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.
Over the years, I've come to believe that there has been a long love affair between France and Japan, culturally and diplomatically speaking. The French seem to have enjoyed manga, anime and cosplay for decades; some of the first anime I saw back in Canada were in French thanks to CBLFT-25. Meanwhile, the Japanese have often gone ga-ga for all of that haute couture and cuisine. I think even the late French president Francois Mitterand once had a dog named Sumo.
Well, the idea was only percolating in my mind over the last several hours but I was thinking for my next Author's Picks, I would bring over some of that kayo kyoku with French titles. But these songs aren't covers of French originals...just tunes whose singers and songwriters thought that a title in French would be c'est si bon. And so, without further ado:
(1981) Circus -- Petit Dejeuner ~ Nichiyoubi no Choushoku（日曜日の朝食）
I can say one thing about singer-songwriter Miharu Koshi（越美晴）. Going through her long discography, she doesn't bore you. Last month, I posted about her techno-polka"Madonna"（マドンナ）from 1991. Of course, as I mentioned there, she's run the gamut of the genres and I'm talking about a wide spectrum ranging from her debut single, the City Pop"Love Step" (ラブ・ステップ）from 1978 to her quirky technopop bop "Hashire Usagi"（走れウサギ）in 1985.
Well, I may have found yet another small niche in her music. Her 5th single was "Tachiiri Kinshi"(Entry Prohibited) from 1980. Written and composed by the singer, my impression of Koshi's music at that time was that she was going for that City Pop sound, but with "Tachiiri Kinshi", I found it more akin to the 50s-esque New Wave sound ofJuicy Fruits（ジューシィ・フルーツ）. Even the cover of the single above in the thumbnail had her looking like she was the leader of an old-fashioned motorcycle gang. Lyrically, the song is about complaining about a woman who's being a huge tease but when things look serious, she puts up the shields.
"Tachiiri Kinshi" was also included in Koshi's 1980 sophomore album"On the Street MIHARU II". It would be interesting what the rest of the tracks sounded on that one.
Whether or not one has a taste for Miharu Koshi's vast and eclectic discography stretched over a variety of genres, one has to admit that she's kept things lively over the decades. It could be her early years from the late 1970s as a bubbly City Pop singer when her name was identified in kanji（越美晴）, and then going deep into the 1980s, she made a hard left intotechnopop, New Wave and maybe even avant-gardism with her name permanently changed into katakana（コシミハル）. Going into the 1990s, she took another turn into something perhaps melding French or European pop and technopop.
Koshi released her penultimate single in February 1991 titled "Madonna" which seems to be a quintessential example of that 1990s sound. Written by Koshi and Kikuhide Sekiguchi（関口菊日出）and composed by the singer, the first half of the song comes across as a happy-as-all-heck circus polka (led by her on the accordion) before the technology begins filtering in and then "Madonna" gets a little more introspective before the marching band returns.
Before anyone might make even the slightest assumption that Koshi was paying some odd tribute to the Material Girl, "Madonna" was actually created for a Suntory brand of wine with that name. The commercial for the wine above, strangely enough, has Tomoyo Harada（原田知世）mouthing the song although I think there is enough of a vocal resemblance between her and Koshi that Harada could have possibly sung "Madonna" on her own. The song was also placed in her 1991 10th album"Chichi to Pistol"（父とピストル...Der Vater und die Pistole） but the album version is simply a very truncated take.
The last time I checked on Koshi, she was doing jazz and/or tributes to German music from the early 20th century. As I said, she hasn't been mundane with her career.
Well, a Happy New Year to everyone out there and welcome to 2023! 新年あけましておめでとうございます。
As would usually be the case in my family, we had the traditional o-zoni（お雑煮）breakfast this morning after the New Year's greetings. Because our ancestors originally hailed from western Japan, our o-zoni have round mochi in a miso soup. Folks in the Kanto area, however, tend to grill square mochi before putting the cakes into a clear soup. I've had both styles but in each case, I'm always careful to chew pieces of mochi well and over several seconds lest I end up a victim of choking. French kissing a vacuum cleaner isn't my idea of enjoying January 1st.
Anyways, getting onto the first business of KKP this year, 2023 is known as the Year of the Rabbit and I've illustrated that with the thumbnail of the cute little bunny at the top of the article. Not that I'm into astrology, but I did manage to find what Rabbit people are supposed to be like from the website Chinese New Year, although the paragraphs below don't tell the whole story:
To outsiders, the Rabbit’s kindness may make them seem soft and weak. In truth, the Rabbit’s quiet personality hides their confidence and strength. They are steadily moving towards their goal, no matter what negativity the others give them.
With their good reasoning skills and attention to detail, they make great scholars. They are socializers with an attractive aura. However, they find it hard to open up to others and often turn to escapism.
A plain and routine life is not their style. Though conservative and careful in their actions, they need surprises every so often to spice things up.
