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 think as much as 1970s City Pop had certain distinctive arrangements and sounds (the keyboard haze effect) and the 1980s version also had their own fascinating tones (the sparkling mineral water glissando), there is also something about the 1990s version. And yes, I know that there will be some who disagree that the final decade of the 20th century in Japan had City Pop especially with the economic downturn there but I can't deny that there was rich urban contemporary music happening. The music industry including certain singers and producers probably didn't get the memo from Parliament or the stock exchanges.
For me anyways, there was that certain big brassiness and especially sparkly synthesizers that marked that time. Maybe the Bubble had burst, but musically in some corners, it was still living life large in the big city. Time to hit the New York Grill for dinner? Sure, let me dust off my VISA Gold!
Anyways, that's the buzz I get from Yurie Kokubu's（国分友里恵）"Dear~How To Love You", the first track from her 4th album, "Do You Love Me?" from August 1991. Written by her old bandmate from SHAMBARA, Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）, and composed by Hitoshi Haba（羽場仁志）, it starts out innocently enough but then the horns rev up and we're off to West Shinjuku for that medium-rare steak. And yep, the brassiness and sparkle are there. Plus, Kokubu seems to be really exercising those golden vocals more than ever.
All those years ago, it was through the above video featuring Macross 82-99 and Yung Bae's Vaporwave or Japanese Future Funk"Selfish High Heels" that I discovered the joys of Kaoru Akimoto's（秋元薫）original "Dress Down". But I did wonder about how that particular title for the Macross and Yung Bae collaboration came about. I had simply figured that it was some mashing of words in that surreal meme and Vaporwave style.
But eventually I did get my "Cologne" from 1986 and so I discovered that "Selfish High Heels" was the translation for one of the track mates of "Dress Down", "Wagamama na High Heel". Written by Akimoto and composed/arranged by Yuji Toriyama（鳥山雄司）, it's quite the funky and high-stepping boogie about a woman who intimately knows Party Central territory and its residents and every night is a great night. Maybe it's the City Pop version of "Barbie" the movie in five minutes.
Well, it's been even longer between SHAMBARA postings. The last article that I wrote about this City Pop supergroup with Tetsuo Sakurai/櫻井哲夫 (bass) and Akira Jimbo/神保彰 (drums & percussion) from Casiopea and vocalists Yurie Kokubu（国分友里恵）and Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）was for their "Aquarium no Tokai"（Aquarium の都会）back in the spring of 2021.
No worries here though since I've got them back with another banger of a track from their "Shambara" album from 1989. "Take Me Higher" is another pleasurable strut down Chuo-dori in Tokyo. Written by Akimoto and composed by Jimbo, it not only takes me back to the dance music of the 1980s but also makes me wonder about those Bubble Era years. The crazy thing is that "Take Me Higher" reminds me of Robbie Nevil's"C'est La Vie" from 1986, another supremely catchy hit.
It's been a few years since I've had City Pop songstress Yurie Kokubu（国分友里恵）up on the byline so welcome back to her. In fact, the last such article was back in 2019 for her "Easy Love".
I can hear that Kokubu was still applying her chops to the brassy champagne-and-caviar sights and sounds of late 1980s and early 1990s City Pop. Such is the case with her song "Watashi ni Dake Forever" (Forever Only to Me) which is a part of her September 1990 album"Silent Moon". Written by her fellow City Pop chanteuse and SHAMBARA bandmate Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）and composed by Hitoshi Haba（羽場仁志）and Masaki Iwamoto（岩本正樹）, has got those fine tight horns and background chorus while Kokubu exercises that wonderful boomer voice of hers.
A 2014 reissue of "Silent Moon" included "Easy Love" as a bonus track although it was also a track on Kokubu's 1983 debut album"Relief 72 Hours".
It's been almost seven years since I featured any of the tracks on Kaoru Akimoto's（秋元薫）1986"Cologne", probably seen as one of the pillars for City Pop collectors thanks to "Dress Down". I've already got that covered along with "Narcissist" (ナルシスト).
"Kyou wa Hitorikiri" (Just Me Today) is a track from Side B of the original LP and it's a slightly more contemplative but no less groovy song. Written by Akimoto and composed by Kenjiro Sakiya（崎谷健次郎）, I do love the thrumming from the bass synth and the measured pacing of the tune. It's just like a solo stroll in the city on a Sunday evening.
