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.
All this time, I've occasionally mentioned the cocktail Orange Mimosa in the blog articles. That came about because I first heard about it on "The Incredibles" years ago. And yet, I'd never sampled the stuff myself, so above is the recipe. I didn't know that it was that easy to make.
Interestingly enough, I heard from a commenter for the Tom Tom Club article stating that Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）put out a new digital single recently. It's been a long time since I've heard from the singer and the last article on her was posted near the end of 2024 by Fireminer.
At one point, Hamasaki was pretty much the Queen of J-Pop. I was living in Japan at the time and around the early 2000s, it was a rare day that I didn't see her visage in the window of some store, a display in a record shop or on the television screen. Practically every single by her was meant for a Gold stamp and tons of purchases. But then, as we all went further into the 21st century, she did a slow fade from the charts. I knew that she had been suffering from some hearing issues (something that I've been dealing with for some time as well) and I'm hoping that the fact that she's popped up again with a new song, those issues have been rectified.
"mimosa" is her 19th digital single that was released on April 8th and when I heard those first syllables from her, I noticed that her voice had dropped in tone a bit but by the end, it sounded like the Queen was back. With words by Hamasaki, the elegiac melody and arrangement were handled by Kunio Tago（多胡邦夫）and Yuta Nakano（中野雄太）respectively, and there is something about the music which takes me back to those high-flying Hamasaki days. Hamasaki's lyrics are more bittersweet than the usual Orange Mimosa in that they involve having to deal with a lot of sturm und drang in life but staying determinedly on course and not giving up.
The music video is interesting in that it seems to take place in an Ayumi Hamasaki art gallery of sorts with AI helping to animate some of the most famous shots of the singer herself. "mimosa" reached No. 6 on the Oricon Digital Download chart.
Hello, J-Canuck here. Hope you have been enjoying the Holidays. Now that we are approaching the arrival of 2025, contributor Fireminer is here with an article on the J-Pop superstar Ayumi Hamasaki. Have a read of his take on "Never Ever".
In my previous article on TM Network’s“COME ON EVERYBODY”, I touched on a Famicom game that had to do with the band and that song in particular. Video games about musicians are nothing new. 90s kids will remember titles like “Michael Jackson's Moonwalker”, “Revolution X”, “Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style”, and “Queen: The Eye”. Then there are also “games” little more than interactive CDs like your “Prince Interactive”, “Kid A Mnesia Exhibition”, and what I want to get into in this article, “Visual Mix: Ayumi Hamasaki Dome Tour 2001 A” (alternative title: “浜崎あゆみ VISUAL MIX”)
But first, the song:
This is Ayumi Hamasaki’s 21st single“Never Ever” released on March 7, 2001. It was later included in the album “I Am…” released on January 1, 2002. “I Am…” brings together dance, rock, pop and ballad pieces with the theme of love, hope and peace connecting them all. It’s still weird to see “Never Ever” stands beside the fan-favorites “Dearest”, “M” and “Evolution” because it is admittedly one of her weaker songs.
“Never Ever” is quite a straightforward pop-rock song, with lyrics about finding strength from love in the face of despair. The instrumentation sounds a lot like early 2000s stripped back J-Rock in a nice way. What kills this song for me though is the vocals. I’m not really that deep in Ayu’s early discography, and one reason is her nasal voice. She did get a lot better in the early 2000s, but the squeakiness remained for “Never Ever” and prevented it from being a good piece. The song could’ve worked had it been written differently so that Ayu didn’t have to reach for the high notes, but then again, she composed it herself.
Back to “Visual Mix”. It was released on December 21, 2001 for the PS2 as a two-disc package. The first disc has footage of Ayu’s live performance and behind the scenes at the Tokyo Dome on July 6 and 7, 2001 (as part of the Ayumi Hamasaki Dome Tour 2001 A – she also toured the Nagoya Dome, Osaka Dome, and Fukuoka Dome.) The footage was captured by Sony’s Fourth View technology (also called SONY Spatial Video) which was a form of early 360° recording. It was previously used to make a very similar game named “Space Venus starring Morning Musume” starring the eponymous idol group.
