FINAL SPANK HAPPY -- Smooth Escalator

By Kakidai via Wikimedia Commons

During my years in the Tokyo area, I've managed to enter and traipse through all of the major department stores in the megalopolis such as Mitsukoshi and Matsuya. I've also visited Isetan in Shinjuku. These days, I'm not sure about the future of department stores, generally speaking. Perhaps as has been the fate of the department store here in Toronto, the Tokyo ones may also be facing extinction like the dinosaur but knowing Japan and their penchant for holding onto the oldest things, the depaato that I've mentioned may stick around for a few more decades like a stubborn Time Lord I know.

Well, Shinjuku Isetan was the setting for this rather fascinating music video for the song "Smooth Escalator" by the eclectic group SPANK HAPPY (or officially FINAL SPANK HAPPY in this case) which got its appearance in December 2020. The month itself is fascinating since this was smack dab in the pandemic years. How did they get permission to film inside the commercial emporium? Was the video a visual gift for those stuck at home? And for that matter, what was up with the additional "FINAL"? Were they about to break up?

Regardless, this is about as recent as I've gotten with SPANK HAPPY in the blog since most of the entries have covered their early material in the 1990s and then into their technopop 2000s, although I did cover their "Natsu no Tensai"（夏の天才）from 2018. By the late 2010s, the group consisted of founder Naruyoshi Kikuchi（菊地成孔）and singer-songwriter Tomomi Oda（小田朋美）, and I'm assuming that Kikuchi and Oda are indeed the ones tripping the light fantastic within the deserted department store with the former looking like a hip-hop member from m-flo and the latter looking like a New Wave gamine from "Breakfast at Tiffany's". According to the story for the video, the two of them sought refuge in Isetan from zombies.

"Smooth Escalator" has a mix of sophisticated piano pop of Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）sentiments and a commonly-heard synth that I will have to ask YMOfan04 about sometime wrapped around some gentle, almost whispery, singing-like-talking...not quite rap. As someone who hadn't been able to enter a store aside from the local supermarket for several months at the time "Smooth Escalator" came out, watching the video would have been rather swooning for me as well.