Hidemi Ishikawa -- Easier

 

Listening to this song, the question that came to mind was "When did an aidoru stop being an aidoru according to her discography?". It's kinda like that even older question that was impinging on my brain years ago, "When did kayo kyoku switch to J-Pop?". I have my own answer to the second question, but I know that people have their own varying opinions.

In any case, the reason that I posed the first question was that on hearing Hidemi Ishikawa's（石川秀美）song "Easier", I had to wonder whether this was really an aidoru tune anymore. The fact that it was written and composed by a fellow named David Andrew Scott (according to the JASRAC database) did have me tending toward the negative. What also kept pushing the needle into the "No" range was that "Easier" really does go down easy as something that would be heard in the City Pop or AOR genre. The keyboard work and the wailing guitar has me thinking more West Coast than Tokyo studios for aidoru, in which case, I think that Ishikawa can join Momoko Kikuchi（菊池桃子）in her early twin-tailed career as a singer of teenybopper tunes and City Pop classics. One final point is that by the time Ishikawa had recorded "Easier", she was in the industry for about three years; from what I've seen of other 80s aidoru who've been around for that long, other genres including straight pop have come calling. Still, to cover all the bases since I don't know Ishikawa's discography nearly as well as I do some others, I will throw in the Aidoru tag in Labels.

"Easier" was a track on Ishikawa's July 1986 8th album "Pastiche".  Returning to that first question, it has me thinking about some of the other A-list aidoru such as Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）and Akina Nakamori（中森明菜）. When did they make that big step from aidoru to pop superstardom?