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.
Yesterday on "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）, the episode's theme was on flower-titled kayo kyoku. That did get me to thinking...as I recall, there have been quite a few such songs that I've remembered over the decades, so I've decided to provide my own short list. My list kinda breaks out a little more widely although the first entry here was also included on the program's own list. Anyways, without further ado:
I may have been less than a year old when the original "Mission: Impossible" series came on CBS in September 1966, but my earliest television memories are the opening credits montage sequence, the tape recorded message and Jim Phelps looking over who was going to be in on this week's mission. Oh, of course, there was also the theme song by Lalo Schifrin for which my mother told me with no lack of mirth that I had a very visceral reaction. Apparently, I was bouncing in my Pampers when that iconic theme came on, but I guess even back then, I had an ear for the coolest tunes.
And so for this week's ROY article, I'm going with another beloved American lawman show theme to join the themes from "Dragnet" and "Peter Gunn". But unlike those articles which had the avant-garde group Art of Noise do their cover versions, I'm sticking with the original Schifrin version. Indeed, it is one of the most recognizable themes on television no matter the nation and as soon as one hears it, I'm sure that those famous repeated scenes, mask-ditching, espionage derring-do...and Tom Cruise come to mind, although for nostalgia's sake, so do Peter Graves and Martin Landau.
These pieces of information haven't appeared on the Wikipedia article for the song, so I'm wondering if they are apocryphal. However, one piece is that Schifrin had actually originally created the theme as background music for a particularly intense scene in an episode of "The Man From UNCLE", another 60s spy show; Schifrin was involved with at least a few of the episode scores. The other trivia point is that the "Mission: Impossible" theme was played presumably once on ABC's "American Bandstand", that popular music-and-dance show hosted by Dick Clark, only for things to come to a screeching halt because the kids couldn't figure out how to dance to it.
Ah, yes. Tom Cruise. There was the late 1980s return of the series on ABC with Graves once more which started out well but petered out (no pun intended) fairly quickly. However, I was in Japan when Paramount Pictures decided to bring "Mission: Impossible" to the big screen with the actor who would become the world's most famous stunt man with the first of the movie franchise coming out in 1996. Even though I was no longer bouncing around on my butt in the theatre, it was still a thrill to catch the trailer with the famous catchphrases and the original Schifrin theme. When I first saw the movie, though, I had to admit to some disappointment since the production team decided to break two M:I commandments: they killed off the team, making Ethan Hunt the overarching one-man IMF team with a few recruits helping out here and there; plus, they made Jim Phelps a bad guy. In the quarter-century since that first movie, though, I've been much more accepting of it, and I have to say that Brian DePalma put in a lot of style and Danny Elfman put out a bristling version of the theme song.
In the leadup to the release of the 1996 movie, I was at Tower Records in Shibuya when I saw a counter selling Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen's dance remix take on the Schifrin theme. Yeah, I think that I was spending an inordinate amount of time at the listening post for that one.
Since the DePalma movie, we've had a total of six "Mission: Impossible" movies with Cruise up to now with different directors and composers. Plus, we should be getting another couple of them coming down the pike in the next few years. With all of the intrigue and "Can you top this?!" stunts (I'm guessing that Cruise will have to crawl around the International Space Station before jumping onto a Space X capsule to get back to a yurt in Mongolia in the next flick), I still look forward to the opening credit montage and how the Schifrin theme is handled. No more bouncing around, though.
Although a single of the Schifrin theme was released in 1967, I'm going to go with the debut year of the original series in 1966. So, what were the award winners at the Japan Record Awards back then?
I realize that it's a day early for Reminiscings of Youth but on hearing yesterday about the passing of The Rolling Stones' drummer, Charlie Watts (1941-2021), I felt that I should have put something up as soon as possible. Now, I was never a Rolling Stones fan but their presence in popular culture was so great that even as a non-fan, at least some of their songs were very well known to me such as "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash", and I knew about the outsized personalities of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Often when I compare 80s aidoru superstarsSeiko Matsuda（松田聖子）and Akina Nakamori（中森明菜）, I use the analogy of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as respectively applied to them.
