Kingo Hamada -- Machi no Dolphin（街のドルフィン）

 

Well, it's another round of Urban Contemporary Fridays on "Kayo Kyoku Plus", and it's nice that it is the end of the month. The end of March and the beginning of April also signify a new fiscal year in Japan, and that also means that there have been a few changes in the mediasphere in terms of personnel in venues such as NHK and Weathernews Live.

First up is Kingo Hamada's（濱田金吾）"Machi no Dolphin" (Dolphin in Town) from his October 1982 album "midnight cruisin'". I was reading Rocket Brown's own review of Hamada's 4th release and was inspired to write about one of the tracks that I hadn't yet covered on the blog. By the way, you can take a gander at my own thoughts on this through-and-through City Pop album along with the individual articles for the title track and "Mayonaka no Tennis Court" （真夜中のテニスコート）. 

As Rocket put it, "Machi no Dolphin" has "...a Latin-inspired disco beat with a simple, yet playful chorus that's fun and catchy." It is indeed very slick and though the lyrics by Kohei Oikawa（及川恒平） merely talk about admiring the stardust in the heavens creating the titular dolphin prancing about with a kid, the overall melody by Hamada himself has the effect of going out on the town and living it up in pre-Bubble Era Tokyo. Saxophonist Jake H. Concepcion is back in the house adding some further happiness to painting the town red as it were. The only thing this song is lacking is a painting of the dolphin in town (or over the town) by either Seizo Watase（わたせせいぞう）or Hiroshi Nagai（永井博）.

Rocket also mentions at the beginning of his album review that "Machi no Dolphin" saw the light of day outside of Japan thanks to Engelwood's Future Funk treatment of it back in 2017. Just a couple of years ago, Engelwood even put out a very resort utopian video for "Crystal Dolphin", so maybe I can hold off any requests to Watase or Nagai.

P.S. July 15th 2024: Charles Cornell has just gone crazy for "Machi no Dolphin" so have a look at his video.