Just to let you know, I'm not a Rabbit but a Snake person, so it'll be a few more years before I commemorate that. However, as the first article for 2023 on "Kayo Kyoku Plus", I thought I would pay tribute to the occasion by putting up some rabbit-themed songs or songs that have something to do with rabbits just for kicks.
Well, it took pretty much the entire decade of time that "Kayo Kyoku Plus" has been in existence, but finally I am able to talk about the album that is known as singer Yui Murase's（村瀬由衣）debut, "W., Morning" from April 1992. Now, just to clarify, that title is the one in fancy typography on the front cover of the CD with the come-hither Murase by the doorway. However, on the spine of the case, the Japanese title is "Suiyoubi no Asa, Mado wo Akeru"（水曜日の朝、窓を開ける...Open Your Windows on Wednesday Morning）.
For years, I was wondering about giving my thoughts on "W., Morning" through a KKP article but finding the tracks on YouTube proved daunting. However, over the years, I was able to find a couple of tracks represented on the platform: the peppy title track and the contemplative "To Each His Own". Now, I've already explained how and why I got Murase's debut album despite not knowing anything about her through those two articles, so have a go over there and find out if you wish. Otherwise, I'm just going to dive into the tracks.
Although when I first got "W., Morning", I wasn't quite as appreciative of the album, I am now fully satisfied that I did get a keeper after all. My general impression at present is that it's spearheaded by a lady who'd had plenty of experience and training as a backup singer before finally getting her own chance behind the lead mike. It was no waste of her talents in the recording booth.
Case in point: Track 7, "Ame no Detail"（雨のディテール...Details in the Rain）. This is a mid-tempo pop song of regret as a man in his office gets mesmerized by the rain spattering on his windows which then makes him remember the romance that he has since lost. Hidetoshi Yamada（山田秀俊）worked on the music and keyboards while Kanata Asamizu（朝水彼方）took care of the melancholy lyrics and Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）arranged everything. There was even a City Pop presence in the form of Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）on guitar. By the way, the information on the various songwriters and musicians comes from Discogs.
"Living in Your Portrait" is the second track, and folks can be forgiven if they first assumed that somehow Tatsuro Yamashita and Mariya Takeuchi（山下達郎・竹内まりや）had something to do with the creation of this groovy and rolling song. I mean, the rhythm and the background chorus just sound so Tats summery, doesn't it? Plus, there's the harmonica solo! Actually, though, the composer was City Pop-turned-technopop ingenue Miharu Koshi（コシミハル）with Asamizu on lyrics once more (and for almost all of the remaining tracks except for "To Each His Own"). Another KKP resident is here with Nobuo Ariga（有賀啓雄）on arrangement, background chorus and bass.
The reason that I finally pulled the trigger on talking about Murase and "W., Morning" is that an uploader finally put up the entire album onto YouTube earlier this summer, and so I'm quite thankful to them. At this point, the other tracks can only be found here, and these are good ones so allow me to plug ahead.
Track 1, "Haru no Arashi"（春の嵐...Spring Storm） is one of the tracks that has stayed in my mind since my purchase of the album back in the early 1990s. A proud power ballad led by piano depicting a declaration of commitment to a relationship no matter the risk of rough seas, Murase shows her vocal chops right from the get-go.
At 9:22 is Track 3"Cool". This is Ariga's own composition and arrangement and it's a dreamier ballad about how grateful a woman is about her husband or boyfriend coming back to her each and every night. Maybe she puts on a slightly tsundere expression but inside she's really quite content. Perhaps the title hints at her surface demeanor but for me, it actually has the spiritual function of bringing the temperature down a few reassuring degrees.
The following song is "Kiss Shite mo Heiki"（キスしても平気...It's Alright to Kiss Me） at 14:24 which is my favourite track on "W., Morning". It's an AOR/pop tune that I enjoy for Yudai Suzuki's（鈴木雄大）relaxing melody with a bit of tropical flavour, and Asamizu's lyrics are about as happy as any romance can get with a couple enjoy the simple pleasures of staying home together on a Sunday. Kunihiko Ryo（梁邦彦）arranged things here as well as handle the keyboards while Nobuo Yagi（八木のぶお）was on the harmonica as he was for "Living in Your Portrait".
Track 8 at 34:10 is "Yasashiku Kizukasete"（優しく気づかせて...Kindly Let Me Know） has Ryo arranging Shin Tanimoto's（谷本新）melody as something that I think is the out-and-out 1990s City Pop track of the album. It even comes with some added trombone by Yoichi Murata（村田陽一）.
Finally at 39:27 is "Yoin ~ Anata ga Soba ni Iru You ni"（余韻 ~あなたが側にいるように~...A Lingering Memory ~ As If You Were By My Side）. The final pop track is about remembering a past love but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of regret and more in the way of fond remembrance. Asamizu, Suzuki and Ryo were in on this one.
