Eurobeat
Eurobeat is a genreA) of music that originated in Italy. Apparently, its original purpose was just to speed up ItaloDisco. Eurobeat then, inexplicably, became popular in Japan.
Following this, the Italians decided that it was most reasonable to market almost exclusively to the Japanese. So the majority of Eurobeat out there was created by Italians for the Japanese. This is also why Avex, a Japanese record company, somehow produced a bunch of albums with Italians.
There’s also a related genre called Hyper Techno which is…something.
Now for a bit of a hard pivot.
Association
This is mostly a hypothesis on my end, so take this with a grain of salt. But yes, I will be treating it like a conspiracy theory.
In the West, Eurobeat is primarily associated with racing, cars, street-racing and, of course, InitialD. However, this is not the case in Japan. The association definitely exists, but it isn’t as strong as…
Gyaru and ParaPara.
I think this mostly has to do with ParaPara, which itself was liked by Gyaru…and the fact there were prominent dance clubs in Japan which were focused entirely around Eurobeat.
This association becomes somewhat obvious when you start factoring in:
- Songs, which inexplicably reference ParaPara and Gyaru with some degree of frequency.B)
- Songs which are focused around specific dance clubs which, coincidentally, were focused around ParaPara and catered to Gyaru.C)
- Excluding Super Eurobeat, the album art for many compilations features stylized gyaru.D)
- You could even count all the pretty obvious references to Japan.E)
This can be considered cherry-picking, I guess…but I legitimately think the association is stronger.