In “Visual Mix”, you don’t passively watch Ayu perform “Never Ever” and other songs from “I Am…”. You can change the camera view, zoom in or out, and add visual effects such as fireworks or falling cherry blossoms. “Playing” with it is like messing with a video editor when you were a kid in computer science class.
The second disc consists of a simplified music mixer (“Ayu-Mix Studio”) and a fake web browser (“Ayu Browser”). In “Ayu-Mix Studio”, you get to play around with the remixes of “Endless Sorrow” or “UNITE!”. It’s rudimentary compared to more “professional” fares on the PS2 like “eJay Clubworld”. Ayu Browser on the other hand reminds me of some games like “Front Mission 3” and “Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers” which recreate the 90s Internet experience in a futuristic shell. Admittedly you don’t have much to do in “Ayu Browser” other than decorating it with pictures of Ayu and, more impactfully, sending and receiving prewritten emails to the singer herself. Nowadays we have ChatGPT for that.
All in all, “Visual Mix” is an interesting piece of software. It was released in a time when few Japanese had a PC at home, but many had the brand new PS2 and were all too eager to explore its multimedia capability. “Visual Mix” and the technology behind it were the products of Sony Music Japan, who also had a lot of involvement with the development of the PS and PS2. With “Visual Mix” they had -- in their own small way -- portended how the interactive concert experience would become.
From writing about the recent B'z single "Illumination"（イルミネーション）, the theme song for the currently running NHK morning serial drama "Omusubi"（おむすび）, I was wondering a little about the gyaru（ギャル）culture that's been depicted on the show.
I was in Japan at the time when the gyaru culture was blossoming on the streets of Tokyo and elsewhere, notably Shibuya. Mind you, I don't recall having any gyaru as students although one kid was wearing her marshmallow-y loose socks below her uniform. Nope, my experience with such young people was purely observational as I saw the ladies decked in all sorts of dyed hairdos and bizarre makeup.
Anyways, as I was watching one scene of "Omusubi" which took place at a karaoke box, one gyaru took the microphone and sang an old Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）hit. And that got me thinking about what were the favourite J-Pop tunes among the gyaru elite way back then. Well, it's a bit biased, but there is the Avex Portal which has put up its own five favourites for the 1990s.
I don't know whether there are any former or current gyaru reading this, but considering the source website, the choices are indeed slanted rather heavily toward Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）, so if there are any other non-TK songs that can be recommended as gyaru favourites, please let me know.
OK...this is going to be a slightly off-kilter Reminiscings of Youth chapter this week since I'll be talking about something in the year 1999 when I was well into my 30s. Still, I can say that this is a ROY article if I just substitute "youth" with "youngishness" (yeah, I realize that this isn't a real word...it's been given a really angry red underline).
But first, let's go with some background for me and this song. Irving Berlin, one of the masters within the Great American Songbook of jazz songs and show tunes, created "Let's Face the Music and Dance" for the 1936 musical "Follow the Fleet" with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It's a song that I had heard from time to time since I was a kid although at the time, I hadn't known the title or its background, although usually it was through the famous scene above of Astaire and Rogers dancing to it that I kept hearing it.
When I look back upon it, I realize that I had been struck by the fact that it was an unusual jazz number with the key changes making it sound romantic, elegant and ominous at the same time. With the lyrics of "There may be trouble ahead, But while there's moonlight, And music and love and romance, Let's face the music and dance" in that first verse along with the succeeding verses, Berlin may have been hinting at the war to come but still asking listeners to not forget about hope and each other's company in a happier spirit.
While reading up on the song via Wikipedia, I discovered that Nat King Cole had done his cover of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" in 1964 with arrangement by Billy May. Compared to the original's feeling of being sadly resigned to a potentially dark future while savoring the moments before then, Cole's take is a joyful ring-a-ding-ding swing through Las Vegas, including a playful organ that seems to have been hauled out from Yankee Stadium. His version was apparently an inspirational one, getting other future singers to do their covers of the Berlin classic.
And that brings me to the present...well, actually 23 years ago. I was walking through the long mall underneath the Shinkansen tracks in Sukibayashi which is located midway between Ginza and Hibiya in Tokyo. There was a very long branch of HMV taking up a good chunk of the mall and when I came across the jazz section, I heard this familiar tune on the speakers which happened to be a new version of "Let's Face the Music and Dance".
