The Outer-National Dream

1989, the year Beauty was released, marked a profound shift in the history of the world. It was the year the Berlin Wall collapsed, signifying the end of the Cold War, and leaving the democratic, free-market, Western world standing victorious. Nations would no longer be competing on the field of politics, but in the arena of economics and, in the post-Cold War era, the new rules of the game were neoliberalism and globalization. Even in Japan, the financial broadsheet, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, went from being a specialist newspaper popular with bankers and brokers, to a general-interest print with a wider readership, and the circulation of 1.85 million in 1981 reached 3 million in 1991.

Nowadays, you would struggle to find supporters for neoliberalism and globalization. But back then, with Japan wrapped snug in a bubble economy, it was almost impossible to see the negative effects of these policies. At the same time, they appeared to promise new cultural possibilities.
When J-Wave, the commercial radio station established in 1987, first coined the concept of J-Pop around 1988 to 89, Japanese listeners envisioned the dawn of a new, global pop music. Something that would smash the wall dividing Western and Japanese music and bring the two together. J-Pop would be the genre to take the idiosyncratic Japanese sound, heavily-flavored with traditional influences, and create a new Japanese pop that could have a place at the global music table. Expectations were high and J-Wave’s signature pop program, the Tokyo Hot 100 hit parade, soon came to embody the ambitions and dreams of Tokyo, now no longer simply the capital of Japan but a city of the world. And for me, a high school student, J-Pop was all that and more, and I had a lot riding on it. (Ironically, it was not J-Pop that brought global acclaim for Asian pop, but the J-Pop influenced Korean pop boom.)
The biggest pop album of 1989 was Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. Jam and Lewis’s bold and vibrant sound was a milestone achievement in 1980s black pop, but in Japan, the song was also helped by a major sponsorship deal with Japan Airlines (JAL). The deal included a marketing campaign, with a JAL TV ad featuring Janet and her crew dancing out the plane as they landed, and a concert at Tokyo Dome, also broadcast on primetime television.
Sponsorship for artists had been growing in popularity as a business branding strategy since the mid-80s, when Janet’s brothers tied-up with Pepsi for the Jacksons Victory Tour. Japan, with the economic power of a bubble economy, could take advantage of this trend, and new opportunities with major overseas brands gave advertising agencies new avenues into the Japanese market. In 1990, MC Hammer put the whole world on Hammer Time with the global hit “You Can’t Touch This”, and the following year he was in Japan performing live at Tokyo Dome. Seeing an international hit artist play in Japan in real time was a reminder of how connected the global economy had become.

