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.
Last week, there was the news on the death of singer-songwriter Shinji Tanimura（谷村新司）, and now I have to unfortunately report on another departure from this mortal coil of another figure in the Japanese music industry. The announcement was made today on October 24th that the vocalist of the rock band BUCK-TICK, Atsushi Sakurai（櫻井敦司）, had passed away on the 19th from a brainstem hemorrhage during a concert that night. He was 57 years old.
Almost three years ago, I posted an article on BUCK-TICK's first major single"Just One More Kiss" which had been released in October 1988. It would be a little more than a year before their follow-up single "Aku no Hana" (Flowers of Evil) was released in January 1990. Based on "Les Fleurs du mal" by French poet Charles Baudelaire who was apparently a favourite of Sakurai's, the song seems to be the perfect theme for any isolated and angry goth shut-in or a rocking vampire.
Written by Sakurai and composed by guitarist Hisashi Imai（今井寿）, "Aku no Hana" became BUCK-TICK's first and only No. 1 hit although many of their other songs would get into the Top 10, especially in the early to mid 1990s. Selling around 300,000 copies, it would go Platinum and end up as the 52nd-ranked single of 1990. An album also titled "Aku no Hana" was released in February that year which hit No. 1 and became the 20th-ranked album, going Double Platinum.
My condolences go to Sakurai's family, friends and fans. Among the family that he has left behind is his son, Akutagawa Prize-winning author Haruka Tono（遠野遥）.
During my time on the JET Programme, I was helping doing the usual team-teaching in the junior high school and I asked some students who their favourite singer or band was. Miss Fukuda answered "BUCK-TICK". Of course, I've heard about a buck and a tick separately but I never heard them together so I didn't quite understand and when I asked her to repeat a couple of more times, I knew that she was starting to get frustrated as was I, so I let it go.
Ah, BUCK-TICK...so that's who it was. During my two years in Gunma Prefecture, I came to realize how Japanese music was diversifying in myriad ways from the late 1980s. There was R&B to a certain extent (although I think it would take another decade before it finally came to full fruition) along with ska, but it was more about the rock music going into the 1990s and some pretty way out rock music for that matter in both music and presentation. I was seeing some of these bands pop up with some garish makeup and hair that threatened to tickle the stratosphere.
BUCK-TICK was one of those bands, and I guess that there was some regional pride within that student when she answered me since this particular band was born in Gunma Prefecture, specifically from the cities of Fujioka and Takasaki in the southern part of the province (I was situated up in the north, in the Japanese Alps).
Their 2nd single overall and their first major single was "Just One More Kiss" released in October 1988. Written by vocalist Atsushi Sakurai（櫻井敦司）and composed by guitarist Hisashi Imai（今井寿）, according to a 1990 interview in the music magazine "Fool's Mate" via J-Wiki, the latter really wanted to show the worth of BUCK-TICK and whipped the melody up within a day although at the time, he didn't think that this would ever get out as a single. However, with Sakurai's lyrics coming on board as ones for a "decadent love song", Imai gradually got sold on it as a worthy candidate as a single.
Now, as someone who's never been a huge rock fan and as someone who initially saw those rock bands in the late 1980s with a feeling of old-man dread, I have to say that I actually like "Just One More Kiss" thanks to that arrangement by the band and Tsutomu Nakayama（中山努）, especially the refrain. If I hadn't been such a tense stick-in-the-mud back then, I would have been more appreciative of rock back then and maybe my music collection would have been even larger (along with the eventual shipping costs back home). I think that even the sky-high hair as depicted in the music video is actually rather quaint now.
"Just One More Kiss" peaked at No. 6 on Oricon and earned BUCK-TICK a Best New Artist prize at the Japan Record Awards that year, and it was included on the band's 4th studio album"Taboo" which came out in January 1989 which hit No. 1. As for the other members, there are rhythm guitarist/keyboardist Hidehiko Hoshino（星野英彦）, bassist Yutaka Higuchi（樋口豊）and drummer Toll Yagami (ヤガミトール...the older brother of Higuchi).
According to J-Wiki and Wikipedia, the members got together initially in the early 1980s as a band called Hinan Go-Go（非難GO-GO...Criticism Go-Go） while in high school, and apparently they went to the same school as one Kyosuke Himuro（氷室京介）, the vocalist for another rock band BOOWY. In 1985, the group changed their name to BUCK-TICK which is a fanciful way of expressing the word bakuchiku（爆竹）, Japanese for firecracker (yet another mystery has been solved in my mind).
Up to 2020, the band has released 41 singles and 23 albums including their indies output, and has been seen as one of the pioneers for visual-kei. Apparently, they have covered pretty much every form of rock and on J-Wiki, their genres even include Showa kayo.