Back around the end of the century, I did have my jazz-fixated age so I was more than happy to enter HMV Jazz and find out who was behind this classy, mellow and really romantic version of the song; nothing ominous. It was much longer than any other take and it also had a very pleasant bossa nova kick in there. Fortunately for me, it just so happened that jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall had released her latest album, "When I Look in Your Eyes" from June 1999.
Before that fateful encounter at HMV, I had never heard of Krall, so it was wonderful to hear that she's a fellow Canadian of my generation, being born in Nanaimo, British Columbia. One of the things that was another winner for her along with the amazing arrangement was indeed her voice. It smoked pleasantly like the rising wisps of a Cuban cigar and there was even a swagger in there and on her face which was strangely reminiscent of Elvis...so how ironic that she would end up marrying another Elvis.
It won't be a surprise for you to read that I bought "When I Look in Your Eyes" lickety-split, and it's good to know that it did end up with some pedigree since it was nominated for a Grammy for Best Album of the Year, and won the awards for Best Jazz Vocal and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical in early 2000. Since then, I've bought a few more Krall albums (including her Christmas one) and I even got to go to her concert in Bunkamura in Shibuya a few years later. It was just after that she'd gotten married to Mr. Costello and I thought it ran a tad short but becoming a fan, I think that any length of concert would seem short.
I'm sure that Ms. Krall has been to Japan quite a few times since my time in seeing her, and the above displays her 2019 tour in the country. As a coda for this story, her "Let's Face the Music and Dance" remains my favourite version of the song.
So, which three songs were in the Top 10 of Oricon in June 1999?
Another one of those Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）songs that had me going "Oh yeah! I remember this one." With Hamasaki all over the pop culture spectrum at the time, "Evolution", like many of her other hits, had that refrain which refused to go away on television. No surprise since it was used for a Kose cosmetics commercial and it hit No. 1 a few weeks after its release in January 2001 as her 20th single, so I probably got to hear it a lot on the countdown shows.
According to the Wikipedia article on "Evolution", apparently the critics didn't particularly like her way of delivering the lyrics (those were provided by Hamasaki herself with the melody provided under her pen name of crea). I don't really mind it myself (kudos on that rapid-fire patter) and I think that having her go into a more rock mode added a fresher angle after hearing so many ballads from her.
"Evolution" became the No. 7 single of the year selling around 950,000 copies in Japan, and was placed onto Hamasaki's 4th studio album"I am..." released in January 2002. It also hit the top spot on the album charts and became the 2nd-ranked album of that year. On the top albums in Oricon history, "I am..." has placed in at No. 57.
For me, one of the most famous scenes of Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）in her music videos is where she's strutting towards the camera in various types of dress. Not sure where the video was filmed, though. Perhaps it was somewhere in New York City (certainly those night shots provided some confirmation). Probably the reason for that image sticking in my mind all these years was that the song was another big hit for her.
The video was for her 11th single"appears" from November 1999, and perhaps that title was a shorthand for the famous proverb, "Everything is not as it appears". Hamasaki's lyrics hint at observations of various couples walking hand-in-hand and wondering if everything is really OK with the relationship. My take was that the protagonist was making those observations while contemplating her not-so-happy recent experiences at love. Also, those many"guises" that Ayu puts on had me wondering whether the lady had to take on a variety of different incarnations to please her boyfriends over the years.
From the urgent melody provided by Kazuhito Kikuchi（菊池一仁）, when I listened to "appears", I had assumed that the song was used for some TV suspense, but the only tie-up here was as a commercial song for a cosmetic. The song reached No. 2 on Oricon and became the 81st-ranked single for 1999. It was also a track on Hamasaki's 2nd original album"LOVEppears" which came out at the same time as "appears" and hit No. 1 for 3 weeks running. By the time the year was up, it had already become the 15th-ranked album, and then by the end of 2000, "LOVEppears" even upped its standing to No. 14. Currently, it is the No. 40 album on Oricon's list of all-time albums.
There has apparently been some happy news in the Hamasaki household as of late. From what I've read on Mixi and both J-Wiki and Wikipedia files (with one source being Arama Japan) for singer-songwriter Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）, she gave birth to a boy at the end of last November, and made the announcement on her Team Ayu fan website on New Year's Day (although I couldn't find it there for some reason).