"W., Morning" may not have garnered a whole lot of attention in the J-Pop world but I think that Murase's first album is a good collection of songs for those who are interested in the classier side of pop of the early 1990s. At the same time, though, the singer and all those who worked on it have provided a slightly nostalgic bunch of songs reminiscent of the works of female singers in the mid to late 1980s such as Miki Imai（今井美樹）, Akiko Kobayashi（小林明子）and Midori Karashima（辛島美登里）. It's music to enjoy like sipping that latte during Sunday brunch.
As much as I remember the wonderful working partnership between Taeko Ohnuki and Ryuichi Sakamoto（大貫妙子・坂本龍一）of Yellow Magic Orchestra during the early 1980s with their eclectic mixture of synthpop and French-feeling music, I also have in mind another fascinating tandem. That would be the relationship between Miharu Koshi and Haruomi Hosono（コシミハル・細野晴臣）, also of YMO, starting from around 1983 in which Koshi transformed from the good-time City Pop lady into a New Wave gamine, heavy into the synths but with a different aural sensation, more along the lines of Old Europe in general for the lack of a better description.
I found a good representative of that new Koshi sound in the 1980s through "Belle Tristesse ~ Myo naru Kanashimi" (Strange Sadness). This wasn't a part of her albums or singles under her name but it was a track on a November 1983 compilation album by Alfa Records titled "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" produced by the Takahashi Brothers, Nobuyuki and Yukihiro（高橋信之・高橋幸宏）, the latter of whom completes the YMO trio.
The words, music and arrangement were all handled by Koshi and Hosono, and the feeling that I get from "Belle Tristesse" is some sort of weird technopop drama occurring within a toy shop based in Germany or Austria. Perhaps the toys come alive and are now pondering existence...maybe it's an emo version of "Toy Story"? In any case, it's quite the 80s Koshi tune and just from the title alone, I can understand the potential melancholy that can arise in folks around the Yuletide, and after all, it's a common trope in J-Xmas songs.
If "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" is hard to come by, then "Belle Tristesse" can be found as a bonus track in Koshi's remastered CD "Epoque de Techno" which came out in 2009.
Looks like tonight is the night for covering old standards. Earlier, I contributed Shun Sakai's（酒井俊）lovely soulful cover of the original 1934 "For All We Know". Now I've got "Moonray"(1939), a slow swinging composition by the legendary clarinetist Artie Shaw and his orchestra with Helen Forrest singing.
As has been the case with "For All We Know", "Moonray" has had its variety of covers over the years, and surprisingly or not surprisingly, chanteuse Miharu Koshi（コシミハル）has also provided her own cover. I say "surprisingly" since although I knew her for her very early days as a City Pop singer and then her 80s times as an avant-garde technopop artist, I hadn't known about her abilities in the jazz genre. On the other hand though, I also want to add the "not surprisingly" tag because Koshi is someone who has dipped her fingers into different kinds of music, so why not jazz?
There may not be any clarinets playing in Koshi's cover of "Moonray" but the arrangement for the title track of her October 2015 album is wonderfully nocturnal. I have to cite the lovely contrast in the intro between the smoky wood bass being plucked away and Koshi's whispery and high-pitched scatting before she begins singing. Of course, we can't forget the playful tones of the piano and the dapper brushing of the drums. It feels like being in an intimate jazz supper club in the 1950s or 1960s.
This week's Reminiscings of Youth article is the second one to feature the great band Earth Wind & Fire. Of course, the first one I did was the celebratory favourite, "September" which I did, naturally enough, on the 21st of September. And in all likelihood, I will end up doing a few more ROY articles with EW&F over the next several months.
The first time that I heard "After the Love Has Gone", EW&F's July 1979 single, it wasn't on the radio. Actually, it was on a TV show about a radio station..."WKRP in Cincinnati", to be exact. In fact, it's in the above video of a second season episode called "For Love or Money" (go to 22:37...regrettably, the song sounds like it's been largely muffled due to the usual copyright issues), and though I don't really remember the plot for this season opener, I do recollect the scene of poor Bailey Quarters being stood up by Johnny Fever while "After the Love Has Gone" is playing.
I know about Loni Anderson as the beautiful Jennifer Marlowe and how her posters were flying off the shelves while the show was on the air, but I was always drawn to (the just-as-beautiful) Jan Smithers as Bailey, and watching that scene while the EW&F classic was playing really had me wanting to stomp on Johnny for stomping on Bailey's heart.
Although it's been over 40 years since "After the Love Has Gone" was released and that episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati" was broadcast, whenever I listen to this ballad, at least during part of those 4 minutes and change that the song is playing, my memories unearth that particular scene at the radio station. It just seemed like the perfect match between scene and song for a TV show, and in fact, the Wikipedia article for the song mentions about that scene on "WKRP". Apparently, it's also been used by a number of sports teams whenever they lose at home.
