I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
I've already posted a number of Art of Noise articles in the past ten years as parts of the Reminiscings of Youth file here on KKP, and indeed, the avant-garde synthpop group consisting of Anne Dudley, Trevor Horn and all of the rest made up some of the most incredible collages of sounds to form music to add pleasure to my time in the 1980s. By the time that they came up with their version of "Dragnet" for the movie starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks in 1987, they were very much a welcome part and parcel of the decade's pop panoply.
However, several years earlier, I was honestly taken aback and maybe even somewhat intimidated by the Art of Noise when I heard their December 1983 debut single"Beatbox". It was nothing that I had ever heard before; they made this beloved song in the breakdancing world out of various sounds which emanated like and not like human voices screeching out a march alongside some pounding percussion and perhaps my first exposure to orchestral hits.
I've read and heard that there have been various takes (or diversions) on "Beatbox" on record and in music video. If so, then the music video below is the one that I've seen because I remember seeing that image of the London police officer getting duplicated and stretched out. It was quite the tourist video for London as well.
Among all of the diversions (I've seen No. 10), I think the one that I heard the most on radio was Diversion 1 which lasts more than eight minutes and finishes with a classy classical piano take on the core song. It's almost as if AON was trying to let us know that no matter all of the technology and sampling, music still comes down to a basic beautiful melody played out on an old-fashioned instrument.
So, as I said, "Beat Box" was released in December 1983. What else was being released in Japan in that month?
There has been of late some love for the pop culture zeitgeist of the 1980s. The hit show "Stranger Things" have brought back Kate Bush's"Running Up That Hill" to prominence after nearly 40 years, Kenny Loggins'"Footloose" got its day in the sun on "The Umbrella Academy", and there's that whole thing for Japanese City Pop since the late 2010s. And now I hear that one of my personal 1980s cultural touchstones may be making a comeback: Max Headroom! One of the streaming networks is thinking about rebooting the suave and stuttering AI for a TV show in the not-too-distant future (maybe 20 minutes later). I told this to my brother last weekend and on hearing that Matt Frewer will be returning as Max, he remarked on how carbon-dated he had to be.
When the smarmy Max Headroom first popped up on television screens whether it be through MTV or those Coke commercials, I actually thought (hoped) that he was actually the first sentient artificial intelligence since I was (and still am) a hopeless nerd. But as it turned out, he was actor Frewer in some elaborate makeup against greenscreen. Still, the character invented in the mid-1980s by George Stone, Annabel Jankel (whose brother is up here on the blog) and Rocky Morton was a hit because of the allure of all that cyberpunk and computer animation. Those brief appearances turned into a British TV sci-fi movie, a music video show hosted by VJ Max and then a 1987 American television series adaptation of the original British movie.
I remember catching that ABC series which I think lasted for a year. I ended up having an increasingly tenuous relationship with the show as the episodes crept along since I believe that the producers were perhaps a little overly focused on the techno-dystopian elements than they were in a long-standing and cogent story. Not even sure whether Max was all that compelling to anyone by the end which made me think that wrapping an entire series around a pop cultural phenomenon was a step too far.
Anyways, this special holiday edition of Reminiscings of Youth (it's a Civic Holiday here in much of the country) features this wholly appropriate collaboration between this bizarre 80s pop icon and the avant-garde synthpop of Art of Noise. Released as a single in April 1986, "Paranoimia" is all about Max's difficulty in getting to sleep due to various extreme worries (the title is a portmanteau of "paranoia" and "insomnia") while the usual AON bells and whistles are whirling around his ironically soothing tones.
"Paranoimia" hit No. 31 on Canada's RPM singles chart while in America, it got as high as No. 32 on Billboard's Top 100. I got my original version as a track on Art of Noise's album "In Visible Silence" which came out in the same month as the single. The above video features an extended mix.
So, how was the Oricon chart for April 1986 doing? Well, I've got No. 3, No. 5 and No. 6.