Remembering Ayu in her halcyon days as the golden-tressed superstar diva of J-Pop with all of those high-tempo chart-topping hits, it's sometimes nice to go back to her very early days when her hair was a bit more of a strawberry blonde and shorter. Not knowing too much of her discography back then, I did find her 2nd single, "YOU" from June 1998.
Written by Hamasaki and composed by Yasuhiko Hoshino（星野靖彦）, "YOU" seems to be an expression of her feelings for that special someone through the good and bad times, and in the end, she wants to continue to support him. Perhaps it's still at the friend stage but would like an upgrade in the relationship.
I'd never heard of "YOU" before although it went Gold, reaching No. 20 on Oricon, or perhaps it slipped my mind since I recollect watching a lot of the "Countdown TV" episodes and seeing a lot of Ayu's hits being featured all of the time. In any event, although the arrangement does include a proud synthesizer and guitar, I like it as a pretty calming and introspective song with that familiar voice behind it. "YOU" was also included on Hamasaki's first original album"A Song for xx" which was released on New Year's Day in 1999. That album hit the top spot on the charts and ended the year as the No. 16 album, becoming a million-seller and earning a Best Album prize at the Japan Record Awards.
As I write this, Japan is now in the last 24 hours of the Heisei Era, a period of time that I was happy to have spent much of in Gunma and then Tokyo/Chiba. Of course, being the sentimental and nostalgic guy I am, I've decided to put out a small list of the singers and bands which fairly screamed "HEISEI" to me. I'm not going to so much highlight any particular songs but rather put them up as representatives in this Author's Picks this time around...just the artists themselves. Moreover, this is a personal list; I'm not basing this on Oricon charts and numbers of albums sold. It's all about the affection for certain folks that hit the big time during this time, and to be honest, my picks will mostly be in the 1990s.
1. Wink
"Samishii Nettaigyo" was a title that I couldn't remember or say at all even though this was a Wink single that had just gone gangbusters when it was released in July 1989, a few weeks before my arrival in Gunma Prefecture to teach at the junior high schools there. All I could say was "that WINK song"! With expressions and movements reminiscent of porcelain dolls, Sachiko Suzuki and Shoko Aida struck me as being the anti-aidoru: no smiling and no skipping around. Their time at the top was relatively brief but boy, did they pack their hits in.
2. B'z
As I mentioned in the actual article for "Bad Communication", this was the song that woke me up during my mornings in the first year of my Gunma stay because of Rie Miyazawa in those computer commercials. Takahiro Matsumoto and Koshi Inaba did it fun and did it loud and have continued to do so right to the end of Heisei with other rockers such as "Be There" and "Love Phantom". I always wondered which would win the ultimate battle between Inaba's voice and Matsumoto's guitar.
3. Kazumasa Oda
(covered by Chris Hart)
Still awfully hard to find any of his original solo songs on YouTube but that hasn't deterred me to include the former member of Off-Course on the list since this was an artist who managed to come up with his own sound separate from the one that he and his bandmates created back in the 70s and 80s."Love Story wa Totsuzen ni" was just one example of how he put together those synthesizers and those other instruments to come up with tunes for himself and other singers that would put him up as an urban contemporary balladeer in the last decade of the 20th century.
4. Namie Amuro
I guess for a lot of people that when Namie Amuro announced her retirement from the music business a couple of years ago, they figured that the Heisei Era really was heading for its end. She was one of the first singers that I heard on landing at Narita to start my second stint as an English teacher, this time in Tokyo. She wasn't just dynamic, she was a dynamo! Dancing, singing, showing off her fashion, Amuro started off a pop cultural trend all her own for a few years and I think she was one of the factors in the Komuro Boom that took over J-Pop for the middle years in the 90s. In fact, I still remember being in an Ikebukuro game centre one Saturday night and while my friend was doing his games, I was in a music video capsule watching her "a walk in the park".
5. Ayumi Hamasaki
I wasn't ever a huge fan of Ayumi Hamasaki but as much as Amuro had taken the Japanese pop world by storm around the middle of the 1990s, Hamasaki carved her huge slice of the pop culture pie by the end of that decade and into the new century. There isn't too much exaggeration involved here when I say that ads plugging her next big single and her appearances on "Countdown TV" were basically everywhere.
