Yutaka Yamakawa -- New York Monogatari（ニューヨーク物語り）

Well, it's been a bit of a banner day for me today. As has occasionally been the case now and then, another mystery in my music tapestry was solved earlier. To explain, I decided to pull out a few of those ancient Canadian Tire audio tapes that were worth merely a few pennies from my dusty old cabinet.

Playing one on Jaws, my ravenous tape recorder, I was lucky enough that it wasn't too hungry today and didn't end up chewing up the tape. The tape is at least 30 years old and one of the songs that I had taped from the radio when I was in university was this really techno dance remix which I thought and still think is very cool, but I couldn't identify the title or the artist behind it. Well, I think the title was pretty easy to figure out since the basso profundo DJ kept yelling out "NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK!". Now, remember this was in the pre-Internet days so it wasn't too easy to make efforts to track stuff like this down back then.

However, now that we're in 2019, all I had to do was punch in the thrice-yelled city and a few more lyrics into the search engine to realize that the song was indeed titled "New York" and it was by Micro Chip League from 1987. Mystery solved!

From one end of the music spectrum to the other...in tribute to my above discovery, I thought about getting up some sort of New York-based kayo. Perhaps I could have gone techno but I just found this very enka/Mood Kayo tune by Yutaka Yamakawa（山川豊）titled "New York Monogatari" (New York Story), his 29th single, released in January 2007.

The notable thing about "New York Monogatari" is that it was written and composed by Tsunku（つんく♂）, the lead singer for the 1990s rock band Sharam-Q（シャ乱Q）and the godfather for the whole Hello! Project aidoru enterprise from the late 1990s onwards. However, listening to this song, I realized that the man did provide his fair share of tenderhearted ballads, albeit in a different genre, when he was in Sharam-Q, so to come up with an enka ballad was probably not too difficult for him.

And Tsunku did a pretty remarkable job, too. The song not only utilizes a bit of rock guitar but also that piercing trumpet that I've often associated with an old-fashioned Mood Kayo. The lyrics by Tsunku sound as if they were perfect for a Humphrey Bogart-type trying to drown his blues in drink as he remembers back to a past torrid love affair in The Big Apple.

Well, come for the techno and stay for the kayo!