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.
Since I first heard LUVRAW through the episodes of the wild n' zany anime "Space Dandy"（スペース☆ダンディ）with its great set of music, there was something that hooked me about this fellow with his vocoder/talkbox.
There's surprisingly not any J-Wiki article on LUVRAW or even a website dedicated to him (if anyone knows, let me know). And apparently he's got a partner-in-crime named BTB. So, perhaps LUVRAW & BTB are kinda like Chage & Aska in name....and kinda like Daft Punk in sound.
What I could find out was that their first album came out in 2010, "Yokohama City Breeze", and I've been in thrall to one of the tracks, "Dori Summa" which is that hard-to-categorize melange of music that I also like in a song. LUVRAW & BTB have been listed as an electronica duo but through "Dori Summa", I can hear some of that old-style funk and perhaps some City Pop in there, too. I'd say that there was old and new in this track, and it's darn tasty and catchy.
Perhaps if we go with the title of the album, "Dori Summa" would be a nice song to enjoy while driving with the top down over the Yokohama Bay Bridge.
At the beginning of the year, I started talking about the music attached to the zany anime, "Space Dandy". The show has already garnered a lot of attention from the way-out stories and the wackadoodle situations that the crew of the Aloha-Oe end up in. But it seems like the music has also played a good part in the show's popularity. There are the super funky theme songs,"Viva Namida" by Yasuyuki Okamura（岡村靖幸）, "X-Jigen e Yokoso"（Ｘ次元へようこそ） by Etsuko Yakushimaru（やくしまるえつこ）, and the one song that first got me thinking about the music placement for "Space Dandy", the smoothly soaring "Hoshikuzu no Pipeline"（星屑のパイプライン）by Junk Fujiyama.
I just saw the recent episode for the 2nd season which was a seeming tribute to "Glee" and "High School Musical", and although the songs in there were more parody (as they were supposed to be) than actual singles to be released, the dedication of the producers to the additional music had me thinking back to the final episode of the 1st season, "Sōjiki Datte Koisuru Jan yo"（掃除機だって恋するじゃんよ...Even Vacuum Cleaners Fall In Love）.
That episode was about one of the crew, the robot QT, falling in love with a coffee maker. The story reminded me of the plot for the Pixar movie, "WALL-E"; there, I remember Louis Armstrong's version of "La Vie En Rose" following the cute little robot. And just like that movie, there was music following a robot in love in that final episode of "Space Dandy". However, instead of the old-style jazz of "La Vie En Rose", it was a slow-groove techno ballad that accompanied QT and his first love, Maker (at around 8:50 of the episode at the link below).
At first, I thought "Holy Cow! Those guys actually got Daft Punk to perform!" Uh-uh, nope. It was actually a unit called LUVRAW that came up with "ANATATO"(With You), a song that not only reminded me of the French techno duo but also some of the R&B love songs that I used to hear back in the 70s & 80s. I've tried to look up any information about the unit, and he/they have a Twitter account (@LUVRAW), but there isn't much. I've gleaned that LUVRAW has been around since at least 2010 with a couple of albums out, and the unit's weapon of choice is the talk box. Below is another example of their music.
As for "ANATATO", it can be found on the official soundtrack for "Space Dandy". Have a listen to this one at night with the lights down low....except for a lamp on your vacuum cleaner. It looks like no matter what kind of mayhem QT ends up for the remainder of the series, his theme song will always be this one for me.
