Earlier this morning, I had the chance to join Rocket Brown of "Come Along Radio" and Scott of "Holly Jolly X'masu" among others for a few hours of exchanging Christmas stories and J-Xmas tunes via Masa's Discord Neo-Tokyo server. It was a lot of fun and I hope that this can become an annual tradition. As I'm typing this, I think Rocket has been keeping up the marathon of tunes (and will do so until 8 pm EST tonight) so I may drop by again in an hour or so just to see how he's doing. Just wanted to thank him for organizing everything.
We seem to be in the homestretch as we head into the final week before Christmas. Certainly, it's the final full weekend before the 25th so I'm hoping that most folks have been able to get in their shopping at the malls and stores. I was able to get mine done a few days ago.
For today's "Kayo Kyoku Plus" Christmas entry, we have KinKi Kids' 5th single "Happy Happy Greeting/Cinderella Christmas" which was released in December 1998. It was sold as a double-A-side single and with "Happy Happy Greeting", we have a cheerful shuffle done by the Domoto guys which was whipped up by a couple of veteran songwriters. The lyrics about looking forward to a wonderful Christmas and a new year were written by Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）while none other than Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）provided the melody and arrangement. Yamashita was also behind the KinKi Kids' hit "Garasu no Shonen"（硝子の少年）the previous year.
"Cinderella Christmas" can almost be thought of as a kissing cousin to Yumi Matsutoya's（松任谷由実）"Cinderella Express"（シンデレラエクスプレス）in that the former also deals with a romantic relationship being as tight as anything but separated by several hundred kilometres of a Shinkansen line (I did make a recent earlier referral to that song last week). Matsumoto was once again behind the lyrics about waiting for that Bullet Train to take one of the partners home while the other is biding time to give a Xmas present. Meanwhile, composer Arata Tanimoto（谷本新）and arranger Seiko Nagaoka（長岡成貢）came up with a good old-fashioned disco beat (Nagaoka has shown to be quite proficient in other genres). If I'm not mistaken, the KinKi Kids filmed the music video in Odaiba, Tokyo by Rainbow Bridge.
As was the case with all of KinKi Kids' singles, "Happy Happy Greeting/Cinderella Christmas" hit No. 1 on Oricon. It ended up as the 33rd-ranked single for 1999, going Double Platinum and selling over 600,000 copies. The chorus arrangement had its all-star lineup for both songs with Tats, Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）, and Etsuko Yamakawa（山川恵津子）helping out on "Happy Happy Greeting", and Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）involved in the latter.
I'm happy that Johnny's is creating official Youtube channels for their groups so you can finally post MV's on the blog and not have to track it down on another site. Love the song as well.
ReplyDeleteYeah, and there's also a much better chance of the video staying up longer or permanently since it's by the actual group.
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