6. Dreams Come True
This was another band that was making its mark especially in the early 1990s. When I saw that "Music Station" episode on my host family's TV back in 1989 and Dreams Come True make that introduction with a beaming ear-to-ear Miwa Yoshida declaring herself in English, I felt that there was a seismic shift in pop music. I had equated Dreams Come True as a Japanese version of Swingout Sister but that wasn't quite accurate. They also had their own unique voice of sunny uptempo songs and heartbreak ballads.
7. Sing Like Talking
These guys may not have become hugely known on television per se, but I am so glad that I found out about Chikuzen Sato's amazing band and purely by mistaken identity. Cool and urban with plenty of soul, Sing Like Talking was a group that I had thought was another band whose name and output have largely disappeared from my memory. SLT, on the other hand, has stuck with me all these years and I've got a number of their albums to show for it.
8. Misia
It was through the above video that I first got to know Misia. She among a few others symbolized my opinion that good ol' soul was coming back into Japanese popular music for a while from the late 90s, and that voice of hers was just incredible. One of my wishes that she will participate in the Opening Ceremonies for next year's Olympics...preferably to do a cover of Minako Yoshida's "TOWN".
9. Morning Musume
Just when I thought that the concept of female aidoru had gone onto the pop culture heap of history, Tsunku from Sharam Q took this group of runners-up in a television show singing contest and molded them into the core for Hello! Project. Morning Musume had some successes in their early years, but "Love Machine" in 1999 was the booster rocket that sent them soaring, and for a few years, the hits and the TV shows and the new members kept rolling in. It might be all about the alphabet teams now but for me and some of my contemporaries, Morning Musume was our beloved girl group.
10. SMAP
As was the case with Hamasaki, I was never a dedicated fan of SMAP's music although I did buy a few of their singles such as "Celery" and the super-catchy "Shake". But again, for many years, it just seemed that every one of their songs was destined to reach the top of the Oricon charts or at least hover in the Top 10 for several weeks. It didn't hurt either that all of the members achieved fame in other facets of mass media as well through dramas, variety shows, specials and commercials. I did enjoy my "Bistro SMAP", and wouldn't it have been something if it had still stayed on the air to host The Avengers?
My list is not a complete one by any means but I did want to keep things at 10, and obviously any music memories that you might have of the Heisei Era may be vastly different from mine. So I offer the invitation to commenters and fellow contributors alike...if you have your own Heisei list, by all means, let us know! Meanwhile, let's get ready for Reiwa.
In a way, I kinda feel inappropriate about writing on this song by Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）. As I stated in my very first article ("SEASONS") for the singer-songwriter who had basically held control over a good chunk of the charts starting from the late 1990s and into the 2000s, I never became a super fan of hers, but reading from her biography on J-Wiki and Wikipedia, she did have something to say about herself through her lyrics. Perhaps someone on the blog who is a huge enthusiast could give a better rendition here, but I will try my best.
"vogue" was Hamasaki's 14th single released in April 2000, and it was the first in a trio of singles which became known as the singer's "Trilogy of Hopelessness". The next two singles, "Far Away" and the aforementioned "SEASONS" detailed the singer's past and future respectively, whereas "vogue" focuses on her present. However, the general theme for the trilogy is one of pessimism.
Looking at her lyrics in this song, she seems to describe herself as a pretty flower and yet a flower that will inevitably fritter away. The impression is that there seemed to be a lot of insecurity within her, and the Wikipedia article for "vogue" points out her then-current dissatisfaction with her previous songs in terms of how well she expressed her message through them.
And yet, at the time that I was in Japan, my feeling was that Hamasaki had become a powerful force in Japanese pop culture with everyone being very positive not just on her music but also her fashion sense. I used to see her on the music shows, holding her own very well with the likes of comedic duo Downtown and appearing like someone who was quite cordial but wasn't going to kowtow to anybody.
During one week, CNN International had devoted a part of its programming to modern-day Japan, and Hamasaki was one celebrity that was interviewed during that week. I remembered the interview as being somewhat awkward although I thought the singer was OK doing the talk in Japanese and in fairly fluent English. There seemed to be some sizing up between her and the interviewer through their eyes and body language but didn't think that Hamasaki was being evasive. My point here is that I, as a casual observer of her fame, never thought that she was ever particularly insecure but pretty shrewd.
