Now, here's a name I haven't come across in a long while. I may have first heard of the name Ruriko Kuboh in the last year of my Gunma stay since she debuted in 1990, but I only really found out about her some months into my new life in Ichikawa from late 1994.
Kuboh hails from Kobe and started voice training during her high school years before making the big move to Tokyo in 1988. She started her career in 1990 with her debut single, "Plastic My Life", but her first big hit came in 1993 with "Otoko"（男...Men）, her 9th single, which earned her first invitation to the Kohaku Utagassen that year.
However, when I hear the name Ruriko Kuboh（久宝留理子）, I will always be reminded of her 11th single, "Hayaku Shite yo" (Get A Move On). It was a song that I had actually heard first through karaoke, both in personal visits to the karaoke boxes with friends and then viewings of tarento performing the song themselves on TV, before I finally got to see and hear Kuboh take the mike. Written by the singer and composed by SORCE, "Hayaku Shite yo" would have been the ideal theme song for the Peanuts' character, Peppermint Patty, in her love/hate relationship with Charlie Brown. If Miss Reichardt (yep, that IS her real name) could speak Japanese, those lyrics would have her trying to harass and tick ol' Chuck off just to get some sort of real emotion from him. And through the official music video above, Kuboh also has that smart-alecky tomboyish character to her. Her singing and music also remind me a lot of some of the high-toned and high-energy singers from that time such as Kohmi Hirose（広瀬香美） and Mariko Nagai（永井真理子）.
"Hayaku Shite yo" was released in July 1994, and went as high as No. 8 on Oricon before finishing the year as the 53rd-ranked song. The song went Platinum and also earned Kuboh a second straight appearance on the Kohaku. It also got used as a jingle for an NTT DoCoMo pager (remember those?) commercial. It is available as a track on Kuboh's 6th album, "COLORS" which was released in November 1994 and made it all the way up to No. 2. I was able to finally get an old copy of the single at RecoFan many years later.
Hi, J-Canuck.
ReplyDeleteRuriko Kuboh is a new name for me, so I'm glad you posted this song. I really enjoyed it, especially the arrangement with the synths. it made me remember some Hiroko Moriguchi songs of the same time, like "Anata to Ita Jikan", which was released a year after, in 1995. Maybe this kind of arrangement was trendy at the time.
Hello, Marcos.
DeleteI think the arrangement was probably the way to go with a number of female singers in the early 90s. For me, what I heard with Ruriko reminds me of singers like Mariko Nagai, Miho Morikawa, ZARD and Kohmi Hirose.