Los Primos -- Takasaki no Hito（高崎の女）

 

Having lived in the northern wilds of Gunma Prefecture for about a couple of years, I knew about the southern cities of Takasaki and Maebashi with the latter metropolis being the capital of the province. In a way, I kinda saw the two cities as twin cities along the lines of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the state of Minnesota. Though I did drop by into Maebashi a number of times to walk around and have lunch, I don't recall entering Takasaki all that much aside from a few fleeting memories of being driven through the area. The Joetsu Bullet Train which took me to Tokyo from my own Shinkansen station, Jomo-Kogen, stopped off at JR Takasaki Station along the way, but I never got off there to take a look unfortunately.

I was curious about not whether there were any go-touchi songs about Gunma (every prefecture is practically obligated to have songs created about them) but how many of them there were. Well, it didn't take long for me to find out that there was a song called "Takasaki no Hito" (Takasaki Woman) which was recorded by veteran Mood Kayo group Los Primos（ロス・プリモス）.

Los Primos is of course no stranger to melodramatic tunes connected with cities and prefectures. My last two entries on the group were associated with Nagoya and Yokohama, after all. But this time, Takasaki was given the Mood Kayo treatment, especially with that bluesy saxophone and plucky guitar introduction. "Takasaki no Hito" was actually the coupling song to Los Primos' final single to date, "Forever Tokyo"（フォーエバー東京）which was released in June 2006. The creation of the song was a family affair in that Los Primos member Takashi Mine（峰たかし）was responsible for the melody while his wife whose kanji reading I am not sure about...Seiren or Aren（聖蓮）...took care of the lyrics.