Then again, perhaps I may have misread the situation. It may not be so much insecurity but frustration about how she wanted to get her point across instead of going up those Oricon rankings.
As I said before, I didn't follow Hamasaki's music too too closely at the time, but I do remember the music video for "vogue" which occupied TV for months. It was always that special effects scene of her in that strawberry blond hair among the cherry blossoms with the innocent smile while the journey-like music played away, so I had no idea about how dark those lyrics were. The Wiki article talked about the Latin beat in there, but I also think it sounds as if it had come from an even deeper part of Europe, just like the way that some of those old kayo from the late 1970s had sounded.
"vogue" reached No. 3 on Oricon and ended up as the 23rd-ranked single of 2000, going Triple Platinum and selling over 760,000 copies. It was also placed on her third studio album"Duty", released in September 2000, which also included the other two songs from her trilogy. That album went straight to the top and stayed for 4 weeks running and became the 2nd-ranked album of the year. It finished 2001 in 77th place, and in terms of all-time top albums in Oricon history, it is currently 24th.
Y'know...in all the years that J-Pop superstar Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）was an omnipresent figure on TV with all of those hits, I don't think I had ever heard of this song, her 4th single from October 1998, "For My Dear..."
The title rings a bell but hearing the song has given me something fresh to listen to. It's a laidback and wistful ballad by songwriters Hamasaki and Yasuhiko Hoshino（星野靖彦）about being afraid to take that step of confessing one's love to someone, and I am quite drawn to that crystal plaintive voice of the singer with the quiet arrangement. Also, the accompanying music video sends some interesting images of various people (not) trying to avoid each other. There is some rather poignant awkwardness in there.
Plus there is Hamasaki herself in that short red hair in that original video before she became that huge superstar. Quite natsukashii. "For My Dear..." went Gold, breaking the Top 10 for the second time by hitting No. 9. There was a re-release of the single in 2001 for which it peaked at No. 33. The song also was on her hit debut album"A Song for ××" which also contained a number of her other singles including "poker face".
Well, I was having dinner with my friend Daniel last Friday in Koreatown when he told me about one of his favourite singers, Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）. One of the bits of information I received was that she actually did a rap album. At first thought, I surmised that that it would be possible considering the type of music she did. I don't have a full range of knowledge of her discography so maybe the album was in there, I thought. But then, he told me that she did the album even before she released her first official single, "poker face". In fact, it was almost 3 years before "poker face".
My attention was got. After receiving the link from Daniel, I checked it out and found "NOTHING FROM NOTHING". Released in September 1995 (with an EP coming out later in December), Ayumi Hamasaki was once AYUMI, and her collaborators were DOHZI-T and DJ BASS. Hearing 16-year-old AYUMI rap with the guys kinda reminded me of EAST END×YURI. It's kinda cute...almost like hip-hop-moe. But then there was the dreamy bit where those familiar tones of her singing voice echoed slowly over the cool bass. The overall effect was rather reminiscent of all those R&B tunes during the 1990s before J-R&B became big near the end of the century, so actually I do like it.
DOHZI-T took care of the lyrics while Kazuo Ishijima（石嶋和雄）came up with the music. Unfortunately, "NOTHING FROM NOTHING" got nothing. It didn't get onto Oricon and Nippon Columbia summarily dropped her. Obviously, though, there was a much better fate for her on the horizon a few more years down the line. Wikipedia has stated that the EP and single are out of print so I'm sure the Holy Grail as far as her fans are concerned is this one.
Went out with some good friends to catch "Wonder Woman" today. It's been a while since I've seen a blockbuster flick so early in its release so it was actually rather nice to hear some laughter and emotion from the larger audience. As for the movie itself, I was quite happy for DC that they finally got the successful superhero movie they had been desperate for. No guarantees on what "Justice League" will be like later this year but at least they've got one hit on their hands.
I wrote my first Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）article just a little over 2 years ago and related the fact that I was never such a big fan of hers aside from a few exceptions such as "SEASONS". However, I cannot deny that a decade or so ago, she was pretty much the female pop superstar in Japan. Figuratively speaking, I could have thrown a rock somewhere through the TV airwaves and there would have been a good chance that it would have struck a performance or a music video of the lass.
