“Like the Apocalypse Is Imminent by Guys Who Could Barely Play Guitar”: Performing Amateurism in the Garage Rock Underground of Tokyo

Abstract

This paper explores notions of amateurism in underground rock, focusing on the case of the garage rock scene in Tokyo, Japan. The ideal of the amateur has a long history in popular music, from the 1960s urban folk scene to DIY cultures of punk and alternative rock. In this paper, I ask, how does this ideal translate in the context of the Tokyo underground? Garage rock is a particularly apt site to probe this question, as the very term “garage” evokes highly localized and makeshift forms of music making. The garage rock scene in Tokyo forms a niche within underground rock comprised of a small but committed collective of fans and musicians who recycle and rework the sights, sounds, and styles of mid-1960s American rock and roll. These fans embody the dual meaning of the term “amateur,” which connotes both a mode of production (amateur musicianship) as well as a mode of attachment to a cultural object (fandom). In this paper, I explore amateurism as both production and style, wherein I seek to bridge the sounded and sensory world of garage with the practical, on-the-ground investments of energy and labor that go into organizing and producing events. I show how the ideal of the amateur, while rooted in formations of genre that are transnational in scope, is made meaningful in highly nuanced ways in the production and performance of garage rock in Japan.