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I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.

Friday, March 25, 2022

GANGY -- Slow Dancer(スローダンサー)

 

Nice little photo above of a walk towards Roppongi. Maybe it could be used as the cover of one of those discs from the "Light Mellow" series.

Perhaps this particular song could have been placed on one of the CDs from that series as well. GANGY, aka Ganji Itokazu*(糸数元治), seems to have been a one-and-done person when it came to his discography. He's another in the line of very obscure Japanese singers that I've come across over the years so I had to look through a number of webpages to get any information about the fellow. But in all of them, they mention that one single of his, "Slow Dancer", from June 1982.

"Slow Dancer" is definitely in the City Pop/J-AOR vein with those different mellow and sparkling keyboards playing the jazzy melody by GANGY himself with Tsugutoshi Goto(後藤次利)providing the arrangement. In a way, the song reminds me of the some of the material from 70s wunderkind Shinji Harada(原田真二). As for the lyrics by Akira Kogure(木暮陽), the singer lays out his story of that beautiful but perhaps unapproachable slow dancing lady on the floor.

On one page, the author stated that he recollects hearing "Slow Dancer" quite a lot on the radio in his youth, and it did fairly well on the charts by hitting No. 25 on Oricon, selling about 120,000 records. But after that, he faded into obscurity...at least when it comes to any other success on the charts. If anyone else has any information about the rest of his discography, let me know.

From the Takechas website, I did find out some intriguing trivia in that the Okinawan GANGY was married to the late singer-songwriter Lily(りりィ). On my first article for Lily, "Watashi ga Naiteimasu"(わたしが泣いています), I mentioned that her son, Juon Kamata(鎌田樹音)who is the lead vocalist for the alt-rock band FUZZY CONTROL, is married to Miwa Yoshida(吉田美和)of Dreams Come True. Apparently, GANGY is Juon's father, although on the J-Wiki article for FUZZY CONTROL, the father is simply mentioned as being a guitarist, but it was because of Juon seeing GANGY perform that he himself decided to take up the electric guitar.

*Itokazu has another reading, according to Jisho.org. The kanji can also be read as "Shisuu", so if anyone can confirm GANGY's real name's pronunciation, that would be most appreciated.

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