MIKI -- Big City Night Life

 

When I stepped out in Ueno-Hirokoji not too far away from Ueno Station in Tokyo during my 2017 trip, I realized how much the neighbourhood had changed. Ueno-Hirokoji was where I began teaching in the megalopolis in late 1994. It was populated with a lot of businesses including department stores and restaurants but I never recalled any movie theatres except for the one that looked like an old porn movie palace near Ueno Park (not that I ever went inside that place...really). So it was quite the revelation to see this humongous Toho Cinemas cineplex smack-dab in the middle of the area where my old NOVA school was located. Ah, times do change.

It must have been quite the enhanced night life in that area until COVID-19 struck the entire world but I'm hoping that the situation is getting gradually better so that the crowds can return to enjoying the nocturnal scene. Anyways, onto the song of this article, I once again come across an entertainer whose information is limited to the fewest crumbs but in 1988, a singer by the name of MIKI came out with the album "Feel Dandy", and from this release is "Big City Night Life".

Now, according to the JASRAC database, Mark S. Mazur and P. Schott came up with the nighttime strut and shuffle while Yoichi Umemoto (only listed in romaji) wrote the English lyrics. Granted that the overall feel of the song takes things into more into American dance-funk than out-and-out City Pop, but hey, City Pop is pretty amorphous anyways. In fact, there's something so rhythmically shuffling about "Big City Night Life" that I keep getting reminded of The Dazz Band's "Let It All Blow".

As for those slivers of information about the singer herself, I had thought that I found something about her life including her real name but it has turned out to be apocryphal. There's a Japanese Wikipedia entry about a singer and actress named Miki Akiyama（秋山実希）but she was born in 1977 which would have made her the tender age of 11 years old when she came out with "Feel Dandy", so I think we have a problem there, Houston. However, I could find out from a photograph of the obi for the CD that Hidekazu "Ponta" Murakami（村上秀一）was on drums, Soichi Noriki（野力奏一）was on keyboards and Kenji Omura（大村憲司）was on guitar for the album, and all three of them are well-known.