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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.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Kenji Sawada -- Kimeteyaru Konya （きめてやる今夜）


Despite the New Wave appearance Kenji Sawada（沢田研二） had on the cover of his 40th single, "Kimeteyaru Konya"(I'll Show You Tonight), when I first heard this song via sources such as "Sounds of Japan" and the video tapes of ranking shows, I thought this was a pretty normal pop song for him. After all, getting those impressions of him as a Japanese David Bowie through the 1981 and 1982 Kohaku Utagassen specials, I thought I would always see him as a New Romantic Dandy with the songs to match.

But "Kimeteyaru Konya" is just a fun and happy song about a guy determined to get that girl, a song that would have been easily covered by Checkers. There's a bit of rock and techno in there, genres that dominated "Stripper" and "Rokuban-me no Yuutsu" respectively, but with this song, I gather that Sawada was going for that 50s-ish sound that was so popular back in the early-to-mid 1980s. And I think he pulls it off well with that Sawada swagger in his delivery.


"Kimeteyaru Konya" was released in September 1983 with lyrics by Sawada and melody by Daisuke Inoue（井上大輔）. It went as high as No. 14 on the Oricon weeklies and won a Special Gold Prize at that year's Japan Record Awards (according to J-Wiki, his 6th in a row).
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2 comments:

  1. bònMay 12, 2020 at 11:03 PM

    this song is interesting in that Kenji Sawada originally wrote the entire song, and provided to Yuya Uchida in 1977. There's an album. If you look up the title + Uchida's name, you will get that version. Then Yosui Inoue composed a different tune for the same lyrics, and Kenji Sawada sang it some 5 years later.

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  2. bònMay 12, 2020 at 11:05 PM

    I meant Daisuke Inoue as the composer. ugh.

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