Even the guitars were often downtuned to sound more ominous and growling. Although the ’90s featured more successful women rockers than any other decade, the era’s sensibility remained traditionally male – loud, brash, barbaric. The resulting electronica was hailed as “the new rock” while Britpop reintroduced previously retired orthodoxies.
Even house music – severed by this point from its gay and black roots – was straighter, whiter, less melodic, and more formulaic. Their international arrival occurred between the sudden deaths of Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur, figureheads of the grunge and gangsta rap that defined American music in the ’90s. When popular music was at its bleakest and most monochromatic, Pizzicato Five were neon-hued and eclectic. When the act called it quits in 2001, Pizzicato Five had released 14 studio albums, at least that number of compilations, about as many EPs, and every kind of single conceivable. By the time leading American indie rock label Matador Records introduced them internationally with the 1994 samplers Five by Five and Made in USA, P5 was only two, the absurdly productive songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Yasuharu Konishi the sole original member. They’d started in the mid-’80s as an easy listening quintet, switched vocalists to favor smooth plastic soul, discovered samplers around the time their third (and defining) singer Maki Nomiya arrived in 1990, then morphed into a dance/pop-art/retro-futurist act that pulled from just about every musical genre and aesthetic movement since the mid-20th century.
Pizzicato Five were many things, but never ordinary. Even looking back today, I still think about my initial 1995 encounter with P5 as one of the most startling, fully realized concerts I’ve ever experienced, and their records remain among my most beloved. These are some of the words I wrote nearly 20 years ago about Pizzicato Five’s San Francisco stop on the Tokyo-based group’s first US/European tour.
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