Yukio Aoshima -- Onna Nante（女なんて）

 

Last summer for the first time, I actually had the late entertainer and former Tokyo governor Yukio Aoshima（青島幸男）up on the byline of a KKP article instead of having him in his usual place in Labels as a songwriter. Ironically enough considering the season, it was for a Christmas song that he released in the year 2000.

Now, it's his second time on the byline and this time around, we're going way back into his career in the early 1960s when he released this December 1963 single titled "Onna Nante" (Aw, Women). As soon as I saw that title, I kinda figured that it was going to be a comical kayo (which was Aoshima's specialty) about a guy's frustration with women in a "You can't live with them, you can't live without them" way. Sure enough, he sings his own lyrics of his disdain of women and all of their bad points only to say in the last line that he'll still see if he can get a date with any of them.

Hiroaki Hagiwara（萩原哲晶）composed "Onna Nante" in this twangy way which suggests that the complainer in the song lives somewhere out in the rural areas or he's a country boy at heart in the big city. There's something also very enka in the sharply slicing arrangement, but the comical aspects for the song make me think of it more as a general kayo kyoku. Not surprisingly, Aoshima sings it in the manner of a worldly fellow, if his world extends as far as the walls of his favourite watering hole.