Eri Nitta -- WHO?

 

I was watching a shortened version of "Asaichi"（あさイチ）last night (it was the usual thing that parliamentary deliberations truncated the coverage) and I noticed one of the guests. She was a cheerful young-ish middle-aged woman with a dirty blonde short cut, and then one of the hosts introduced her to the audience: Eri Nitta（新田恵利）! 

Good heavens! I hadn't seen Nitta anywhere on television for decades. The only footage was through old coverage of her time when she was a part of Onyanko Club（おニャン子クラブ）in the 1980s. The lady has obviously aged in the last thirty years but then I recognized those eyes and that smile.

Well, I figured that I just had to begin this business week of KKP with a Nitta song. But not being a huge fan of hers, I had to think about that one. In the meantime, I looked at Marcos' article for her No.1 hit, "Fuyu no Opera Glass" (冬のオペラグラス), and then I saw one comment at the bottom. Though the commenter stated that he/she wasn't a huge fan of hers either, he/she had to admit that there was an affinity for Nitta's January 1988 8th single "WHO?". The commenter even provided an URL to a YouTube video showing her performing it on stage...although the video has since been deleted.

But I've got the recorded version above. Although it's an aidoru tune, "WHO?" also has some Eurobeat pumping blood in there as the lass sings about being rather cynical toward love on the outside but still feeling quite vulnerable and open on the inside. Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）wrote the lyrics while the song was composed by Ken Nishizaki（西崎憲）; he's not only a composer but also a translator who has taken care of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle (maybe the song title should have been "WHODUNNIT?"). In any case, "WHO?" made it up to No. 21 on Oricon.