It's ironic...years before I started up the ROY series here on KKP, I still had been able to squeeze in great 80s collective Art of Noise into the blog with their "Legs" because the song had been used as the theme for veteran magician Mr. Marikku（Mr.マリック）and his "hand power". I even used the above thumbnail although I didn't even refer to "Dragnet" even though I gave some of their other hits a shoutout. But today, I finally give the band's second go at an iconic American crime show theme its just dues. However, I need to go through quite a bit of background.
Dum...de...DUM...DUM!
Yup, that musical cue isn't only one of the most famous musical cues in pop culture history, it's probably one of the first cues that I had ever heard and remembered as a toddler. Now, it wouldn't be for some years that I realized that the US police procedural program "Dragnet" had started as a radio program in 1949 before it became a long-running television show in the 1950s, both starring Jack Webb as the unflappable and intrepid Sergeant Joe Friday and a lot of others as his partners over the decades.
The whole franchise was famous for a number of tropes: the quick even-toned patter of Friday and his partner, Friday's narration of the progress of the case that episode, the description of Los Angeles, and the fact that the guys seemed to circulate like air through all of the police station's various departments. But my first exposure as a little boy to "Dragnet" was in its final years in the late 1960s when the older and portlier Friday was partnered with Officer Bill Gannon, played by veteran actor Harry Morgan.
Of course, there was that opening blast of ominous horns which launched the "Dragnet"song, one of the more recognizable themes in all of television. Officially titled "Danger Ahead" and composed by Walter Schumann, it not only struck me as foretelling of danger ahead but it also meant "Uh oh...police in back!". I've heard my old buddies in school intone it to signal big trouble...usually of a parental nature.
"Dragnet" the original series finished its run very early in the 1970s and since then, cop shows evolved to show a more fallible side to their characters and even what they were up to outside of work hours. So it was with some surprise when I was already in university that a new movie version of "Dragnet" was hitting the big screen in 1987. I just saw the promotional picture of Dan Aykroyd as Joe Friday and Tom Hanks as new partner Pep Streebek, and thought "OMG! Are these guys actually going to do a serious movie?!". Aykroyd was the comedian from "Saturday Night Live" and "Ghostbusters", and Hanks at that time was also a comedic actor.
As it turned out, "Dragnet" in 1987 was a homage and a parody to the original Webb classic and the trailer above made that clear. Webb's Friday would never have reacted in the way that Aykroyd's Friday did when the car ran over his foot.
Then I found out through one of the music video shows that Art of Noise was tackling the iconic theme song for the movie. They did a great job with another legendary theme, "Peter Gunn", the previous year so I had great expectations. Well, to my initial disappointment, I wasn't all that impressed with the original version of AON's "Dragnet" theme. I mean, it was nice seeing the kid and her three buddies from the band's "Close to the Edit" don their California togs and have fun with scenes from the upcoming movie but in retrospect, this version seemed like a beta test take.
That didn't dissuade me from catching the movie though since I was interested in seeing how everyone involved, including Aykroyd and Hanks, would treat "Dragnet". As it turned out, the movie was OK but not great. I thought that Aykroyd gave an impressive and endearing Joe Friday impression, but like a number of comedies centering around successful characters from "Saturday Night Live" (with the exception of "Wayne's World" and the first "Blues Brothers"), "Dragnet" wasn't quite able to stretch out the story adequately beyond some of the funny gags.
But the intro was spectacular with it opening like a classic "Dragnet" TV episode under the narration of good ol' Joe and then the epic "Danger Ahead" horns and march. It was funny and awesome seeing Friday walk over to the station before the new version of the Art of Noise theme exploded on the screen. And this time, AON hit it out of the park with this dance remix version incorporating all of the jittery vocal excerpts. Before the advent of YouTube, I'd been searching for this take of the theme for years and years and so I was extremely happy for my ears to get reacquainted with it again.
I also have to say that the final scene of the movie was incredible and hilarious, too.
The following year, Art of Noise released a number of remixes. I ended up getting one of my own.
"Dragnet" the movie was released in June 1987 so what were three of the singles that got released at the same time? Two of them were actually the debut singles for these singers.
