New Music
New music, ny奴 my奴jikku in Japanese, is a Japanese popular music genre of the 1970s and early 1980s, formed when singer-songwriters who had emerged from the folk boom began writing sophisticated, urban pop songs performed with rock and session-musician accompaniment. Rejecting both the protest stance of folk and the manufactured kay艒kyoku system, its artists, prominently women such as *Yumi Arai* and *Miyuki Nakajima*, asserted individual authorship over introspective, literate texts set to polished arrangements drawing on American soft rock, jazz and R&B. The genre professionalised Japanese songwriting and fed directly into city pop and modern J-pop.