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 put up a few DAOKO songs up on the blog over the past several months, and I think this particular song is one of her most infectiously catchy pop tunes that I've heard thus far.
In September 2016, DAOKO released her 2nd CD single"Moshi mo Bokura ga Game no Shuuyaku de/Daisuki with Teddyloid/BANG!"（もしも僕らがGAMEの主役で/ダイスキ with TeddyLoid/BANG!...If We Were Main Characters in a Game/I Love You with TeddyLoid）, and that last one has hit my ears with a true bang. Written by the singer and composed by Hideya Kojima（小島英也） of ORESAMA, a band that I've usually associated with anison, that bubbly percussion that launches the song has had me thinking of either Pharrell Williams'"Happy" or Taylor Swift's"Shake It Off". I think the entire song is bubbly enough to be an anime theme. And of course, there just had to be a music video to match the overall bubbliness. By the way, the entire single reached No. 29 on Oricon.
Welcome to Monday! Spring is literally around the corner here and yet the temps in Toronto for much of this week will be hovering merely around the 0-degree Celsius mark. It's rather ironic since this past winter has been called by one of the chief meteorologists in the nation as a non-winter. Ailing ski resort managers may have to agree.
Anyways, singer-songwriter and rapper DAOKO has been someone that I finally posted an article about just last fall; notably, her "ShibuyaK" from 2015. She's done her solo work and collaborated with other artists but last year, she actually got together with four other musicians to form the band QUBIT.
Mind you, it's just the one song so far that I've heard, but it sounds like QUBIT may be more into the cute and bubbly technopop in comparison with DAOKO's rap and dance beats. Still, her "Fast Life" from July 2023 has the singer providing the rap amidst all of the fast-moving bleeps and bloops. There's even some piano jazz percolating away in the last half of "Fast Life". In a way, the song does remind me of the helter-skelter nature of navigating Shibuya on a Friday afternoon or night.
The rest of QUBIT is Seiichi Nagai on guitar, Masato Suzuki on bass, Shohei Arimori on keyboards and Kazuya Oi on drums. DAOKO and Arimori were the creators behind "Fast Life" which I assume is also part of their first album "9BIT" which came out in November 2023.
Never actually heard or saw this anime "Kekkai Sensen"（血界戦線...Blood Blockade Battlefront） adapted from a 2009 manga which is currently into its third series. From what I've read of the premise though, it sounds like a bit like "Men In Black" with a supernatural bent.
The anime adaptation has had two seasons with the second season being called "Kekkai Sensen & BEYOND" that had its run in 2017. I decided to take a gander at how the theme songs came across and I did a full stop at the ending theme and the credits for that second season. One reason is that good ol' Yasuyuki Okamura（岡村靖幸）, one of the funkiest singers to be involved in anison alongside one of the most soulful in Masayuki Suzuki（鈴木雅之）, was back again to help out in a duet with singer-songwriter and rapper DAOKO. I'd written about DAOKO almost a month ago regarding her 2015 debut single"ShibuyaK".
Well, cool and funky is what I'm getting with their collaboration, "Step-Up Love". Released as DAOKO's 4th single in October 2017, both singers worked on the lyrics while Okamura took care of the music and arrangement. A song where the romantic chase seems to be more preferable than the final takedown, "Step-Up Love" has DAOKO and Okamura getting to do what they love best, the former doing her sultry rap while the latter gets to funk it up.
Looks like the song got translated into a dance-off between DAOKO and Okamura in the official music video. MIKIKO, the choreographer behind Perfume's dancing, was also responsible for creating that competition in the basketball court. DAOKO and her ELEVENPLAY group of dancers did their Voguing against Okamura's quintessential funky struts. "Step-Up Love" managed to peak at No. 8 on Oricon. It's also a track on DAOKO's 2nd album as a major act, "Thank You Blue" which came out in December 2017 and got as high as No. 13.
I generally have had a pretty congenial relationship with Shibuya. No, I had already left my adolescence far behind when I first ventured into the Teen Mecca of Japan but even so, I had my favourite places including Tower Records, Tokyu Hands and the old RecoFAN. Plus, there were the nice restaurants up at the top of the Parco Department Store. Mind you, I remember late one night when my friends and I were heading back to Shibuya Station from some outing when we encountered a lot of people in their teens and twenties not dealing with heavy drinking very well and well, let's say, we had to keep our eyes on the ground not to step in anything gloppy.😵
Singer-songwriter and rapper DAOKO is someone that I've heard about in the last several years, but I never used the opportunity to listen to her discography until today. I know that she's worked with funky Yasuyuki Okamura（岡村靖幸）and she made her first appearance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen back in 2018. As such, I decided to go to her beginnings and came across her first major debut when she released a double A-side "ShibuyaK/Samishii Kamisama"（さみしいかみさま...A Sad God） in October 2015.
At first, on seeing the title "ShibuyaK", I'd wondered whether the song would have that Shibuya-kei sheen but actually the song stands for Shibuya Kousaten（渋谷交差点）or the famed huge Shibuya Crossing that a lot of tourists have wanted to visit. Written and composed by DAOKO and Hideya Kojima（小島英也）from the band ORESAMA, there's something very Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）90s in the arrangement that could get listeners swooning about making that trek to one of Tokyo's bubbling neighbourhoods although DAOKO's lyrics describe her seeming love/hate relationship with Shibuya on a few levels. She gives shoutouts to some of the famous emporia in the area such as 109, Forever 21 and Parco but also decries the results of the cheap mass production of commodities.
The single peaked at No. 23 on Oricon. It was also a track on her second major album of December 2017, "Thank You Blue" which went as high as No. 13.
