VIZION -- Obscure Dance Party

 

Ahhh...so that's what the disco scene was like in Tokyo back in the 1980s (this is from YouTuber 80stoa, by the way)! When I visited the city in 1981, I was far too young and shy to enter a Japanese dance emporium but during my days studying in high school and university about the nation, I learned about places like The Lexington Queen in Roppongi. Never managed to get inside there but when I did return to Tokyo in 1989 in those JET orientation days before being shipped out to Gunma Prefecture, some of us did get to a dance place within one of those Western Shinjuku hotels. It was one of the tiniest places to have my feet repeatedly stepped on, perhaps even smaller than Toronto's Sparkles up on the observation deck of the CN Tower.

Come to think of it, I have encountered a few strange places to dance during both of my stints in Japan. There was that one place in Numata within Gunma where they had 40 minutes of karaoke and then 20 minutes of dancing with added dry ice fog pumped in during that final one-third in the hour. In the following decade, my friends and I visited a Brazilian churrasco restaurant in Ginza which had all-you-can-eat meat and then enforced dancing during which the wait staff would gently hoist all of the patrons onto the dance floor for several minutes of boogying. Not sure if that was considered to be a crime against humanity considering all of the meat inside us and that couldn't have been good for the staff when they had to clean out the washrooms. I guess that can be called paying one's due-dues.😎

Well, at least they weren't obscure dance parties. But I do have "Obscure Dance Party" by the obscure band VIZION. I mentioned about these funkadelic guys back in the spring with their "Dancing Generation" because of some of the members who are already well represented on their own on the blog: Kenjiro Sakiya （崎谷健次郎）, Akihiko Matsumoto（松本晃彦）and Nobuo Ariga  (有賀啓雄) . 

Both those songs that I've cited are on VIZION's sole 1983 album "Psychotic Cube". Now in that last article on Sakiya and the band, I also wondered if there were some synthpop influences in "Dancing Generation". Well, I don't think that there is any doubt about it in "Obscure Dance Party"; in fact, next to the funk and boogie, I swear that I hear something that's almost akin to a "Super Mario Kart" soundtrack anchoring things down. Try racing down the track with Mario while listening to this one. Sakiya was responsible for both words and music for this first song on the album.