And that's the crazy and amazing thing about this song. It's a beautiful and romantic creation about the loss of romance. With those soft horns and strings and the crooning by the vocalists, when I first heard this, I'd thought that it was all about a wonderful courtship between two people when it was actually about the separation of them. Maybe there is something very Japanese about "After the Love Has Gone".
That same Wiki article has plenty of information on the making of the song but suffice it to say that I couldn't imagine Hall & Oates singing "After the Love Has Gone". This is truly my favourite EW&F ballad, and it's truly a masterpiece by David Foster, Jay Graydon (aka Airplay) and Bill Champlin with Maurice White behind the production and main vocals. I'm glad that it got its Grammys.
So, what were three singles that got their release in July 1979 when "After the Love Has Gone" itself was released?
Although it's not always the case, I've often seen television meteorologists in North America as the court jesters of the news teams. They can whip out the quips as readily as the high temperatures and the low pressure systems. Until very recently, I was accustomed to seeing one such fellow on the local CTV affiliate for many years after returning from Japan.
His name is Tom Brown and he was always the giddiest fellow on set. Brown was also in charge of the annual Xmas charity campaign, Toy Mountain, and many was the time that he would do location shoots doing stuff while talking about the weather. The above video had been put up a year or so on YouTube before I returned back to Toronto for good, and though bloopers were rare with Brown, this particular video had a bit of a boo-boo. Happily, the polar bears were alright.
Recently, I've been seeing what is perhaps becoming a bit of a YouTube sensation in the form of a certain weather forecaster on Japan's Weathernews broadcasts. Her name is Saya Hiyama（檜山沙耶）from Ibaraki Prefecture, and her very bubbly personality has made ripples all across the platform although I'm not quite ready to call her the personification of "Plastic Love".
To be honest, I subscribed to the Weathernews YouTube channel some months ago not particularly because I needed to know what the weather was like in Japan that desperately. Instead, without looking at the live broadcast, I have been simply enjoying listening to the weather folks talking away along with the calming music. Perfect while I'm working away at my assignments. Just want to say though that I still love New J Channel.
Now, how does all this talk about weather forecasters on either side of the Pacific come into play for this song? Well, the Weathernews broadcasting day is broken up into various segments with cute names, and the 11 am to 2 pm slot has been called "Coffee Time" (I guess Lunch Time was a tad too pedestrian). And as such, it reminded me of this song by chanteuse Miharu Koshi（越美晴）that I'd been putting on backlog for a rather long time.
Called "Coffee Break" from her 1981 album "Make Up", it sounds like the type of song that would get played on the overnight non-host segments of Weathernews when just the maps would be put up. With lyrics by Yu Aku（阿久悠）and music by Koshi herself, there is a soothing reggae beat accompanying this number that I wouldn't place among her very early City Pop creations but neither would I consider it as being part of the out-there New Wave tunes that she would surprise her fans with a couple of years later. Maybe New Music and pop would be the answer here? I've already put up another track from "Make Up", "Sarigenaku Ginger Ale"（さりげなくジンジャエール）.
Getting back to good ol' Tom Brown, sad to say but he and one other weather veteran on CTV Toronto, Anwar Knight, were let go along with many other employees (including whole radio stations) throughout Canada owned by a certain part of the media industry some weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, viewers and listeners didn't take the news well, and I'm left wondering what is to become of Toy Mountain which was really Brown's baby all these years.
Well, I hope that Tom Brown is doing well in whatever he is doing right now and he's being missed. I will leave you tonight with a video of his appearance as a contestant on CBS' "The Price is Right" game show in the United States. He rather surprised us with that news a few years ago but apparently he and his family were on vacation in Los Angeles when he got to come on down.
Almost 7 1/2 years ago, I contributed an article on this cover of a cute 50s song that I'd never heard called "Good Morning, Mr. Echo". The song that was originally recorded in 1951 by The Jane Turzy Trio (really just Turzy with some overdubbing) sounded like the ideal theme song for a pioneering American morning news show on one of the networks in the early days of television, and this cover was performed by one of the legends of contemporary kayo and his associate, a City Pop singer-turned-technopop diva of the 1980s. Of course, I'm talking Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）...or I should say Harry Hosono Jr....and Miharu Koshi（コシミハル） respectively, and the duo was called Swing Slow.
For the "Good Morning, Mr. Echo" article, I'd mentioned that I would have to eventually get onto talking about the rest of "Swing Slow" which was released in October 1996. Well, I guess "eventually" is about the length of an adolescence or almost twice as long as a long-running TV series reaching rerun-ability status. In any case, apologies.
