Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Onyanko Club -- Makka na Jitensha(真赤な自転車)

 


Ahhh, yes...along with that well-worn romantic trope of sharing the same umbrella heading home from school, anime also possesses the one about a boy riding his bike while the girl is on the back being taken home. I gather that sort of thing happens in Japan in real life. Cute little Chiyo-chan in "Gekkan Shojo Nozaki-kun"(月刊少女野崎くん)had always dreamed of that situation but romantically inept Nozaki-kun destroys that meme in a second.

Not sure about the choreography for "Makka na Jitensha" (The Red Bicycle) which appears as if things were practiced in a very relaxed fashion in the dance studio but I think that was the point of lyricist Yasushi Akimoto's(秋元康)first aidoru mega-group Onyanko Club(おニャン子クラブ). The girls were supposed to look adorkably amateurish. But I can't complain too much about the song itself which was a track on the group's first album "KICK OFF" released in September 1985.

Composed by Ken Takahashi(高橋研)and arranged by Jun Sato(佐藤準), Akimoto tells the delectable trauma of riding the back of that bike while the boy of one's dreams is pedaling away while the brassy saxes and the doo-wopping back singers included in the song give it that 1950s rock n' roll beat that I've usually associated with Onyanko Club. As for "KICK OFF", the album peaked at No. 2 on the Oricon weeklies. Just FYI, the lead singers for "Makka na Jitensha" were Eri Nitta(新田恵利), Miharu Nakajima(中島美春), Satomi Fukunaga(福永恵規)and Kazuko Utsumi(内海和子).

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