dos -- Baby, baby, baby

Well, I did say that I would write about this group soon after writing about a song that had been recorded by one of its members earlier in her solo career. Hey, 15 minutes later is soon, isn't it?

Anyways, as a young guy in Japan in the 1990s, I remember experiencing the Komuro Boom via TV and thinking that music impresario Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）was pretty much taking over the air waves with his various solo singers and groups. Namie Amuro（安室奈美恵）was the It Girl of J-Pop at the time, Tomomi Kahala（華原朋美）was becoming a new sensation and trf was having good times with its brand of pop and dance music.

Then came along this commercial on TV one day which featured this latest creation through Orumok Records. The ad showed two women and a man bopping about in shiny and silky wear while singing away. My first impression was that Komuro was trying to make another trf.

Not quite, but it was another Komuro unit with three lower-case letters for a name. dos is the abbreviation for dance of sound, and according to J-Wiki, Komuro's concept for the group was, and I hope that I've got the translation correct, "Music to grasp dance and song side by side"（ダンスと歌を並列に捉えた見る音楽）. Just on that alone, I kinda thought that this was indeed trf the sequel. Anyways, dos consisted of vocalist Taeko Nishino（西野妙子）, alias taeco, dance and chorus Asami Yoshida（吉田麻美）, alias asami, and dance and chorus Eiji Kabashima（椛島永次）, alias kaba.

Their debut single was "Baby, baby, baby" from March 1996 which was the song that Orumok Records was showing on the ad, and it's the only song that I can remember by dos. To be honest, this is the first time that I've heard the song and watched the music video in its entirety, and doing so, I got the impression that dos was going to be a somewhat mellower version of trf. I mean, it's a nice enough song but it didn't really grab me like some of trf's hits have and still do over two decades later. Komuro and Takahiro Maeda（前田たかひろ）wrote the lyrics with Komuro composing the music.

"Baby, baby, baby" went Platinum, getting as high as No. 4 on Oricon, and finishing 1996 as the 53rd-ranked single. It also became a campaign song for Tessera shampoo (I think I actually used it once or twice). There would be two more singles and a full album before dos faded away in 1997 without any official announcement.  Nishino went on to continue acting and appearing as a tarento, and asami soon returned in 1998 as part of a new Komuro-led group called TRUE KiSS DESTiNATiON.

As for kaba, along with his role as a choreographer (he helped map out the dance sequences for Amuro and Kahala along with many others), he also became a popular tarento himself. And since I never followed dos during their brief existence, I hadn't realized that kaba was actually a member of dos (I didn't take down names at the time). A few years after I had left Japan to come back here for good, kaba underwent sex reassignment surgery and officially changed his name to Ichika Kabashima（椛島 一華）, although her stage name remains Kaba-chan（KABA.ちゃん）.