(Video from the Drum Channel)
My lone Rolling Stones anecdote comes from years back when I was teaching at the second school during my 1994-2011 time in the Kanto region. One Monday, I had to do a series of level checks for young employees at the swanky Four Seasons Hotel in Tokyo not too far away from Japan's equivalent of The Pentagon. Once I was finished, I was given a pleasant afternoon tea service as part of their gratitude and I had a nice conversation with the hotel manager which led to some of the famous stars that have stayed at the Four Seasons. When he told me that The Rolling Stones had stayed there, his eyes rolled so hard in his head that their pupils could have bulged out the back of it. Let's say that they weren't the cleanest or the most button-down of guests.
And yet, I couldn't have imagined that Charlie Watts would have been involved in any of the debauchery (although I came to know about his vices in the 1980s). When I first saw him on television in the 70s or 80s, he already looked old to me compared to Mick and the others. Watts' hair was either already gray or graying. I don't know anything about his drumming philosophy or style but he always struck me as being the stoic parental anchor behind those drums. He appeared well-grounded and very dapper in his suits, and I think that he would have been the most approachable Stone.
For this ROY article, I've gone with one of their first hits, "Paint It Black" which was released as a single in May 1966. It's one of the Stones' songs that I know very well and even my anime buddy who has love for electric guitars has played "Paint It Black" constantly as part of his practice regime. Not being too cognizant about the Stones and their work, as I've mentioned above, listening to "Paint It Black", which was created by Jagger and Richards, there was the familiar melody with the sitar which I would find out on Wikipedia was the first time that a song with such an instrument would become a No. 1 hit. I also discovered that "Paint It Black" dealt with a person's earth-shattering loss and how he saw the world during that time of mourning.
Covers of "Paint It Black" have been done over and over in the decades since the song's initial success, and that includes Japanese artists. Given the direct translation of "Kuroku Nure!"（黒くぬれ!）, rockers such as RC Succession（RCサクセション）and Kenji Sawada（沢田研二）have given the Stones' classic their own take. RC Succession, led by the late Kiyoshiro Imawano（忌野清志郎）, is performing the song above although I couldn't find out who had provided the Japanese lyrics.
Now, what was being released in May 1966 in Japan according to Showa Pops?
Mike Maki（マイク眞木) is a name I've heard now and then in these music retrospectives that often pop up on Japanese TV. And even at the age of 68, he still turns up on the odd variety program, always as the straight man alongside the wacky Osaka comedians who always populate these shows. He's also been an actor on a number of these trendy dramas; the one I remember is "Beach Boys", a popular Fuji-TV serial that had Maki play an old surfer dude.
However, he started showbiz life in 1963 by starting a band called The Modern Folk Quartet (probably adapted from The Modern Jazz Quartet in America), and then he started a solo career with this song, "Bara ga Saita"(A Rose Bloomed). Known as the first Japanese-made folk song hit (written and composed by Kuranosuke Hamaguchi/浜口庫之助), according to the author/webmaster of "Hamadayama Life", OKA, in his article "Japanese Popular Songs Between 1945-1970", he mentions that the song isn't particularly sophisticated. And I'm not particularly surprised. I think when it came to adopting American musical forms at that time, it was more about style over substance. But that was OK with the Japanese since the song managed to sell over 300,000 records. Folk music had existed before this song came along but this song succeeded because it was lyrically simple (the translated lyrics are available near the bottom of the article) and just illustrates a simple truth about that lone rose blooming in the garden: when it came to pure pop music, listeners just wanted a pleasant melody with uncomplicated wording (a policy that continued far into the 80s) For the more complex stuff, they turned to enka and the message folk songs.
"Bara ga Saita" is, in fact, so simple that I thought it was originally a children's song. I've often heard it sung at kindergarten in Japan. (May 5 2018: Strangely enough, a commenter informed me that there is a kid's song, "One Little Finger" that sounds fairly similar.)
Now, as for the last piece of trivia for Mike Maki. He happens to be married to late 80s singer, Kanako Wada （和田加奈子）。
