DAOKO -- ShibuyaK

 

I generally have had a pretty congenial relationship with Shibuya. No, I had already left my adolescence far behind when I first ventured into the Teen Mecca of Japan but even so, I had my favourite places including Tower Records, Tokyu Hands and the old RecoFAN. Plus, there were the nice restaurants up at the top of the Parco Department Store. Mind you, I remember late one night when my friends and I were heading back to Shibuya Station from some outing when we encountered a lot of people in their teens and twenties not dealing with heavy drinking very well and well, let's say, we had to keep our eyes on the ground not to step in anything gloppy.😵

Singer-songwriter and rapper DAOKO is someone that I've heard about in the last several years, but I never used the opportunity to listen to her discography until today. I know that she's worked with funky Yasuyuki Okamura（岡村靖幸）and she made her first appearance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen back in 2018. As such, I decided to go to her beginnings and came across her first major debut when she released a double A-side "ShibuyaK/Samishii Kamisama"（さみしいかみさま...A Sad God） in October 2015.

At first, on seeing the title "ShibuyaK", I'd wondered whether the song would have that Shibuya-kei sheen but actually the song stands for Shibuya Kousaten（渋谷交差点）or the famed huge Shibuya Crossing that a lot of tourists have wanted to visit. Written and composed by DAOKO and Hideya Kojima（小島英也）from the band ORESAMA, there's something very Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）90s in the arrangement that could get listeners swooning about making that trek to one of Tokyo's bubbling neighbourhoods although DAOKO's lyrics describe her seeming love/hate relationship with Shibuya on a few levels. She gives shoutouts to some of the famous emporia in the area such as 109, Forever 21 and Parco but also decries the results of the cheap mass production of commodities.

The single peaked at No. 23 on Oricon. It was also a track on her second major album of December 2017, "Thank You Blue" which went as high as No. 13.