Kuniko Yamada -- Tetsugaku Shiyou（哲学しよう）

 

When it comes to veteran comedienne Kuniko Yamada（山田邦子）, who I saw as the Japanese version of America's Carol Burnett, I mostly remember her time spearheading her own Fuji-TV Wednesday night show "Kuni-chan no Yamada Katsutenai Terebi" (やまだかつてないテレビ....Kuni's Yamada Unprecedented TV) during my days and nights living in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture in the late 1980s going into the 1990s. However, I also remember that in the early years of that decade, Yamada had gotten her start on the popular comedy-variety program, "Oretachi Hyokinzoku" (オレたちひょうきん族....We Are The Wild and Crazy Guys) , also a Fuji-TV property and one that included EPO's cover of "Downtown" as a theme song. Specifically, she had one of her own segments called "Hyokin Ekaki Uta"（ひょうきん絵かき歌...Wild and Crazy Illustration Song） in which she drew some amusing minimalist pictures with a sly twist while a chorus backed her up. I think the above set though was one of the more modest segments. Man, was she a fast talker!

Yamada was also a singer and again, it was mostly on "Kuni-chan no Yamada Katsutenai Terebi" that I saw her perform these somewhat tongue-in-cheek parody tunes, taking affectionate shots at the current hits or even genres. What I hadn't been aware is that she'd been releasing music from time to time since basically her debut in 1981. 

Although, Yamada's day job remained in the comedy field, she had the big-name composers helping out in her tunes such as the late Eiichi Ohtaki（大滝詠一）and Spectrum bassist Naoki Watanabe（渡辺直樹）. In December 1982, Yellow Magic Orchestra's Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）wove a simmering synthpop number called "Tetsugaku Shiyou" (Let's Philosophize). Yamada, as she did with her other songs, created the lyrics about being a little over-the-top in trying to seduce a fetching young man. I'm not quite sure at this point how serious or ironic she was being with "Tetsugaku Shiyou", although if I'm going to use the Burnett analogy once more, it would be as if America's veteran comedienne attempted a Carly Simon-type pop song.