There are still seven more tracks on "Cologne". I'll have to see about finishing off the rest of the album in one fell swoop soon enough. I'm just realizing that I covered "Dress Down" a few years before the whole City Pop boom around the world started up. Quite ironic considering that I've always considered myself a late bloomer.
For my final song tonight, I realize that I haven't put up a SHAMBARA song recently. For those unfamiliar with these folks, it is a fusion group in personnel and genre, with Tetsuo Sakurai/櫻井哲夫 (bass) and Akira Jimbo/神保彰 (drums & percussion) from Casiopea, two vocalists Yurie Kokubu（国分友里恵）and Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）plus musicians Nozomi Furukawa（古川望）and Kunihiko Ryo（梁邦彦）to round out the band.
I've already written about a couple of tracks from their 1989 album"Shambara", the funky "Solid Dance" and the much mellower "Lovin' You". Well, this one is somewhere in between the two in terms of overall tempo, and "Aquarium no Tokai" (Aquarium City) takes things into another direction. There's more of a light tropical rum punch vibe and a feeling of taking that well-needed vacation down into the Caribbean, and at this time, I'm sure that a lot of people would love that cruise right now (apparently, Royal Caribbean will be setting sail again in a few months).
Not sure if I will ever be able to acquire "Shambara" but this one sounds very worthy just from the variety of songs that I've heard so far from this City Pop/AOR supergroup.
Well, it's been a while but maybe for Hump Day Wednesday, we can bring on some SHAMBARA.
Around 3 1/2 years ago, I introduced this City Pop/AOR supergroup consisting of members from fusion band Casiopea (カシオペア) and vocalists Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）and Yurie Kokubu （国分友里恵）along with instrumentalists Nozomi Furukawa（古川望）and Kunihiko Ryo（梁邦彦）. The band lasted for perhaps a year or so but it was quite a ride on their lone album "Shambara" from 1989.
I remember putting up the catchy-as-all-heck"Solid Dance"and just marveling that Akimoto and Kokubu were singing together with a part of Casiopea backing them up. Well, the track following "Solid Dance" cools things down significantly to a slow dance. "Lovin' You" is interesting in that it begins with a piano solo that feels like it's going into a certain ballad style but then suddenly the synths come in to take things into a different love song direction.
No matter though. "Lovin' You" is gentle and soulful and it sounds so 1980s. It would have been quite the thing to have heard this at my university prom since I graduated right in that year of 1989. Listening to it would have been so easy...finding the date was the hard part. However, the song is something that can be appreciated at any time of the day.
Kaya Saeki（佐伯伽耶）was a singer that I had encountered purely by accident several years ago on YouTube, and I liked her urban contemporary material so much that I decided to cover both the A and B songs for her debut single "Perfume wo Nokosenai"（パフュームを残せない）from October 1994.
Deep in the backlog, I found out that I'd put a bookmark on her 2nd single as well, "Pretty Please" which was released about a year later in October 1995. From an article about that single on another blog, the cover of the single with Saeki had me wondering whether she had decided to take a different direction with her music since she looked more like a sexy pop singer along the lines of Ryoko Shinohara（篠原涼子）at the time.
However, from reading the blogger's description and listening to the song itself, "Pretty Please" keeps things to that late 1980s City Pop feeling with perhaps a bit of Keizo Nakanishi（中西圭三）brightness. Perhaps urban contemporary music wasn't all that much in the ascendant in the 1990s so it was nice to know that there were folks like Saeki and Masayuki Suzuki（鈴木雅之）still providing some of that smooth and groovy music for painting the town red. Saeki herself provided the lyrics while Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）...yes, the "Dress Down" singer herself...composed "Pretty Please".
A small brainwave went through my head just now. I was just thinking about all those examples of sophisticated urban music or champagne pop by female singers from the late 80s into the early 90s that I had already written about. One prime example is Chikaco Sawada's（沢田知可子）"Aitai"（会いたい）which was released in June 1990, and I remember it as being the ending theme for the late-night TV Asahi program "Tonight". Somehow, my feeling is that the producers of all those talk/variety shows past midnight must have thought they had found a gold mine of wonderful music for night owls to head to slumberland to.
