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.
Hello, J-Canuck here! Fireminer is back with a new article on an R&B band that hasn't been on KKP before.
It is difficult for a single blog entry to comprehensively describe the impact of YouTube to overseas fans of Japanese music. Till this point, I still can’t wrap my head around the effort my older brother put into loading up his Gen 2 iPod with Japanese music at a time when you pretty much had to go fishing on P2P servers. But only a few years down the line and things got much easier with YouTube. Just go there and you can enjoy an entire world of Japanese music in full 240p glory.
A good number of my peers were immediately attracted to Japanese hip-hop because of YouTube. They did not belong to the breakdance crew, who were into Crunk anyway. I suppose they were born a bit too late for the Missy Elliot era, so they went with M-Flo and Nujabes instead. In hindsight, their style of atmospheric reggae- and R&B-infused hip-hop truly was the forefather to the modern lo-fi beat music you find everywhere on YouTube nowadays.
The one YouTube music video that overseas fans kept recommending to each other was “Garden” by Sugar Soul (シュガー・ソウル) and Kenji Furuya (降谷建志) of Dragon Ash fame. Little has to be said about Dragon Ash. If you were into Japanese hip-hop at the time, you knew Dragon Ash. Sugar Soul though we had little idea about. They were an R&B trio formed in 1996 by DJ HASEBE (real name: Hasebe Daisuke), vocalist aico (real name: Machida Aiko) and composer Kawabe (real name: Kawabe Kenhiro). Their single Garden was released in 1999 and was arguably their biggest hit to date.
That orchestral backing was just delightful and hankered back to the 90s golden age of hip-hop, when you started to see a lot of crossovers but the music had not been subsumed by the lazy sampling of the bling era. The lyric was inspirational and talked about reaching to a promised land through the fire and turbulence of life. It’s the kind of music that puts spring in your steps.
Sugar Soul would release another four singles and one album before calling it quit in 2001. After giving birth, vocalist aico resumed activity as the singer for the electronic dance unit KAM (カム) in 2010. Sugar Soul reunited in 2018 to commemorate their 20th anniversary and released the EP “UPLOAD”.
After writing about actor Ikko Furuya（古谷一行）and one of his songs yesterday, I was reminded that his son, Kenji Furuya（降谷建志）, was also the vocalist and songwriter for the band Dragon Ash. There were those years in the late 1990s and early 2000s when this hip-hop/rock group frequently showed up on television, especially the music ranking shows.
Several of the comments for the music video of Dragon Ash's 4th single from March 1999, "Let yourself go, Let myself go", took on the glow of nostalgic swooning. I have never been a hip-hop fan myself but I can understand those fans' feelings since I used to see an excerpt of the video on a weekly basis for months, perhaps as much as a whole year. As the thumbnail shot shows, the excerpt was always of Furuya bouncing up and down in that blue hat and winter jacket and/or driving in his beloved Ford Mustang according to the J-Wiki article on the song.
In all honesty, I listened to "Let yourself go, Let myself go" in its entirety for the first time only yesterday since I'd completely forgotten about the band and its magnum opus in the years since then. Again, my knowledge of hip-hop on either side of the Pacific is minimal at best, but I find the song to be one of the more melodic examples of such a song, especially getting near the end. In fact, I was wondering whether "Let yourself go, Let myself go" was burgeoning on becoming a hip-pop ballad.
From what I could understand of Furuya's lyrics, they seem to be about moving forward from a bad time, perhaps judging from the title, the sad end of a romantic relationship. I did pick up on a few phrases hinting at stopping to smell the roses and walk into a better and more hopeful future. "Let yourself go, Let myself go" peaked at No. 4 on Oricon, going Double Platinum and ending the year as the 26th-ranked single. It was also a part of Dragon Ash's 5th album"Viva La Revolution" which was released in July 1999. It hit No. 1 on the charts and became the 13th-ranked album for the year breaking two million copies in sales.
