Presenting a playlist featuring the top 10 songs I listened to throughout this year 2023, automatically created by the statistics from my own Apple Music account.
The playlist, in general, consists of J-Pop and J-Rock songs. If you’re curious about these musical styles, I recommend reading this post I wrote a few years ago.
For a long time, Japanese composers have been my favorites. The harmony they typically use in Japanese music is much more complex than what we are accustomed to hearing in the West. I have even come to consider that my ear, that is, my personal way of perceiving and understanding music, has adapted to this specific type of sound. I believe that everything I listen to and compose is influenced by this particular way of constructing music.
Marty Friedman, a celebrated American guitarist who moved to Japan over 20 years ago to participate in the local music scene, shares in this video a typical chord progression used in Japanese pop songs to exemplify the difference in their complexity.
As Friedman mentioned to Rick Beato in a recent interview: “Japanese seem to want more data. More going on. It gets crazy. Really inventive chord progressions. Quite difficult to understand. Really busy chord progressions. And it encourages more inventive things.“
I listen to so much music in Japanese that it no longer seems unusual to me, but perhaps for someone not accustomed to the sound of that language, it might be quite strange.
On the other hand, non-natives listening to music in an Asian language is no longer unusual. Asian-origin pop music is increasingly reaching a global audience. It’s common to see Korean artists topping charts in European or American countries. And even though I personally may not be a huge fan of K-Pop, I must say that this globalization of music is something I find excellent.
A few years ago, I came to this conclusion: even if I generally have no idea what the words in Japanese songs literally mean, it doesn’t mean I don’t understand what they’re singing about. In other words, the meaning of a song is much more than just the words it contains. When listening to a song, we understand the message and what it’s about beyond just the lyrics. We consider the feeling and the execution of the performer, and everything it conveys, along with all the other elements of the music.
Or let’s think about a completely instrumental piece. Not a hint of lyrics, and it doesn’t mean we can’t understand the intention and feelings of the composer or performers.
The reality is that, regardless of the language, style, or instrumentation, as the legendary jazz artist Duke Ellington said, “there are only two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.”
But anyway, here are the direct links to the playlist for my Top 10 Most Listened Songs for 2023 , both for Apple Music and Spotify.
