Minako Tanaka -- Yume Mite TRY (夢みてTRY)

I remember finding Minako Tanaka (田中美奈子) very similar to Chisato Moritaka (森高千里) when I saw her for the first time singing “Namida no Taiyou” (涙の太陽), her debut single. Something about the look, or, more specifically, the revealing tiny and tight skirt along with the long black hair, almost confused me a bit. The year of the performance was 1989, a good time for an aidoru to debut with an eurobeat style song. And that was the music style that Minako and the team behind her relied on the most.

Here’s the “Namida no Taiyou” performance that got me hooked in Minako Tanaka two years ago. The song is an eurobeat cover of Michi Aoyama’s (青山ミチ) rendition, which was a Japanese cover of “Crying in a Storm” by singer Emy Jackson (エミー・ジャクソン), who was born in Japan but raised in England.

As for “Yume Mite TRY”, Minako’s third single, released in May 1990, it was a “Stock Aitken and Waterman” (SAW) inspired eurobeat/synth-pop aidoru song. With an overall cheerful vibe, the song is marked with sharp synth notes and a prominent bass line, two remarkable characteristics of the vintage italo-disco/eurobeat style from the mid-to-late 80s.

Particularly, I always liked Minako’s vocals, and she was a good live singer too. Her vocals were very clear and strong when needed. Unfortunately, the “sexy aidoru” slice of the market was already filled at the time, as she was kind of overshadowed by the aforementioned Chisato Moritaka. Truth is that the more “sexy aidoru” never got very popular during the late 80s/early 90s, with Chisato being the most famous among the sexy divas. Minako Tanaka, Reiko Kato (かとうれいこ) and the “soft porn” Aya Sugimoto (杉本彩) were relegated to lower places at the time. The winds of change just came around the mid-90s when acts like Ryoko Shinohara (篠原涼子), Namie Amuro (安室奈美恵) and MAX gained popularity exactly for portraying a sexier, edgier and more mature style if compared with the kawaii aidoru stereotype of the whole 80s. Irony of the destiny, these mid-90s acts were also investing in the same dance-pop/eurobeat style that Chisato, Minako, Reiko and Aya were trying to popularize in the early 90s. Don’t get me wrong, this music style was very popular at the time, with acts like Wink, Kyoko Koizumi (小泉今日子), TM NETWORK, and even Chisato Moritaka, releasing successful eurobeat penned songs, but the Japanese “dance craze” took the charts by storm just during the mid-to-late 90s, a time when Minako and Aya were not even singing anymore, while Reiko was struggling to chart well with a new music style. The only one who continued to be successful was Chisato Moritaka, but she just put all the glitter and synthesizers away to do so*. Being a very talented lyricist and instrumentalist, she had even more success with her “more mature” pop/rock and ballad-oriented material between the mid-to-late 90s than with her “magical girl from a shoujo manga” persona portrayed in the early 90s (she would even wear capes in some of her performances at the time).

I needed to share this video. Chisato is singing while looking cool in a cape. The song is “Aru no OL no Seishun ~A Ko no Baai~ (Moritaka Connection)”, another light eurobeat/synth-pop song. By the way, the performance is from late 1990.

Back to “Yume Mite TRY”, an interesting fact about the song is that Tetsuya “TK” Komuro (小室哲哉) was the man behind its lyrics, music and arrangement. I remember reading an article about Komuro saying that he went to England in 1988 to study the pop music that was being developed there**. Based on that, it’s important to remember that in 1988 SAW’s hit factory was at its peak, and as a great visionary as he was, Komuro understood that dance-pop and eurobeat were very lucrative genres that had yet to be fully explored in Japan. TM NETWORK’s “GET WILD ‘89”, which I wrote an entry for “Kayo kyoku Plus” sometime ago, is a good example of Komuro’s overall commitment to the style.

Other than that, “Yume Mite TRY” differs a lot from the edgier techno-ish stuff that he was responsible for around the mid 90s, a time when TK produced a ton of successful acts like TRF, hitomi, Namie Amuro and former girlfriend Tomomi Kahala (華原朋美). All of them, alongside many others, were relying exclusively on his beats and synth tricks to survive in the charts. Also, this period, known as the “TK era”, distinguished him as the “invincible producer” of the J-Pop scene, a title that he had yet to conquer in May 1990 when “Yume Mite TRY”, a typical eurobeat aidoru song, was his newest creation.

To enjoy "Yume Mite TRY" being performed live, here's the link. Sorry for the quality, but Minako's videos are not easy to find.

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/GJJA0pSlJP0/

“Yume Mite TRY” ended reaching #12 on the weekly Oricon chart, making it the best ranked single of Minako’s entire career (source: Oricon).

*To read more about my reflections on the same subject (the link between eurobeat and aidoru), I recommend my entries for “Forever Dreamer” by Megumi Hayashibara, “Overheat Night” by Chisato Moritaka and “GET WILD ’89” by TM NETWORK here in Kayo Kyoku Plus.

**If someone wants to read the article about Tetsuya Komuro, here’s the link for it. It’s a very interesting read: http://www.cjas.org/~leng/komuropa.htm

And here are some photos of my own copy of Minako’s "GOLDEN BEST", a nice compilation with “Yume Mite TRY” as the fifth track.