Miharu Koshi -- Madonna（マドンナ）

 

Whether or not one has a taste for Miharu Koshi's vast and eclectic discography stretched over a variety of genres, one has to admit that she's kept things lively over the decades. It could be her early years from the late 1970s as a bubbly City Pop singer when her name was identified in kanji（越美晴）, and then going deep into the 1980s, she made a hard left into technopop, New Wave and maybe even avant-gardism with her name permanently changed into katakana（コシミハル）. Going into the 1990s, she took another turn into something perhaps melding French or European pop and technopop.

Koshi released her penultimate single in February 1991 titled "Madonna" which seems to be a quintessential example of that 1990s sound. Written by Koshi and Kikuhide Sekiguchi（関口菊日出）and composed by the singer, the first half of the song comes across as a happy-as-all-heck circus polka (led by her on the accordion) before the technology begins filtering in and then "Madonna" gets a little more introspective before the marching band returns. 

Before anyone might make even the slightest assumption that Koshi was paying some odd tribute to the Material Girl, "Madonna" was actually created for a Suntory brand of wine with that name. The commercial for the wine above, strangely enough, has Tomoyo Harada（原田知世）mouthing the song although I think there is enough of a vocal resemblance between her and Koshi that Harada could have possibly sung "Madonna" on her own. The song was also placed in her 1991 10th album "Chichi to Pistol"（父とピストル...Der Vater und die Pistole） but the album version is simply a very truncated take.

The last time I checked on Koshi, she was doing jazz and/or tributes to German music from the early 20th century. As I said, she hasn't been mundane with her career.