Well, I'm not sure whether these two songs by Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）were ever used as theme songs for those late-night shows, but if they hadn't, they should have. "Hitomi ni Utsushite"(Reflecting in My Eyes) was only Akimoto's 2nd single (released in 1991), years after her debut of "Paradox"（パラドックス）in 1985. And for those folks who haven't immediately picked up on the name, she's the "Dress Down" lady that has become the darling for Vaporwavers and Future Funksters everywhere. "Dress Down" was a track on her only album"Cologne" and that came out in 1986.
Written by Emiri Emily（エミリー絵美里）and composed by Akimoto, "Hitomi ni Utsushite" is a romantic urban ballad worthy of backing that couple taking that close-to-midnight half-sleepy/half-giddy stroll before retiring for the night. I love Masaki Iwamoto's（岩本正樹）arrangement here with those strings and champagne synths, and as much as I love her earlier "Dress Down" as one of the anthems for fans who have discovered 80s urban Japanese pop in the last few years, I think Akimoto's voice is even better here.
I did mention that I thought "Hitomi ni Utsushite" should have been a theme song for a late-night talk show. Well, apparently, it was actually used as the commercial song for the GEOS Language School. I guess English teachers needed a cool urbane theme, too.
The coupling song for "Hitomi ni Utsushite" is "Sayonara no Toiki" (Goodbye Sigh), which this time was written and composed by Akimoto with Iwamoto again handling arrangements. The song also has that sparkly bright-lights-big-city feeling of the 1990s with maybe a hint of 1950s pop balladry included. There is also that feeling of soaring high over Tokyo in the clear night sky as this is being sung.
The above information was gleaned from the site of this Japanese blogger who specializes in talking about the old 8cm CD singles, and he mentions how mystified he is about the fact that this lovely singer released her material very sparsely. I also wonder myself. Akimoto wasn't quite as Greta Garbo as Takako Mamiya（間宮貴子）but with that voice of hers, it's only a pity that she wasn't all that prolific, or as prolific as her admirers had wished her to be.
In any case, if I had purchased this single years ago, I probably would have first played it on my ancient Sony Discman as my head hit the pillow. Ah, incidentally, that blog which I mentioned in the previous paragraph is titled "Ushinawareta Media ~ 8cm CD Single no Sekai"（失われたメディア-8cmCDシングルの世界-...The Lost Media ~ The World of 8cm CD Singles）. My respects to the author.
There was a spoken intro on some ancient TV show about there being a million stories out there in the city. Well, in my beloved hobby, I've come across quite a few stories myself as we have worked on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" as we approach our 5th anniversary.
But first some prelude. During my short walk through YouTube last night, I encountered another one of those Future Funk creations by Macross 82-99 with Conscious Thoughts titled "Idol Talk Pt. II". Sometimes I give these videos a shot since I have heard some pretty good Japanese City Pop through all the remixing, and that was certainly the case back in the summer when I discovered Cindy's "Watashi Tachi wo Shinjiteite"（私達を信じていて）through an Artzie Music video.
Lightning struck again! I found the song being kneaded and molded in the Macross remix to be quite cool so I started searching. And it didn't take too long before I found out that the original was "Solid Dance" by the group SHAMBARA.
Perhaps I should say supergroup here since the band consisted of folks from the realm of J-Fusion and City Pop. There were two members from the legendary fusion group Casiopea (カシオペア), Tetsuo Sakurai/櫻井哲夫 (bass)and Akira Jimbo/神保彰 (drums & percussion), joined by two lovely vocalists, Yurie Kokubu（国分友里恵）and Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）who have given their contributions to the Japanese form of urban contemporary during the 1980s, and the latter lady has even had one of her own songs made into a popular Macross 82-99piece. Nozomi Furukawa（古川望）and Kunihiko Ryo（梁邦彦）rounded out SHAMBARA on guitar and keyboards respectively. Although I have only heard the one song by the band so far, it seems like Sakurai and Jimbo wanted to go for a more active and funky sound.
I don't know about the dance in "Solid Dance" but the song is solid. You've got these funky musicians and songbirds putting out this tune that rather screamed out Bubble Era Tokyo just before the bubble did inevitably burst. There is the fat bass, the champagne synths and the wonderful shared vocals by Kokubu and Akimoto for a musical trip through the nighttime megalopolis.
The track which may have been whipped by the two fellows from Casiopea (couldn't track down the information on words & music) was put onto SHAMBARA's first and, I assume, only self-titled album from 1989.
