Kenji Omura -- Gaijin Heaven（外人天国）

 

For my last entry for this Friday's edition of Urban Contemporary songs on KKP, I'm going for another track from Kenji Omura's（大村憲司）fourth and final album "Gaijin Heaven". In fact, it's the title track composed by him, and as with its fellow track mate, "Dance Your Way to God", it's quite the funky banger. Double in fact, I swear those horns in the intro must have been lifted from David Bowie's "Let's Dance"!

I was searching a few sites for who was singing "Gaijin Heaven" and at first thought, I had assumed that Fujimal Yoshino（芳野藤丸）was providing a guest vocal here but apparently, it's Omura himself behind the microphone. What was not in doubt was the background chorus...Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）! Peter Barakan, who often worked with Yellow Magic Orchestra, was responsible for the lyrics about a foreigner's observations about life in Japan. I was there in the big city between 1994 and 2011 but I wonder sometimes about how life really was for foreign residents in those hedonistic 1980s.