Ai Otsuka -- LUCKY☆STAR

 

Now that the Beijing Olympics are in full swing currently, it's been nice to hear that both Canada and Japan have already been earning some medals of various colours. My mind then goes back a dozen years to the Vancouver Games in 2010...and doesn't remember very much at all. In fact, I had to go to some of those impromptu shots by my ancient Casio that I took of some of the televised footage, including the above photo showing off Aiko Uemura（上村愛子）on the moguls.

Singer-songwriter Ai Otsuka（大塚愛）is someone that I've known for her 21st-century bubblegum pop through songs such as "SMILY". I must have then focused solely on the NHK coverage of the Vancouver Olympics since I had no knowledge that the happy-go-lucky Osakan was also behind Fuji-TV's official theme for their Games broadcast in 2010. Indeed, she came up with "LUCKY☆STAR" which was a part of her 20th single "Zokkondition/LUCKY☆STAR"（ゾッ婚ディション/LUCKY☆STAR） as released in April of that year.

"LUCKY☆STAR" has got quite the mixture of spacey dance beats and jangly guitar and it doesn't really sound like the usual inspirational Olympic J-Pop song, but it is indeed catchy. I would have thought it was a tune created by Denki Groove（電気グルーヴ）but it's actually all by Otsuka. The official music video has a goodly dollop of computer graphics to the extent that I wondered if the Pet Shop Boys' 90s videos had been any inspiration. The entire single hit No. 6 on Oricon. "LUCKY☆STAR" would also be included in Otsuka's 6th original album "Love Fantastic" from July 2014. The video below has the instrumental version which is in itself pretty cool to listen to.