I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
"Begin the Beguine" is the old standard that was concocted by the legendary songwriter Cole Porter back in 1935, and its various iterations have been with me since I was literally a baby. For one thing, the sultry nightclub-friendly Ann Margret cover with a touch of bossa nova in its jazz (although a beguine is a form of slow rhumba) was on that RCA Victor "50 Years Of Hits In Stereo" set that my parents had gotten along with the stereo.
Since then, I've also gotten familiar with Julio Iglesias'1981 take on "Begin the Beguine" which was arranged in the disco fashion although disco was pretty much dead (or hibernating) by that point, I gather. The song even made its way onto NHK's 1983 edition of the Kohaku Utagassen when both Red and White teams got together for their usual kick-out-the-doors musical tribute. Porter would have loved it. Too bad that it hasn't gotten onto YouTube.
Entertainer Akira Nishikino（錦野旦）, who I've known primarily for his 1971 hit "Sora ni Taiyo ga Aru Kagiri"（空に太陽がある限り）, followed Iglesias' Latin disco style and recorded his own Japanese-language take on "Begin the Beguine". This was Nishikino's 27th single from June 1982 with Masako Arikawa（有川正沙子）providing the Japanese lyrics and the great Katsuhisa Hattori（服部克久） arranging everything pretty closely to the Iglesias version.
With all of the talk on the song-and-dance group Atarashii Gakko no Leaders (I'm wondering if they will be invited to the Kohaku Utagassen again in a couple of weeks), KKP friend and writer JTM and I were thinking that main vocalist Suzuka with her Wild Child ways would be the one to break out solo first. I can easily imagine her to be the Reiwa era version of Jun Togawa（戸川純）tackling the musical and grand theatrical in one fell swoop.
It's been a long while since I posted anything by Togawa incidentally, so I figure it is time to get this wild child of the 1980s back up. Up to now, I've covered some of her material under her own name but from 1987, she became identified with her new band YAPOOS, and in December of that year, they released their debut album"YAPOOS Keikaku"（ヤプーズ計画...The YAPOOS Plan）. And from that album, the first track was "Barbara Sexeroid", a jangly and jazzy technopop tune with hints of 80s New Wave and 60s secret agent soundtrack. The title character sounds almost like a heroic character with her own show as she boasts her android programming in multiple techniques and a broad way of pleasuring (and yes, I know I'm paraphrasing Lieutenant Commander Data whose TV show premiered only a few months before the release of this album).
Togawa came up with the lyrics while Yoichiro Yoshikawa（吉川洋一郎）came up with the melody. The website "Jun Togawa Forever" did come up with its own brief description of "Barbara Sexeroid", and apparently the song was created to convey the image of what YAPOOS was all about.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a most interesting November Monday on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" as I've posted a couple of ROY articles to Jack Jones and Quincy Jones due to their recent departures, and now for the first time since June this year, we have a new All-Points Bulletin for a rash of songs. Of course, we have the official image up for an APB: the apple pie.
Jeff Song contacted me yesterday to see if I could identify the original singers for the above Chinese covers of Japanese tunes via an old compilation tape that he had come across. He was able to identify the singers for some of them except for six tunes. One of the six samples that I received was actually a cover of the Asami Kado（門あさ美）song "Season" but unfortunately the other five are unknown to me although they seem to cover the City Pop/pop range. So, I'm now passing on the task to you viewers to see if you may be able to identify these mystery songs.
On that note, I have to congratulate the successful conclusion of a long quest to identify what was known as The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet which is now known as "Subways of Your Mind" by FEX. Perhaps this might give Jeff and everyone some inspiration.
Quincy Jones (1933-2024) from the LA Times via Wikimedia Commons
Now that I've put up a rare Monday Reminiscings of Youth article just now and I'm going to do the same here, people must be wondering why I've gone all ROY on KKP. Well, one excuse is that it is a national holiday in Japan known as Culture Day. I don't usually include Japanese national holidays when I do the special holiday version of ROY, but for today I'm making an exception due to the passing of a couple of music figures in my life.
I've already posted one on singer Jack Jones and now we have here a tribute to Quincy Jones, one of the most prolific and successful songwriters and music producers the world has ever known. His file on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" is already fairly large thanks to entries such as his phenomenal 1981 album"The Dude" and his collaborations with Michael Jackson, including the album "Thriller".
Jones had already been in the music business for several years since the 1950s when he released his first single in 1962, "Soul Bossa Nova". Sound familiar?
If it does, you are probably one of the many folks who caught any of the "Austin Powers" movies with Mike Myers. One couldn't have asked for a more Swinging 1960s tune to accompany the British spy and his fellow dancers. The give-and-take between the flutes and the horns is truly groovy, baby!
Probably, though, for a lot of us Canadians, hearing "Soul Bossa Nova" as part of an "Austin Powers" movie was nostalgically surprising than revelatory. That's probably because we had heard it before...as the theme for the Canadian game show "Definition" with Jim Perry throughout the 70s and 80s. I certainly had no idea about what the title was and what its pedigree was...just knew it as the theme from "Definition" and it was probably the biggest thing that I can remember about the show.