This was the climate that Ryuichi Sakamoto released his album Beauty into. In an interview at the time, Sakamoto spoke of the work being inspired by the concept of “outer-national” - as opposed to “inter” national. In a time before globalization became a familiar term, Sakamoto’s outer-national conceived a borderless world, where people were free from nations and nationalities, global citizens roaming the earth as merchants. Interestingly, this concept of people shedding their nationality and becoming merchants coincided with the global shift from political to economic strategy.
In a globalized society, people relinquish their political subjectivity for an almost nomadic sensibility, embracing open and free trade. This was also behind the concept of global music. It was to be a positive expression of an ideal world and a more humanistic way of life. The late 80s was also a time when World Music was quickly becoming the next best thing. Here local merged with global, in a way that some envisioned as a precursor to a global world. It was also a time when people were more mobile, enabling a new movement in the world of underground music: people were crossing over genres and transcending nationality to connect across the globe as individuals, creating a network of people that could form the roots for a global world. Sakamoto recalls the future he imagined at the time.
“In the late 70s and early 80s, ethnic music and fashion was becoming more popular in the cities. It felt fresh and new. In terms of music, I was strongly influenced by African music. Even when I listened to bands not necessarily African in nature, like the Flying Lizards, there was still this element of seeking a sense of ethnicity in the music. It was the end of the rock era and I was excited about what was to come. For me, that was the future depicted in Blade Runner. Like Los Angeles in the movie, a melting pot of different ethnicities, with the languages all blended together to create something both familiar and foreign. I feel like I’m always searching for that world, peering down back alleys in seedy neighborhoods looking for an old Chinese guy hacking DNA. These were the images that inspired me throughout the 80s, and took shape in Neo Geo and Beauty.”
There are a few other albums released around the same time of Beauty that appear to share Sakamoto’s vision.
Greed (1988) by Ambitious Lovers, the avant-pop duo consisting of Art Lindsay and Peter Scherer. The ground-breaking Estrangeiro (1989) by Música Popular Brasileira pioneer Caetano Veloso and produced by the same Peter Scherer. Rei Momo (1989), which was David Byrne’s full immersion into World Music during his hiatus from Talking Heads. Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical (1989), the first compilation album on Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. Naked City (1990) by New York avant-jazz unit Naked City and The documentary film and soundtrack of the same name, “Step Across the Border,” which documented chance encounters between Naked City member/improviser Fred Frith and underground musicians from around the world.
These artists and their music are the epitome of Sakamoto’s outer-national ideal. Global citizens no longer bound by nation or genre. Music merchants roaming the planet. It may be hard for people to relate to just how futuristic it felt at the time, and Sakamoto’s decentralized and interconnected community was eons ahead of the Internet. In that global network, Sakamoto was the node connecting Asian artists and Asian music to the wider world. He was a role model for us Japanese. And Beauty was an album that could more than hold its own on the global stage.
Looking back at Beauty now, what is interesting is how we can see the trend for globalization of industry, mixing with outer-national, or the trend for globalization at an individual level.
This was Sakamoto’s first album with Virgin Records America, established in 1986. At that time, the music industry was changing from a locally based to a global market, and pop music in the US and Europe was undergoing a transformation to reach a growing, global audience. Virgin Records America saw Sakamoto as the pop artist who could lead the world into an era of global pop, and Beauty as the album that would define this sound. Sakamoto was up for the challenge. His album was to be the purest pop album ever, and he was more than confident that he had accomplished that with Beauty.
However, it seemed the record company’s idea of global pop was very different to Sakamoto’s. When he went into the boardroom and played his album to the executives, he had expected to be greeted with a round of applause and a pat on the back. Instead, he was faced with a grim wall of silence. Beauty was not what they had bargained for. The non-album track “You Do Me”, was chosen for the single release and rushed through production to get it chart ready, with the producer simply told to “make it sound like Paula Abdul.” Coincidentally, Paula Abdul, already a popular solo artist by that time, was the choreographer behind Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.”
That, however, was not Sakamoto’s definition of pop. With Beauty, he further developed the concepts explored in Neo Geo, taking the outer-national sensibility further to something that could overcome, or even relativize Western values, while at the same time creating pure pop genius.
In Beauty, Brian Wilson (Beach Boys), Robbie Robertson (The Band), Robert Wyatt, and other US and European music legends play with international artists like Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, Chinese virtuoso Erhu player Jiang Jianhua, Japanese artists Misako Koja, Yoriko Ganeko, and Kazumi Tamaki from the Okinawan Chans, as well as Milton Cardona, Sly Dunbar, and Art Lindsay. Sakamoto puts everyone on an equal footing and then forces them to shed their nationality and ethnicity by taking them out of their familiar territories. The Senegalese artist sings Okinawan folk songs, Foster’s song lyrics are written in the Okinawan language, while the Erhu player performs Samuel Barber’s masterpiece. Here, Sakamoto’s bold experimentation is a clear antithesis to Western pop - a music that has willingly exploited and colonized a plethora of musical genres from around the world. Sakamoto explains.