I'm also...finally...getting onto this since though I have looked through both English and Japanese search engines, there really isn't very much out there at all that talks about "Swing Slow" aside from the fact that it exists. I did find a fellow Blogspot blog called "Spin Easy Time" by Mr. C which did talk about the album in some detail. He posited one observation which has stuck with me: perhaps it's minimalist Shibuya-kei music. Well, let's find out. I certainly did since I used to see this album on the shelves for years at the various CD shops in Tokyo before I finally pulled the trigger and bought it at Recomints at Nakano Broadway years and years ago. The shop has since closed down.
Had no idea about what my ears were going to get into but my eyes were drawn to the cover of what looked like Hosono & Koshi's attempt at a film noir poster. It was something to see the former member of New Music pioneer Happy End and technopop pioneer Yellow Magic Orchestra in darkened profile while Koshi looked absolutely stunning as a Japanese Audrey Hepburn. I wonder whether Harry was going for a bit of Joe Bradley there.
The first song for the above video is "Western Bolero", and considering "Good Morning, Mr. Echo", I'd been expecting this to be another cover of an obscure 50s country-and-western song, but actually this was written and composed by Koshi herself with So-si Suzuki also working on the music. It's sung in French by Koshi and it seems to relate the tale of a taciturn lone-wolf gunslinger on the plain. I don't know enough about boleros to talk from that angle but it does have the languid pace of one, and though the keyboard arrangement seems to take things into the 70s, it feels like Alain Delon riding slowly off into the sunset after dispatching some bad guys on the range.
One of my favourite tracks on "Swing Slow" besides "Good Morning, Mr. Echo" is "I'm Leaving It All Up To You" which mixes in some Lounge with the Western and it has both Harry and Miharu doing another duet.
This track is indeed a cover of the 1957 original by Don Harris and Dewey Terry but I knew that I had heard it somewhere in my childhood, and it was probably from Donny & Marie Osmond. Our family used to watch their ABC variety show on Friday nights. I believe that I did say from the beginning that we were watching quite a few country-variety shows in our much younger years.
As I got deeper into "Swing Slow", I realized that I was getting further into some weird and older territory. I think one comment that I read was comparing some of the music here to the soundtrack for "Twin Peaks", one odd cult favourite from the history of American TV (and it also did quite a number on the Japanese viewing public). Listening to fun if eerie "Disappeared" by Koshi and Suzuki again, there is something beatnik, lounge-y and space-age about the whole experience of this aural film noir of six minutes and thirty-eight seconds, especially with all of the percussion, French accordion and organ. "Disappeared" probably has to be heard in a red-lit room with all sorts of libations starting with martinis. Although there are French lyrics written for this one, they are never sung (at least, not on my copy); instead I believe it's Koshi with those haunting wails. In fact, I'd say that a little over half of the tracks are instrumentals.
The lightly swinging space age weirdness continues with Koshi's "Capybara". Her music is arranged in that Latin lounge style but the beat and her French lyrics sound almost ideal as a children's song. However, she and Yoshiharu Kawaguchi portray a capybara and a caiman respectively as they play a dangerous game of fly and spider. The strange concept reminds me much of what I had to read in Eugene Ionesco's"Rhinoceros" in high school French.
"Voo Doo Surfer" is a purely Swing Slow concoction officially giving tribute in the liner notes to Timothy Leary. It can belong in that "Twin Peaks" lounge or one of the weirder Tex Avery cartoons or even on a Steven Soderbergh"Ocean's Eleven" soundtrack. The guys and gals can be twisting away in their fine clothing to this one.
Swing Slow also help in providing their own unique cover for the traditional song "Yuki ya Konkon" （雪やこんこん）, written as "Yuki-ya-konko" for this album. Not sure what the original songwriter Rentaro Taki（瀧廉太郎）would have said about this version which incorporates the musical themes of "Swing Slow" including some of that synthpop and even a bit of Mancini, but hey, I'm daddy-cool with it!
There are also a few other instrumentals left in "Swing Slow" but I'll leave those to other articles, although hopefully we won't have to wait another seven years and change. But before I finish off, I have yet to answer that question posed by Mr. C above: is "Swing Slow" a minimalist Shibuya-kei album? Well, I think it does skirt that genre to a certain extent (at least enough to include it in Labels), but considering the 1950s spacy influences here and the observation that Shibuya-kei was more about the Bacharach and French pop of the 1960s, perhaps the album is one step parallel to that genre. When I listen to this one-off by Hosono and Koshi, I imagine more along the lines of "Mad Men" sleek suits and dresses more than open shirts with ruffles and velvet blazers. Anyways, have that classic cocktail with this album!
Time for another ROY article and this time, the singer that I'm focusing upon is none other than The Piano Man himself, Billy Joel. I haven't really listened to his material beyond the end of the 1980s so in a way, I guess it can be compared to my feelings on Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）. My period of love for his music was from his beginnings as a solo singer in the 1970s to around the mid-1980s with his album "The Bridge".