According to Wikipedia, "Soul Bossa Nova" was also a track on Jones' 1962"Big Band Bossa Nova" album and apparently it took no more than twenty minutes for the composer to whip up. I had no idea that Lalo Schifrin, the master behind the themes for "Mission: Impossible" and "Mannix", was the piano player on "Soul Bossa Nova".
I know that Jones left this world a very elderly man at 91, but it's still a big void that he's left in music and we can be grateful at least that he's left this huge legacy of music from movies, television and the recording booth. My condolences to his family, friends and millions of fans.
"Soul Bossa Nova" was released in December 1962. Therefore, why not have the last three performers on the White team from NHK's Kohaku Utagassen that year show up?
In last week's ROY article, I gave tribute to Teri Garr, the offbeat comic actress who had been in movies such as "Young Frankenstein" and "Tootsie". I'd also been aware that a singer passed away back on October 23rd and this morning, I discovered that one of America's greatest record producers and composers had left this mortal coil yesterday. The coincidence here is that both men had the same last name.
A few decades before our own family would partake in a few cruises ourselves, we used to watch ABC's "The Love Boat", an hour-long comedy-drama involving the cast and passengers aboard the Pacific Princess and any romantic hijinks which ensued. Every week, we would see a fairly long lineup of entertainers from old and new Hollywood make their way onto the Lido Deck.
There had been the first couple of made-for-TV movies before the series began its nine-season run from September 1977. Of course, when it became a regular weekly series, a theme song was needed and so Charles Fox and Paul Williams came up with this frothy, adventurous and optimistic song called "Love Boat", to be sung by pop and jazz singer Jack Jones whose career started in the late 1950s.
Jones will always be tied to the "Love Boat" theme for most people. Although the show started in the fall of 1977, the single version of the song wasn't released until 1979. If anything, this single version goes even more disco with that wacka-wacka guitar (I can see Isaac the bartender hitting the floor hard now). There have apparently been many covers of the song over the years, but for me, it'll always be Jones inviting listeners to come aboard. He may have even performed the song on a real cruise liner.
As I mentioned above, a lot of stars passed through the Pacific Princess, including one very young Tom Hanks. The other man in the scene, purser Gopher Smith was played by Fred Grandy who would gain further stature by becoming a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa. My condolences to Jones' family, friends and fans.
So, when "Love Boat" hit TV screens in September 1977, what was hitting the Top 3 on September 26th that year?
Had the above photo of Kayo Grace and Mr. Calico picking apples for another article but forgot the opportunity to put it up, so I've decided to just post it up here. I figure that even in November, there are still some more apples to be harvested.
Ironically enough, this is a summer tune. Yes, although we officially went back to Eastern Standard Time from Daylight Savings Time overnight, thereby deepening the stamp that we are definitely in autumn and the days are getting shorter, I'm still doing a summer tune. But, mind you, summer has been unusually stubborn in 2024. We're still getting days of temperature in the low 20s Celsius so the season is being dragged away by its fingernails.
Anyways, I offer you "Sunburn" by the rap duo chelmico, the first track on their September 2024 EP"ati natu ep". Written and composed by chelmico's Rachel and Mamiko with Yazzy Beats also helping out on the melody, the ladies are still spitting those words out at a goodly amount of speed but it's a little more chill and resort-like rather than downtown alley. Certainly, the music video looks like Rachel and Mamiko were taking the kids out on a luxury field trip.
I heard about this New Wave duo called Salon Music some weeks ago via a "Holly Jolly X'masu" podcast and I've already bookmarked one of their Christmas contributions, so I'll cover that probably in December once KKP gets into its Xmas mode once more.
But for today, I thought that I would introduce Salon Music and one of their conventional tunes first. Consisting of vocalist and bassist Jin Yoshida（吉田仁）and vocalist and keyboardist Hitomi Takenaka（竹中仁見）, Salon Music formed during the rising days of New Wave in 1980. They've never broken up officially and up to 2011, they have released 17 albums and an unknown number of singles according to their J-Wiki profile.
One such single is their July 1983 release "Duet ni Muchuu"(Wrapped Up in Duet). Written and composed by Takenaka, right from the get-go, I can hear and feel the New Waviness and perhaps even see her and Yoshida doing an appropriate dance on the floor. In fact, the dance I'm thinking about is the one that Jane Wiedlin and Ron Mael from the band Sparks did in that music video "Cool Places", also from the same year (coincidentally, Salon Music opened up for Sparks in 2001). "Duet ni Muchuu" is definitely short and sweet at a shade over 2 1/2 minutes.
Not sure whether Takenaka did any solo work outside of Salon Music but Yoshida has gone onto producing the works of other acts including Flipper's Guitar（フリッパーズ・ギター）from 1990.