Furthermore, even with my relative apathy toward her music, I'm fairly certain that if a few bars of her music flowed into my ears, I would still be able to identify it as a Hamasaki tune. She was that widespread in the pop culture zeitgeist going into the 21st century. Even listening to her very first single "poker face", there was a certain piece of melody that fired off some memory engrams in my head.
I have to admit that listening to the whole song and watching the music video at the top, I did get some flow of nostalgia due to the 90s synthesizer work and seeing a fresh-faced Hamasaki performing. There was none of that heavy makeup, blonde tresses and the glamour that would characterize her looks during the prime of her career. It was just that Fukuoka-born woman barely in her 20s launching her way to stardom.
"poker face" was released in April 1998 with Hamasaki writing the lyrics and Yasuhiko Hoshino（星野靖彦）providing the melody. It peaked at No. 20 on Oricon. The song (and her next 4 singles) was also part of her debut album"A Song For xx" from January 1999 that had a couple of consecutive runs at No. 1 before ending the century as the 16th-ranked album of the year. It not only went Platinum but also earned Best Album honours at the Japan Record Awards.
Last night, I wrote about an early single by Namie Amuro（安室奈美恵）that served to be one of the first new songs that I had heard since arriving back in Japan in late 1994, so of course, there was plenty of nostalgia juice to be had.
Well, then I figured that it was time to once again cover another super J-Popdiva that came a few years down the pike following the Amuro boom. A new generation of female aidoru courtesy of Morning Musume（モーニング娘。）was on the cusp of hitting it really big and J-R&B was also starting to make inroads. But on the pop front, Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）was about to explode on the charts.
Not being an Ayu fan for the most part, I still couldn't help remembering this song (though I had to look up the title), "Boys & Girls" since it was a frequent visitor on the music shows for several months. This was Hamasaki's 9th single from July 1999, and although I did say in past Ayu articles that I gravitated more to her ballads, I have to admit that the uptempo "Boys & Girls" does have a catchy beat.
For me, I've seen the career of Ayumi Hamasaki separated into 2 parts. There is the far shorter earlier part when Ayu was finding her sea legs with that short hair, and then the later part when the hits were simply rolling in like boulders from an avalanche with the singer-lyricist tressed in those golden locks. "Boys & Girls" is the song that represented the early years.
The song was the second No. 1 for her, following "Love~Destiny" which had come out earlier in the year in April. As with that ballad, Hamasaki took care of the lyrics while D.A.I. provided the melody. And it stayed at the top spot for 3 consecutive weeks, going Triple Platinum and selling over a million copies. It just missed out on being one of the Top 10 Oricon singles of the year by finishing 1999 at No. 11, but it did earn Best Song honours for the first time for her at the Japan Record Awards, and it punched her ticket for her first appearance on the Kohaku Utagassen.
Digging through my old CD singles, I came across this Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）number which represents the only music I actually own by a singer who at one point was pretty much the Queen of J-Pop for a number of years. Perhaps nostalgia for the 90s and early years of the 21st century will get me to buy a few more CDs by her in the near future, but at the time although I knew about her up-and-coming star power, I never really got into her music for the most part.
But I already made that point clear in my only other contribution to Ayumi Hamasaki, "SEASONS", and that was a ballad as is this one. "LOVE〜Destiny〜" was one-half of her 7th single from April 1999. So I gather with the associative property in gear, I probably just like her love songs. Unlike the driving dance-pop that she usually sang, this particular song written by her and composed by the vocalist of Osaka band Sharan-Q/the head honcho for the Hello Project, Tsunku（つんく）, hooked me by the fact that the arrangement sounded a lot like those sappy 80s ballads created by folks like David Foster (I almost expected Rob Lowe to pop in with a saxophone solo in the video) and that Hamasaki sounded and appeared so tender and vulnerable. I remembered that the video got a lot of airplay and seeing the singer looking rather tired in her dressing room certainly showed a different side from the glam.
On the flip side, there is "LOVE〜since 1999〜" which was a more dramatic rendition of the above ballad fit as a theme song for a Japanese movie of intrigue filmed in Europe. Actually, though, it was the theme song for the Fuji-TV drama "Semi-Double" which I barely remember as a show about some affair or affairs exploding among the cast of characters. Although the music remained basically intact, Tsunku put in his own lyrics (and his vocals) for this version. "LOVE〜Destiny〜" was used as the love theme for the show.
