Yasuyuki Okamura -- Daisuki （だいすき）

Yasuyuki Okamura（岡村靖幸）really made an impression on me with "Viva Namida", the funkalicious theme song of the "anything goes" 2014 anime "Space Dandy". In the article for that song, I realized that this fellow has had a career spanning back to the mid-80s.

I've seen the contemporary version of Okamura via YouTube and through his anime avatar appearance on the official music video for "Viva Namida", and he kinda struck me as this rather dissipated section chief who would usually be berated by the boss during the day, only to become this super middle-aged funkster by night.

Well, I wanted to check out Okamura back in his early days. And as you can see from the video above, he looked more like the fresh-faced university hipster. And will you get a load of the 80s fashion that everyone's wearing?

And so I found "Daisuki" (I Really Love You), his 8th single that he wrote and composed from November 1988. And y'know, I kinda daisuki it as well. The voice was as trippy back then as it is on "Viva Namida" although I would grade the song more in the pop vein. In a way, Okamura sounded more like a deeper-sounding but just-as-boppy Senri Oe（大江千里）with that cheerfully contagious beat and the cute kids in the background. Both he and Oe had also created songs for that big-eyed and big-voiced ball of energy, Misato Watanabe（渡辺美里）at around the same time, so I can see how she got that inspiration.

"Daisuki" didn't get that far up the charts, peaking at No. 42. However, it was adopted as a campaign song for a Honda commercial that featured a young Miki Imai（今井美樹）. And the song was also a track on his 3rd album, "Yasuyuki"（靖幸）which came out in July 1989.

http://music.163.com/#/song?id=26158326