In one radio-based retrospective on Joel's career that I heard when I was a university student, the DJ called him a musical chameleon in terms of how he took on a variety of styles of the times and made them his own. Billy did "It's Still Rock n' Roll To Me" as if he were strutting around like Mick Jagger, he took on "Pressure" as a hectic New Wave song, and then there was the entire concept around "An Innocent Man" which paid tribute to the soul and doo-wop of the 1950s and 1960s. But he still had all of those wonderful pop songs of his own style such as "My Life" and "Movin' Out" and "Honesty" which were all over the radio for years and were happily mangled by me at karaoke.😏
However, the first song (and it will just be the first) by Joel that I will feature in this latest Reminiscings of Youth article is "Rosalinda's Eyes" that was "merely" a track on his October 1978 album"52nd Street"when I was just turning 13. Almost half of that album got their own single releases such as "My Life" and "Honesty" but "Rosalinda's Eyes" was not one of them and yet it still got plenty of airplay on radio, and I fell for it, hook line and sinker. It wasn't the first song that I had ever heard by The Piano Man and there are so many of his tunes that I genuinely love, but there has always been something special about this one because of the light and nimble feeling of the Latin-infused melody and just how it always manages to take any edge off a tough day that I go through. Although I never lived in New York City, I seem to get rather nostalgic about sitting on the steps on an old brownstone on a sunny Saturday when I hear it.
Until a while back, I had assumed that Rosalinda was a beloved old flame of the singer but actually, the title was inspired by his mother Rosalind Nyman Joel. If that doesn't make me want to rush out and buy a Mother's Day card several months before the day itself...😭
Anyways, thanks to my recent discovery of the "Showa Pops" website with its long lists of singles released during a certain year, I can at least give three notable tunes that have already gotten their due on KKP another look-see since they debuted in the same month of release as "52nd Street".
Several weeks ago, I put up an article regarding one of the tracks from Miharu Koshi's（越美晴）1980 2nd album "On The Street: Miharu 2", "Tsuioku"（追憶）with its elegant and dreamy arrangement.
Well, I've got another one from "On The Street" called "Up Down", and it's some mid-tempo funkiness from the city although the intro sounds slightly like something that had been concocted by the good folks at Yellow Magic Orchestra. However, although I couldn't concretely track down the songwriters, I'm assuming both words and music were provided by Koshi herself.
But listening to the synthpop-esque intro and the main body of City Pop (which suddenly gets hit with a wave of horns near the end), I'm left wondering whether "Up Down" was a little hint of the transition that Koshi would make a couple of albums later when she went all high-pitch New Wave and technopop with songs like "Keep On Dancin'".
When it comes to City Pop album covers, the one for Miharu Koshi's（越美晴）1980"On the Street ~ Miharu II" is one that stands out. Maybe it's just the way that the singer-songwriter is crossing the road in that white pantsuit. It just seems so disco for some reason although the disco days were pretty much over by then.
I've yet to get this one. The only Koshi albums I have thus far are the ones from her techno/New Wave era onwards although I was able to purchase her "Golden Best ~ RCA Years"BEST album which includes those early City Pop/AOR numbers between 1978 and 1981.
One track that is on both "On the Street" and that BEST album is "Tsuioku" (Reminiscences). Written and composed by Koshi, it has that light bossa in the City Pop with an intro that reminds me of Gino Vannelli and the keyboard Haze effect, that representative sound for 1970s City Pop. "Tsuioku" sounds oh-so-elegant although the lyrics rummage up a scene of a poor embittered fellow walking along the dark pier wondering what went wrong with a past romance. On the bittersweet level, this chocolate has at least 80% cacao in there.
I was listening to the above, Miharu Koshi's（越美晴）"Golden Best" which had been released sometime in 2006, and this single CD Best album has many of her songs in the first part of her career between 1979 and 1981 when she was exploring the City Pop and AOR genres.
One of the tracks on "Golden Best" is "Harbor Light" which was the B-side to Koshi's 1979 4th single"Kardia no Umi"（カルディアの海）. Written and composed by the singer, in comparison with the tropical intrigue of that A-side, "Harbor Light" seems to take things back to downtown Tokyo with its own mysteries of late-night trysts. I do like that bouncy piano and the introductory riff that reminds me of Billy Joel's"The Stranger". The melody, though, kinda weaves back and forth between the not-so-desired secrecy and the best part of the whirlwind romance. However, as they say, all good things come to an end.
Miharu Koshi fans probably already know this, but the above album actually reflects the time when the singer-songwriter turned into a New Wave chanteuse around the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, at this point, this is the only thumbnail photo I could get of her.
Nope, tonight I'm featuring a song from her very early AOR/City Pop days (so the name during this period is in kanji「越美晴」instead of the katakana「コシミハル」 that she's been identified with for years). In fact, this is her 2nd single, "Kimagure Highway" (Whimsical Highway) from March 1979.
