Momoko Kikuchi -- Deja Vu

I have started to realize why a lot of Momoko Kikuchi's（菊池桃子）songs from the 1980s have been featured as City Pop tunes on YouTube radio stations (still miss you, Van Paugam!). They just have that urban contemporary sheen to them. She may have been a high school kid at the time, but she was definitely walking through that concrete jungle.

One reason for this is that composer Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）has often woven those sweet downtown melodies for Kikuchi, and he's the same fellow who's come up with his own City Pop stuff since the 1970s and music for bands such as Omega Tribe in the following decade. He's also behind one of her singles in 1986, "Deja Vu", and although the arrangement takes things far enough into the aidoru genre that I can't really categorize it as a City Pop song, there is still that tinge of metropolitan life in there thanks to the synths.

"Deja Vu" is one of those songs by Kikuchi that I hadn't heard in years so the nostalgic pangs were heavy when I was re-acquainted with it once more. The late guitarist and lyricist Koichi Fujita（藤田浩一）was responsible for the words, and hearing the singer deliver them alongside the swiftly flowing music makes for a really nice combination that takes me back.

The song also made it onto her first BEST compilation released in December of that year, "Sotsugyo Kinen"（卒業記念...Graduation Memories）.