Quite the old audiotape there...going on 35 years and counting. Not quite sure whether I will ever play it again considering its age but luckily, I've got my fair share of CDs by Yellow Magic Orchestra anyways.
And anyways, I'm going with a track by them that came from their 4th album "BGM" from 1981, an album that I have already written about. However, I had yet to chat about this one track "Music Plans" which is directly translated into the Japanese "Ongaku no Keikaku"（音楽の計画）. Listening to this work by Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）with Peter Barakan helping out on the lyrics, I think this was a piece that rather straddled the line between YMO's early melodic era and their later more esoteric period.
That intro had me thinking about Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" for some reason. "Music Plans" had quite the number of plans thrown in there: a bit of Asian, a bit of dance, a bit of whimsy, barely comprehensible vocals by Sakamoto and an instrument that sounds like either a really buzzy guitar or a technopop elephant. According to the J-Wiki write-up on the album, "Music Plans" was the result of Sakamoto trying to get out of an existential funk of sorts which may explain the way-out lyrics.
Very techno poppy.
ReplyDelete