Written and composed by Koshi, it starts with a Scott Joplin-esque piano tootle before a warm and honeyed guitar takes things into a happy road-trip type of City Pop. Koshi relates the story of a couple who may be taking that drive anywhere (out of the city, around the city, through the city) just for the equivalent of a one-night stand, but that's OK with them. They just want to cram in as much fun as possible during the evening.
Koshi's bouncing off the piano is ever-present but I also love the sunset strings. "Kimagure Highway" contrasts with her first single"Love Step" from the previous year in that I've always seen that song as something quite Junko Yagami-ish and firmly planted in downtown. This second single takes the happy couple outbound.
Got to hear both sides of this 1981 single by Miharu Koshi（越美晴）so I decided to put my thoughts down about it. Perhaps it can be seen by her fans as a turning point in the singer-songwriter's early part of her career.
Side A,"Sarigenaku Ginger Ale" (Casually Drinking My Ginger Ale) is a classic City Pop number. There are those certain keyboards, horns and guitar adorning Koshi's breathy vocals about a woman thinking that things aren't completely set as far as her romantic relationship is concerned. That's fine, Miharu...some of that Canada Dry will be great for settling your stomach; it worked for me. Lyricist Yu Aku（阿久悠）and composer Shunichi Tokura（都倉俊一）worked on what was probably her final single before she made that change from City Pop princess to technopop diva a few years later. And both Aku and Tokura had been responsible for a number of Pink Lady's（ピンク・レディー）hits in the 1970s.
Side B, "Pocket Ippai no Love Song" (Pocket Full of Love Songs) is an interesting one since it goes a bit technopoppy which makes me wonder whether this was one hint for Koshi that perhaps she could explore this genre a little deeper. Even her vocals here seem to be making that transition into something higher and lighter although I can still hear the deeper tones that characterized her first City Pop phase. Aku also provided the lyrics for "Pocket Ippai no Love Song" but Koshi was the one behind the melody this time.
Both sides also made it onto her 3rd album, "Make Up" from 1981. The following album "Tutu" from 1983 would see Koshi embrace that New Wave aesthetic.
Far back in 2014, contributor nikala was kind enough to contribute her playlist of techno kayo songs (aidoru edition) consisting of a number of different artists. When I looked through her list again, I realized that I had yet to put in my own choices when it came to technopop tunes from Japan, and that is rather ironic, since although I grew up with a lot of enka and Mood Kayo (though I didn't know of the genre names at the time), the first two genres that I got into when I fully embraced my love of Japanese pop music in 1981 were indeed aidoru (thanks to Seiko and Naoko) and technopop (thanks to Yellow Magic Orchestra). And yet, I hadn't even put up a list of my favourite digital ditties on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" in the past 6+ years, although there are hundreds of entries in the Techno category.
Well, that ends this weekend. As I was mulling over my choices over the past day and night though, I realized that this would be a challenging endeavour. Such was the difficulty and plethora of choices that I've decided to split my favourite technopop tunes into two parts. In both parts, I haven't bothered to order the songs in any particular way; just throwing them out there. And considering that all of my choices have gotten their own articles already, I won't give any long descriptions. I am merely providing the ones that have stuck in my brain all these years.
Marcos V. had introduced "Night Flight" to me through his own article on the technopop trio and this earworm. It has so thoroughly dug under my meninges that for all intents and purposes, "Night Flight" is the representative song for Perfume in my ears and eyes. There is so much of that spirit of YMO and perhaps even Kraftwerk imbued into Yasutaka Nakata's（中田ヤスタカ）work that I'm hoping that royalties didn't become an issue.
Before "Rhythm And Police" came out as the classic opening theme for Fuji-TV's"Odoru Dai Sosasen"（踊る大捜査線）, the typical theme song for a police drama in Japan probably would have taken on the form of some downtown funk, perhaps heavy with bass. Then, Akihiko Matsumoto came along and created an eccentric technopop piece based on a Mexican song "El Cascabel" of which one copy is now floating with a group of other sounds on a probe heading out of the solar system. Nowadays, whenever police cars pass by through Tokyo with sirens a-blazing, pedestrians will probably hear this song instead.
Had no idea about Koshi's past as a New Music/City Pop diva in the 1970s. "Hashire Usagi"（走れウサギ）was my first exposure to the weirdly wonderful world of Miharu Koshi in her techno mode. This particular entry was quite perfect to describe the urgent run of a rabbit through the forest, and this would be my most representative song by her during this period.
"Rokubanme no Yu-u-u-tsu"（６番目のユ・ウ・ウ・ツ）is probably the first techno rock/New Wave song that I heard from Japan, and it would take fashion chameleon and envelope-pusher Kenji Sawada to pull this off. After first seeing his performance on the Kohaku Utagassen, I heard it on "Sounds of Japan" and liked the original version even more. Maybe there were those in the audience in NHK Hall on December 31st 1982 who glared and squinted at the spectacle of New Wave Sawada, but those space-age synths did it for me.