Time for another ROY article. Recently, it came to my attention that episodes of the original "Peter Gunn" gumshoe series were coming up onto YouTube including the pilot which indeed I did see. Yep, I now realized where a lot of those lone-wolf detective conventions originated from: the sardonic voiceover by the main character, the down-and-dirty jazz soundtrack and the surprisingly preferred setting of not-so-nice areas of town. And yet, Peter Gunn himself was not just urban but also urbane and sophisticated which apparently wasn't the usual description of movie or TV private eyes back in the day.
"Peter Gunn" had a short-but-sweet run on NBC and then ABC between 1958 and 1961, so the famous theme has been much better remembered than the actual series with Craig Stevens. And to reiterate, it wasn't the theme that begat the show but the show that begat the fame for the theme originally by the legendary composer and arranger Henry Mancini. That's how incredible the song has been.
It was one of the first songs that I had ever heard in my life thanks to that collection of standards which came with our old oak Victor stereo. And the version that I preferred (which was on that collection of standards) among the original takes of it wasn't the one with Duane Eddy or the one that played in the brief opening credits, but the one with John Williams (yep that John Williams) on the piano and the French horns trumpeting like mad elephants warning of danger. No matter which version, though, "Peter Gunn" was the song that you wanted accompanying you if you went outside on the town and were in that "I gotta a job to do!" mood. You'd invest in the trench coat, even.
"Peter Gunn" has probably popped up in a number of TV shows and movies over the decades to show just that sort of atmosphere for the characters. For example, there was "The Blues Brothers".
Then several years later, I was absolutely gobsmacked when avant-garde pop group Art of Noise (with the help of the aforementioned Duane Eddy and his guitar), whom I'd known for some of the most weirdly infectious songs that had ever come out of the 1980s such as "Beat Box", "Close to the Edit" and "Legs", actually tackled one of the coolest songs ever. I think that I saw the music video first before hearing the song on radio, and that video was glorious with the late Rik Mayall as it took some affectionate pokes at the genre that the original series was representing.
Art of Noise's"Peter Gunn" was unmistakably Art of Noise and unmistakably "Peter Gunn". It was a musical synthesis made in heaven for me and became a must-hear whenever it got onto radio and even now, whenever I need a boost in my energy levels, I go to YouTube to listen to it among other cool tunes. Not surprisingly, it won Best Rock (!) Instrumental Performance (Orchestra, Group Or Soloist) at the Grammys in that same year.
I regret not ever buying the remix LPs back in the day but I finally got my copy of AON's"In Visible Silence" which had originally come out on April 14 1986 with both this song and "Legs".
So now that I've gushed forth my love for Art of Noise's"Peter Gunn", what were some of the top-sellers on Oricon in the month that "In Visible Silence" came out? Well, I got Nos. 3, 5 and 6 for you.
I've been a fan of the Art of Noise since their breakthrough hit early in the 1980s, "Beat Box".
All those amazing samples with the voices and the smashing percussive beats....I couldn't help but be mesmerized. Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley and the rest of the Art of Noise were approachable and avant-garde at the same time.
OK, I'm a big fan of this British New Wave/synthpop group. How does this chime in with this blog? Well, for one thing, a couple of Art of Noise's tunes actually made it across the Pacific to be used in a couple of variety shows. One was the band's cover of the old "Dragnet" theme (I did get my copy of the 12" remix as you can see above) which was used in one segment of the Tunnels' comedy hour on Thursdays which involved a parody of the "Kamen Rider" series, and an excerpt of the song introduced the chief villain.
The other song was longer lasting. It happened to be the strangely titled "Legs" which came out in 1985, but in Japan, it was simply known as the theme song for the magician Mr. Marikku（Mr.マリック）, the mysterious conjurer who had his 15 minutes of fame during the late 1980s into the 1990s.
The music video didn't make it onto the regular rotation of music videos as far as I could remember. I think it was probably saved for the late night programs such as the local Toronto version "City Limits" which always had the more bizarre stuff. But for those who have a leg fetish, this video is your all-you-can-eat buffet.
However, as much as I like all of those songs by the Art of Noise, I have saved my particular love for the one and only "Peter Gunn" from 1986. I specifically kept the radio on at certain times so that I could heart that one. Perhaps by that point, AON were no longer quite so avant-garde, but man was their stuff still catchy!
