Friends of Earth -- Decline of the City

 

Supposedly by the time I become an octogenarian in the year 2045, this mega-project will have opened somewhere in Tokyo Bay. But at the moment, it looks to be a mere fanciful design on an architect's hard drive. This is Sky Mile Tower, 1700 metres of steel, glass and whatever other materials can be thrown in there that will be built somewhere in Tokyo Bay. It even has its own Wikipedia page. I'm not sure if too many people are aware of this though; I asked my Skype student in Tokyo about it and it was definitely breaking news for him.

But that's been kinda my impression of Japan's capital city for decades. Onwards and upwards. Even during a perceived recession in the nation sometime during my many years there, I never had the impression that Tokyo was in some major economic doldrums. There was always some new steel-and-glass tower going up in a particular area at any one time. And look at the last decade when I've been back here in Toronto; Tokyo has been undergoing some further redevelopments.

So it's rather ironic that I'm introducing this particular song titled "Decline of the City" by the short-lived band Friends of Earth（フレンズ・オブ・アース）or FOE, powered by Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）. I mentioned about them last month through their "In My Jungle", and with "Decline of the City", created as a technopop instrumental designed by FOE member Masatoshi Nishimura（西村昌敏）, it's got some mighty rumbling rhythms underneath those shiny synthesizers with some DJ dance beats in there. It truthfully sounds more like "Rise of the City". It doesn't strike me as being particularly major chord upbeat but it's intrepid in its path going forward which has buildings going up by the street load. 

"Decline of the City" is the final track on the March 1986 12-inch single "F.O.E#1/DECLINE OF O.T.T.". Since I couldn't leave an unknown set of initials alone, I had to find out what that "O.T.T." meant. Hosono was the one who coined the three letters used to describe the music that he's created with a driving feel using a detailed mechanical beat. They stand for "over the top", according to the J-Wiki article on the group.