Even before I boarded my Air Canada flight to head to Tokyo for my long second odyssey as an English teacher, trf's "Boy Meets Girl" was one of a large tapeful of songs that had garnered my attention. You might say that it served as my musical introduction to my 17 years as an Ichikawa resident. I hadn't known at the time that it was serving as the campaign song for Coca-Cola but "Boy Meets Girl" certainly had the high-octane caffeine energy to match. The Komuro Boom was on its way.
This is still one of my favourite Japanese technopop songs and it's created by YMO's Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）. I've told Marcos once before that I couldn't tell the difference between drum n' bass and electroclash, and so I wouldn't know what "Kinokhronika" would be categorized as (it apparently means "newsreel"). It's still cool as heck, though, and the song could probably tell some sort of suspense tale among its beats.
As I mentioned in the original article, this is the first Akina song that I ever heard, again thanks to "Sounds of Japan" and the 1983 Kohaku Utagassen. Furthermore, "Kinku" may be the first techno aidorutune that I have heard, now that the bloops and bleeps by Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）are now well buried in my brain. When I compare "Kinku" with the other aidoru hits of the time, I realize that this does really stand out since it is a nifty technopop take on Akina's early misunderstood teen persona singles.
You may be wondering why I haven't put in any Yellow Magic Orchestra in here. Well, that's for Part 2 and that will have a slightly different format due to my prior consternations about what to choose. Hopefully, that list will be on the blog as early as tomorrow afternoon.
Within the last few minutes, I just finished an article on Miharu Koshi (コシミハル) as the New Wave gamine as she sang the rather bizarre "Petit Paradis". Therefore, to serve as comparison to that later 80s technopop incarnation of her, I give you her first version (as 越美晴) when she was the City Pop princess somewhat similar in tone to Junko Yagami（八神純子）.
Case in point, here is her 4th single from 1979, "Kardia no Umi" (Sea of Kardia). I've seen this video on YouTube fairly often but never got to profile it until tonight. Listening to it, quite the comparison can be made with what the aforementioned Yagami was singing at about the same time which was music with this dynamic Latin fervor. It would also fit in with the small boom in kayo kyokuthat was also happening involving songs taking the listener to foreign lands. If I'm not mistaken, the Kardia in the title refers to some region near Greece. And I gotta say that Ms. Koshi was looking rather glamourous on the cover of the 45" there....it could have been taken right on a balcony overlooking the Aegean.
Mike Myers from "Saturday Night Live" fame may have become internationally famous for being Wayne Campbell from "Wayne's World" and as the titular swinging secret agent from the "Austin Powers" franchise, but he also had another memorable character in Dieter, the host of "Sprockets", a TV show that folks like us in North America imagine to be the regular fare on German TV. Who among us SNL fans can forget Dieter's famous sign-off of "Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!"?
I can't help but feel that Miharu Koshi's (コシミハル) video of "Petit Paradis" would have been the perfect inclusion in an episode of "Sprockets"...and I think the video was actually on a German TV show from what I saw. With that strange circus-like melody, Koshi's high-falutin' vocals in English and that over-the-top New Wave-y makeup, it wouldn't take much for Dieter to utter his famous compliment "You are so beautiful and angular, Miharu!" And strangely enough, he'd be right.
Nope, "Petit Paradis" is not one of my favourite tracks on her 1983 album"Tutu" which served to be a re-debut of sorts for Koshi as this New Wave gamine after her previous incarnation as a City Pop princess from the late 1970s. And yet, that video can still be rather magnetic. Plus, kudos to her for taking such a huge leap into a new musical direction.
Now, if you like, you can take a look at how she used to be here.
Well, maybe this article will be the final one for my running gag of wordplay titles over the past few days. I've done a couple of songs under the title of "Summer Blue", there is the immediately preceding article on "Rhapsody In Blue" by DA PUMP, and now I finish with "My Blue Summer".
Also I wanted to provide a bit more of Miharu Koshi's material back when she was 越美晴 with her Latin-infused New Music before she metamorphosed into avant-garde コシミハル. So far, most of my blog entries for Koshi have dealt with her post-metamorphosis output (the only exception thus far being "Love Step"), so allow me to provide a bit more balance by bringing in her 3rd single, "My Blue Summer" from 1979.
As was the case with "Love Step", her debut single, "My Blue Summer" was written and composed by Koshi, and has that dynamic Latin beat with the singer's voice in a lower register compared to the vocal style she would use when she went techno in the early 80s. I'm not sure if the song ever got onto an original album, but it is on that compilation album of her New Music years with RCA, "Miharu Koshi - Golden Best".
