Baker's Shop with Haruko -- Furimukuna（ふ・り・む・く・な）

Nice to have gotten some bagels and English muffins last week from the supermarket. I always appreciate the variety. Did the same thing this morning and got the same items to tide us over until next week.

(4:23)

An intriguing one to start off the City Pop stuff for this Friday as we also begin the month of May. I found this one by genre songbird Haruko Kuwana（桑名晴子）, and as I've always noticed, she's a most photogenic lady! 💝However in 1980, she and the band decided to go with the moniker Baker's Shop with Haruko when "Hot Line"（ホット・ライン）was released that year, and evidently from what I see in the video thumbnail above, a single did come out of it as well titled "Furimukuna" (Don't Look Back).

From the JASRAC database, it was written and composed by Kuwana (although the name that was given there was Harukoo) with Toshiro Masuda（トシロウ・マスダ）co-writing the lyrics. And why I selected it will be evident from the first few notes of "Furimukuna"; it's just scintillating City Pop with Kuwana's splendidly smoky vocals as that intro did it for me.

Rocket Brown and I have talked about some of the musical tropes in City Pop including what he has identified as the Sparkle Riff, that tinkly keyboard riff that we've all heard in many a song of the genre such as Takako Mamiya's（間宮貴子）"Love Trip" (at about 8 seconds in). I also like to call it the Perrier Pour. Well, that might be an 80s City Pop thing to me. With the Japanese urban contemporary material in the 1970s, the musical trope that I've heard in a number of songs there has been another keyboard phenomenon that I've dubbed the Haze, and that pops up almost immediately in "Furimukuna". It just sounds like haze rising from the hot ground, although I did say that this particular Kuwana delight was made in 1980, but of course, there was no temporal Iron Curtain in that year stating that the Haze had to end and the Sparkle Riff had to begin.

In any event, "Furimukuna" ironically makes me want to look back to the good ol' days in Tokyo when I hear it.