Every time I've heard "LOVE〜since 1999〜", my ears have had to adjust to the duet of Hamasaki and Tsunku since the voices didn't quite mesh at the beginning for some reason. Thankfully, they seemed to blend a bit better by the middle of the song.
The single hit No. 1 (her first one) and ended up as the 30th-ranked song for 1999, going Double Platinum selling about 690,000 copies. It also appeared on Hamasaki's first BEST album"A BEST" from March 2001 which hit the top spot and became the 2nd-ranked album for the year. In fact, it is the 6th most successful album in Oricon history.
I
was never a REBECCA (レベッカ) fan, and, like many others, the one hit I know and like
from them is “Friends” (フレンズ), which I first heard while watching Fuji TV's “Nazotoki wa Dinner
no Ato de” (謎解きはディナーのあとで), a drama featuring Arashi’s (嵐) lovely Sho Sakurai (櫻井翔) as the super smart
butler and the very attractive Keiko Kitagawa (北川景子) as a socialite/rookie police
officer.
Besides
“Friends”, I tried other songs from the band watching a video compilation of
their early hits, but no other song caught my attention for real. They were ok,
typical New Wave songs from the 80s, and nothing more than that.
So,
last night, after writing an article about one of my all-time favourite aidoru
group, Melody, I spent some time watching one of the shows they were always
performing at, called “Idol on Stage” (アイドルオンステージ). Thing is, I ended up coming
across a very young and aidoru-ish Ayumi Hamasaki (浜崎あゆみ) performing a song called
“MOON”, and, as she hardly had any interesting song around 1995 (this was
before her true debut as a J-Pop singer), I guessed it wasn’t a song from her,
but one from another artist. Then, after reading that the songwriter was
someone called NOKKO, I quickly discovered it was a song released as a single
by REBECCA in February 1988.
“MOON”
is the best I heard from REBECCA until now. For me, it’s even better than
“Friends”, and that’s probably because of NOKKO’s mixture of vulnerable and
strong vocals through the song. The gloomy arrangement is also quite nice with
its restrained guitars followed by cold synths in the background. In my
opinion, a true 80s must.
Finally,
here’s the aforementioned video of Ayumi Hamasaki singing “MOON” at “Idol on
Stage” (that video has unfortunately been taken down but here's another one). I must say that, although not a Hamasaki fan, I liked her vocals a lot
(they weren’t flawless, but that’s a positive thing in my world), and would
love to hear an studio version of it. Unfortunately, it’ll not happen.
"MOON" reached #20 on the Oricon charts. Lyrics were written by NOKKO, while music was composed by Akio Dobashi (土橋安騎夫). As for the arrangement, REBECCA was the responsible.
Almost 3 years since I set up "Kayo Kyoku Plus", and even with the "Plus" in there, I had never put up an official Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）entry until now. I did mention her in one article since she did a cover version of a much older song (I think it was an Akina Nakamori hit) but never registered her in officially.
As you would be expecting, I was never all that much of a Hamasaki fan. The majority of her songs never really pulled me in. However, there were a few, most of them being her early ballads that did catch my ear. One of them was her 16th single, "SEASONS" which came out in June 2000.
By 2000, Hamasaki was already the household name for the various music fans who watched programs like "Music Station" or "Countdown TV", when this latest mega-hit came along. In fact, I swear that "SEASONS" was a permanent fixture on the "Countdown TV" charts since I kept seeing that video of her in that black dress walking through a stylized desert over and over again for weeks and months on end. It was too bad that the video was so short, though. And I have to say that the ballad was just my type with the lilting piano and Hamasaki's pleading vocals heading up to the sky.
Hamasaki wrote the lyrics while D.A.I. composed the melody. D.A.I. happens to be Dai Nagao（長尾大）, who at the time was the guitarist for the pop/rock group Do As Infinity. "SEASONS" became the singer's 3rd million-seller and her second-most successful single to date, hitting No. 1 for two weeks in a row. It became the 5th-ranking single for 2000, and helped her get onto the Kohaku Utagassen for the 2nd time.