As for the story part, I got this from the J-Wiki article on the band which dealt virtually with just some of the sturm und drang that accompanied the birth of SHAMBARA. Supposedly, Sakurai and Jimbo had been having some differences in opinion in terms of the direction of the band with the rest of the Casiopea members for some time so when they decided to start up this SHAMBARA project in 1988, there was resistance from those members. At the time, Casiopea had just decided to take a break from performing but its leader and guitarist Issei Noro（野呂一生）along with keyboardist Minoru Mukaiya（向谷実）believed that the continuation of SHAMBARA would lead to some problems in getting Casiopea back up and running so they demanded that Sakurai and Jimbo cease and desist. But the conclusion was that the two decided to leave the band permanently (although according to the Casiopea J-Wiki article, it looks like Jimbo at least mended fences as a current support drummer). Usually I'm not too crazy about airing dirty laundry on these pages but it was interesting on how the band got started. Still, if any of the members do read this article and disagree with what I've translated above, please let me know.
However for all that, the life of SHAMBARA didn't last that much longer. In 1990, Sakurai and Jimbo decided to bring things back to fusion but instead of heading back to Casiopea, the duo created another unit called Jimsaku (ジンサク) which lasted for 8 years. From what I've read, the album "SHAMBARA" is about as rare as one can get since any production has been discontinued.
Another one of my purchases was the above CD, "Cologne" by Kaoru Akimoto（秋元薫）. I had already written about one famous track, "Dress Down" , late last year and at the time, I mentioned that "Cologne" would probably be another one of those rarest-of-the-rare discs to track down. Well, strangely enough, the album was re-mastered into CD format and started selling not too long ago. Opportunity not only knocked but threw a battering ram into my door.
I took an initial listen to "Cologne" a couple of days ago and though my first impressions were of the "wait and keep listening" variety, the tracks were pleasant enough so that I haven't regretted plunking down the yen for this one. Case in point: the first full track of "Narcissist". The first half of this fairly urgent and urban song was rather run-of-the-mill until the guitar came in midway and Akimoto did a nice change in key for some seconds.
Akimoto wrote the lyrics for "Narcissist" (as she did for all of the tracks on "Cologne") about a young woman who is always painting her face and the town red but feels hollow and scared inside. Singer-songwriter Kenjiro Sakiya（崎谷健次郎）came up with the nighttime melody. It's not quite as champagne synth-happy as "Dress Down" but considering the lyrics, perhaps happy synths were not the thing here. Sakiya also provided backing vocals on the album along with one other fellow whose star was about to ascend, Toshinobu Kubota（久保田利伸）.
It's been pretty interesting how folks caught an episode of Seth MacFarlane's prime time cartoon "American Dad", came across Stan Smith's reference to future Japanese funk (which was actually Perfume's technopop"Monochrome Effect") and then look up the genre on YouTube. By the comments, it sounds as if an entire fresh new world was opened to them.
One of those examples is the topic of my entry here. I've seen Kaoru Akimoto's（秋元薫）lovely visage on YouTube for some time now but didn't try out any of her videos until very recently. "Dress Down" is one title that stuck out in my mind so it was naturally the first one for me to play. And yep, it's a winner for me. The arrangement has all that synth-driven fizzy flavour of downtown champagne pop which seemed to occupy one corner of the kayo/J-Pop universe during the mid to late 80s. As soon as I heard it, I started thinking of another couple of similar chanteuses, Keiko Kimura（木村恵子）and Takako Mamiya（間宮貴子）. Akimoto, by the way, wrote the lyrics while Akihiko Matsumoto（松本晃彦）took care of the music.
And like those two lovely ladies, it would seem that finding an album by Akimoto will truly be a hunt for rare treasure. Apparently it's not easy to track down her sole release of "Cologne" from March 1986 on the usual sites although she's gained some new fame thanks to YouTube. There is a J-Wiki article on the singer but very little information has been added onto it. From what I could glean, Akimoto started her music career through a band shortly after entering high school in Miyagi Prefecture, and then continuing during her years at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo by participating as part of the backup chorus for Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）at her concerts. She released her first single in 1985, "Paradox" which became the opening theme song for the anime OVA for "Fire Tripper" before releasing "Cologne". In 1989, she and members of the fusion band Casiopea formed a vocal unit called Shambara, and into the 90s, Akimoto decided to become a lyricist for other singers.
