SPEED -- White Love

I hope all of you are having or have had a wonderful Xmas 2013. Missed disaster by the skin of my nose but it looks like the electricity at my place is back up and running permanently again after that ice storm on Saturday. And I now have my first turkey roasting away in the oven for later devouring with my family.

My final J-Xmas song for this year is SPEED's "White Love". This is the girl group's most successful entry from their discography, and certainly remembering how often I saw the music video on the various music shows for the next several months after release, I'm not at all surprised. Released in October 1997, "White Love" roared up the charts white hot to quickly become the 10th-ranked song of the year, so hitting the weeklies at No. 1 was a no-brainer. It also kept good standing in 1998's yearly rankings by sticking around at No. 34. And the group's 5th single broke the two million barrier in sales.

Written and composed by Hiromasa Ijichi（伊秩弘将）, "White Love" was used as a campaign song for a Shiseido product, but it seems as if it has become a nicely accepted part of the annual J-Xmas song list over the years. And it was quite the karaoke favourite among my old students at least. I think the coolness factor with the girls' dark suits and the choreography helped out on that level. The popularity of the tune also got SPEED their first of three consecutive appearances on the Kohaku Utagassen before they did the initial breakup. But as all of the fans will know, the group came back and appeared in the 2008 edition doing a new version of their greatest song. "White Love" is also a track on SPEED's 2nd album, "Rise".