Kavka Shishido -- Yakiniku Princess（焼肉プリンセス）

 

For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, I got to meet a whole bunch of old friends for dinner last night. And I know that it's been even longer since I dined at a yakiniku (Korean BBQ) restaurant, but happily enough, we all got to do that at a suburban place just north of Toronto. It wasn't cheap by any means (each of us paid $127 CDN) but it was the good stuff including Wagyu beef. Obviously, I can't do something like this every month but once a year, it's not a bad thing at all.

The place was also all-you-can-eat for two hours so we were engorging ourselves (and I apologize to all of those vegetarians and vegans out there, but I am an omnivore). I was frankly surprised that I could still stuff it in after all these years, but I think that the key was not ordering any rice; instead of that, I was satisfied enough to wrap the meat in leaves of lettuce instead. My stomach was heavier and my wallet was lighter.

On that note, I thought it would be nice to have something thematic here and therefore I managed to find "Yakiniku Princess" (BBQ Princess). This was a song from percussionist-singer-actress Kavka Shishido's（シシド・カフカ）4th single "Wagamama/Miss. Miss Me"（我が儘／Miss.ミスミー...Selfishness） from January 2014. Nothing ironic or allegorical here; it's simply Kavka happily professing her love for yakiniku...all those plates of different cuts of meat in full marinade; just keep it coming, waiter! I can understand her feelings completely. 

Not surprisingly, the music by Satoru Hiraide（平出悟）(and he also took care of the lyrics as well) is full blazing rock and R&B, just like the fire under the grill sizzling them slices up. Incidentally, Hiraide was also responsible for creating "Love Corrida"（ラヴコリーダ）, which is the one other Kavka song that I covered on KKP. The single peaked at No. 52.

I did my fair share of yakiniku back in my Japan days. The only thing that I was missing from last night's carnivore repast was kalbi kuppa（カルビクッパ）, that hearty stew I always loved at the end of a yakiniku session.

Kavka Shishido -- Love Corrida（ラヴコリーダ）

Before TV Japan's schedule got adjusted due to COVID-19, the noon hour broadcasts usually consisted of educational material including language training with celebrities. For the Spanish segment on NHK, it was drummer-singer-actress-model Kavka Shishido（シシドカフカ）as she went to Argentina. Not surprising when I read on her Wikipedia article that she had actually lived in the country when she was 13 and 14 years old. She had also been born in Mexico and learned how to speak Spanish initally, but apparently the ability faded away during her elementary school years in Japan since she couldn't practice the language with anyone there.

A few years earlier, Shishido had co-starred in an NHK morning serial drama "Hiyokko"（ひよっこ）back in 2017. I didn't watch the series regularly (though my parents did) but remember seeing some of the scenes in which the willowy lass literally stood head and shoulders above most everyone else in the cast.

But strangely enough, though, the first time that I can remember seeing Shishido was through the above music video for a promotional single that she had put out back in 2013 titled "Love Corrida"; not to be confused with "Ai no Corrida"（愛のコリーダ）, the Chaz Jankel classic. It looks like all of the occupations that I had put out for her in the first paragraph came to play on varying levels here. She goes absolutely bonkers on the drums, but I noticed that her vocals and perhaps the arrangement for "Love Corrida" had me thinking of a Japanese Gwen Stefani.

Composed by music producer Satoru Hiraide（平出悟）and written by Shishido and SILVA (I wonder if it is that SILVA), "Love Corrida" peaked at No. 7 on Billboard Japan's Hot 100. It was also a track on Shishido's debut album "Kavkanize" from September 2013. On Oricon, the album reached as high as No. 31.