Ulfuls -- Bakayaro（バカヤロー）

 

Ooh! Wow! It's truly been a long time since I've had Tortoise Matsumoto（トータス松本）and his Ulfuls（ウルフルズ）up on the blog; the last article up here was the hit "Banzai ~ Suki de Yokatta" （バンザイ 〜好きでよかった〜）that's become one of the go-to songs for celebrations of any sort, especially weddings. I saw the Osaka rock n' soul band late last year on television for the first time in quite a while and during the interview, one of their more recent tunes "Bakayaro"（Moron） was playing.

Wait a minute! "Bakayaro". My mind suddenly registered a not-so-old memory. I remembered that I did cover a few songs that had the singer scream out that Japanese epithet in anger and frustration (quite pliable in meaning depending on how it's translated), and those songs were Hideki Saijo's（西城秀樹）"Shiroi Kyokai"（白い教会）, Masahiko Kondo's（近藤真彦） "Blue Jeans Memory"（ブルー・ジーンズ・メモリー）, and Katsuhiko Miki's（美樹克彦）"Hana wa Osokatta"（花はおそかった）all the way back in 1967. When I wrote up Saijo's tune, I sardonically referred to it as the latest in my bakayaro series, and when I registered it onto Twitter, one of the Hideki fans retweeted it also as such with some humour.

Therefore, when I heard Ulfuls' "Bakayaro", I felt that I've met the fourth in the series and it just so happens to be the title of the song itself. Actually, "Bakayaro" is a track on the band's 14th original album, "Jinsei"（人生...Life）, released in May 2017. It's slightly quieter and more relaxing as an Ulfuls tune which was created by Matsumoto and fellow member John B.（ジョンB）, but the venom and frustration in the lyrics are very loud and clear as Tortoise screams out in very earthy language about the stupidity of having dreams and believing in destiny when the personal problems are here and now without anyone to help out. However in the end, he admits that life is all anyone has (for that limited period of time) and one just has to walk the walk alone (nice animal analogy in the video, by the way) to wherever it leads. I can imagine that this probably has been a karaoke tonic for all of the working folks out there in Japan.

"Jinsei" hit No. 12 on the album charts. Also, have a look at the brief article on the album by Arama Japan.