“The term ‘Inter-national’ implies that we all have our own nationality, and we should come together in respect of that. So nationality is an essential part of the concept. But ‘outer-national’ is all about removing your nationality. You leave it behind to come together in somewhere which is nowhere. This concept was realized in the Foster-inspired “Romance”, Barber’s “Adagio”, “Chinsagu no Hana”, and “Asadoya Yunta”. At the time, I felt quite strongly against this idea that just because I was Japanese, I had to be Japanese in my music. Everyone needs to step outside of the structural framework created by nationality and ethnicity. This was something I constantly emphasized to the artists on the album. It’s not enough to just sample ethnic music, you need to go beyond that, it needs to be more than just a taster.”
Industrial globalization and this desire for a new kind of borderless individuality are two sides of the globalization coin. And no album has captured both sides as exquisitely as Beauty. The cold, impersonal glamor of corporate-driven global business exists alongside the vivid and vital energy of individuals pulling apart from the mass. It is a complicated balancing act, eccentric and genius at the same time, and the overall effect is breathtaking.
The sound is richly layered, yet each instrument maintains a raw, stripped back clarity. Sakamoto owes much of the credit for this masterful sonic blend to mixing engineer Jason Corsaro. Corsaro was the resident engineer at the prestigious Power Station studio in New York, where he worked on some of the greatest pop and rock albums of the 80s including Madonna’s Like A Virgin, Foreigner’s Agent Provacateur, Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors, Duran Duran’s Seven And The Ragged Tiger and Arena, Steve Winwood’s Back In The High Life, and Robert Palmer’s Riptide.
(Interestingly, Corsaro began his career working with Nile Rodgers on Debbie Harry’s first post-Blondie solo album, KooKoo. He was later the mixing engineer on Rodgers’ 1983 solo effort, Adventures In The Land Of The Good Groove. It’s believed that it was this early connection that prompted Corsaro to recommend Nile Rodgers as the producer of Madonna’s second album, and it is part in thanks to Corsaro that Nile Rodgers, whose career was in jeopardy after the disco boom ended, found new success as a producer. It was also Corsaro who was responsible for The Power Station, a band made up of the rhythm sections from Duran Duran and Chic, with Robert Palmer on vocals.)
Sakamoto and Corsaro first collaborated on Neo Geo, and working on Beauty together developed their friendship and brought the two of them even closer. Sakamoto remembers how they would mix the track from midnight to dawn, head back to their New York hotel to check the finished versions, and then return to the studio the next night to repeat the process. This continued for two months. Sakamoto’s global pop was a far cry from the mainstream pop and rock superstar sound that Corsaro was used to working with, and yet, he was captivated by this totally new music that Sakamoto was creating. Corsaro had the difficult task of helping produce a sound that could both meet the expectations of the industry, and meet the expectations of Sakamoto. He eagerly accepted the challenge, and used all his expertise to try and make it happen. Corsaro was also fond of Sakamoto, looking up to him like an older brother, and was often seen hanging around him at the studio.
Sakamoto admits that Corsaro’s sound was not always to his liking, but he was so inspired by his enthusiasm and vision that he decided to leave the mixing decisions up to him. Jason Corsaro sadly passed away in 2017 at the age of 58, and his work on Beauty remains unique among his projects. As someone who is said to have defined the 80s pop and rock sound, Corsaro’s work on Beauty can be considered a rare gem in an illustrious career.
When Sakamoto left Japan and relocated to New York for the production of this album, he envisioned a city that was outer-national, cosmopolitan, dynamic, and vibrant, a reflection of the music of the time. However, he was soon faced with the reality. While there was some element of outer-national in the cities and parts of the country, most of the US was conservative, backward, insular, and lacked any kind of global sensibility. It was as if nothing had changed since the 1950s. This was not the nowhere place for global citizens to roam and come together as individuals. “It wasn’t even inter-national, let alone outer-national.” said Sakamoto, expressing the disillusionment he felt at the time.
In some way, this reflects the disillusionment felt by many throughout the 1990s where the end of the Cold War did not end conflict, and the neoliberal policy of deregulation marketized every aspect of society. Self-accountability became an excuse for a dog-eat-dog mentality, and the rich just got richer. The corporations, cleverly playing the money game, continued to grow fat, and the new digital industries exploded into tyrannical economic powers. The dynamic network that connected independent individuals in a uniquely autonomous sphere, quickly transformed into a plantation managed by a giant platform.
Each time the dream for a truly global community seems within our grasp, it is betrayed or distorted. But this does not mean that we have given up. We still want to find a way to make being global more human, more organic. A way for people to connect as individuals in a network and community that brings us together as outer-nationals. As long as that desire remains, the dream is still something we can make a reality.
Beauty imagines the world travelling a single path to a global future. The album was made at a time before that path split in two and global had more than one possibility. The world has changed significantly in the thirty or more years since the album’s release, and the international landscape is almost unrecognizable. But we can use this album to trace our steps back to the beginning, and measure how far away we really are and see what direction we have taken.
Sakamoto’s Beauty is a grand vision for the future. Though reality has cheated that vision at every turn, it has not yet completely vanished. And if this newly remastered version awakens in you a sense of urgency and ineffable beauty, then there is still hope for his vision to become a reality. At least for me, listening to this album in 2021, this beautiful ideal is all the more powerful, all the more compelling than ever before.

By Kei Wakabayashi.

(translated by Heidi Karino for KR Advisory Co., Ltd.)