Hideki Naoi -- Omae wa Inryoku（おまえは引力）

 

One of our stops during that 1981 summer graduation trip to Japan was Toyota City in Aichi Prefecture since it was the hometown as it were for the famous automobile enterprise. Through one of the many pamphlets that I got on Toyota and its corporate philosophy, there was also a hierarchy showing everything from the most inexpensive car in the line to the most expensive which was the Crown. Basically, as that name intimates, the Crown was for company presidents and similarly statured executives.

If I'm not mistaken, the second-highest car in the Toyota line was the Cressida. Strangely enough, not long after our trip to Toyota City, we had our three days of homestay in Nara with the Tezukayama Girls' High School students. My host sister and her father came to pick me up and the latter drove us to his home in his Cressida. At the time, I didn't really think about what Akiko's father did for a living but that was one fine interior for the Cressida.

I'm not sure where the Toyota Corona fit in the grand scheme of things but at one point, it did have a snazzy tune for its commercials, namely in 1983. There's just a thimble of information give about singer Hideki Naoi（直井秀樹）which is simply that he is currently a music producer and that back in the day, he had at least one single and one EP come out under his name. The single was "Omae wa Inryoku" (You are the Attraction) which was that snazzy tune.

Composed by the late Kazuhiko Kato（加藤和彦）, written by Akira Ito（伊藤アキラ）and arranged by Akira Inoue（井上鑑）, according to the writeup of the song on Hip Tank Records, "Omae wa Inryoku" had some inspiration from Elbow Bones & The Racketeers "A Night in New York", a 1980s return to all that jazz and high-flying class which was on heavy rotation on the radio here back when I was a high school kid. There is some of that feeling in "Omae wa Inryoku" but I don't think that the Elbow Bones' influence is quite that direct and it's mixed in with some of the tropical jazz from Kid Creole & The Coconuts. But let's not take anything away from "Omae wa Inryoku"; it's still a fun and bouncy tune for Naoi.