The last time I wrote about Ikue Sakakibara（榊原郁恵）, it was for her 1982 "Ame no Requiem"（雨の鎮魂歌）, which was about as City Pop as one could get.
Well, it's time to get back to her early aidoru late 1970s period and to start off the last few days of September 2021, let's go to the cheerful 8th single, "Do it BANG BANG" which hit the record shop shelves in October 1978. In all honesty, when I first read the title, a very naughty part of me suddenly envisioned the words "Wham" and "Bam", and then the phrase "Thank you, Ma'am". This had to have been some innocently giggle-worthy double entendre.
Ahhh...actually, the answer is a resounding no. Thanks to Jun Kasama's（笠間ジュン）lyrics, "Do it BANG BANG" is a straight-out demand by an impatient young lady to her boyfriend to ravish her. Stop with the kind and polite courtship, she's yelling. All that sexual frustration is swaddled in a cute aidoru melody from Ben Sasaki（佐々木勉）and an arrangement by Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）. Not sure whether Nippon Columbia's switchboard lit up like a Xmas tree with a ton of complaints about the message being sent here...not that I'm having any complaints myself.
Whaddaya know? She even got to perform it on the music shows, but then again, Ikue's star as an aidoru was definitely on the upswing because her previous single was the July "Natsu no Ojosan"（夏のお嬢さん）, her defining hit which had also been created by Kasama and Sasaki. There was no way that she was not going to appear on the shows and the stage from now on especially with that cute countenance of hers. "Do it BANG BANG" didn't do quite as well as "Natsu no Ojosan", but it was still a good earner by hitting No. 15 on Oricon and selling around 125,000 records.
Hi, Brian.
ReplyDeleteI think the three commenters were rather pining for the old days which is fair enough. That second commenter I don't quite agree with...I think that message was pretty clear in its demand for knocking boots.
"I checked both the videos you linked (the first link wasn't really a video)". Were you not able to play the first video from the article?
Some years ago a Japanese friend of mine got drunk and used the "Do it Bang Bang" come on with the bar girl sitting with us. He got a little to animated and wouldn't shut up. That is until the local yakuza protection showed up and was planning to do it to him Bang Bang. Ahh, the good old days.
ReplyDeleteHi, James. As the saying goes, "When in doubt, let the yakuza sort it out." And they really do.
DeleteI did forget one thing. Fortunately, I never had any direct contact with them, but one day when I was in West Shinjuku on one of the overpass pedestrian bridges in 1990, I noticed that on one side of the wide avenue off in the distance, there was an ambling group of gangsters walking down the street. The pedestrians who were walking UP that sidewalk suddenly decided to get to the nearest crosswalk to get to the other side.
DeleteHi, Brian.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've found most of the comments to be rather sparse in detail but I gather that they just wanted to feel like they were doing their minimal due diligence.:)
Morning, Brian. Yeah, if you find that a video won't play in Japan, you can let me know, although other than trying to find another video, there's not much more that I can do.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've found is that a good 10% to 20% of the YouTube videos that have been imported into the blog at any one time end up getting taken down due to copyright strikes on the uploader. In recent times, though, I've found that some videos just have that notice that they can't be played on the blog and the listener has to go directly to YouTube. It's still annoying but at least people can still listen to the song. In a way, I think it means that the music industry is realizing that it can't beat determined music lovers on the platform.