Unicorn -- Hataraku Otoko （働く男）

A few years ago, there was all that kerfuffle about the music video for Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines". The unrated version had all those topless models shimmying and shammying away with Robin, T.I. and Pharrell (I guess he was happy then as well) as if there were no tomorrow.

Well, seeing that video reminded me of something similar which happened over 20 years ago in Japan. The rock band Unicorn with Tamio Okuda (the fellow who helped launch Puffy later on) had just released their 3rd single in July 1990, "Hataraku Otoko" (Working Man). The song was catchy enough for me as it was but then the video came out. It featured the band goofing about and performing while a nude model innocently posed and traipsed around the guys (sorry, no longer around on YouTube). Now I'm not sure how much of the footage involved Chromakey/greenscreen but I'm still fairly certain that at least that model and Unicorn shared the same space and time at some point during filming. Tough work, eh, guys?

Written and composed by Okuda（奥田民生）, the arrangement has the song pulling in little bits here and there of exotic rhythm, Beatles and a bit of that swinging 60s also with some added spaciness. It's got an interesting progression as well. It funks about at first before the synths send it soaring skyward. All that for the story of a working cog hanging in there at his desk for the 12 or 13 hours so that he can admire and fantasize about a female colleague. And here I thought it was all about the semi-annual bonuses.

I didn't search for a lot of rock songs during my spare time on the JET Program but I did come across "Hataraku Otoko" because it was used as one of the opening themes during the life of the late-night Saturday variety show "Yume de Aetara"（夢で逢えたら）on Fuji-TV at the turn of the decade from the 80s into the 90s. I've already written about two of the other themes, "Believe in Love" by Lindberg and "Furi Furi '65" by Southern All Stars. Considering how popular that show was, I think there was quite the symbiotic relationship between it and its theme songs.

"Hataraku Otoko" made it all the way up to No. 3 on the charts, and it is their most successful single to date. The song is also a track on Unicorn's 4th album, "Getamono no Arashi"（ケダモノの嵐...Beast Storm）. It was released in October 1990 and hit No. 1 on Oricon. Not only did it hit the top but it also won Best Album honours at the Japan Record Awards that year. Hard working men, indeed.

Unicorn -- Yuki ga Furu Machi （雪が降る町）

(cover version)

I remember the band Unicorn, led by Tamio Okuda（奥田民生）, during the turn from the 80s into the 90s, and my original image of them (fair or not) was that they were pretty raunchy solely because of their video for their 3rd single, "Hataraku Otoko" （働く男...Working Man）from 1990, in which naked women walked across the screen while the band played....predating by a couple of decades the uncensored version of the video for one of America's big hits from this year, "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke.

However, when I think of a Unicorn song, my memory will always first go to their Xmas contribution, "Yuki ga Furu Machi" (The Town Of Snow). This came out in December 1992 as their 8th single, and was written and composed by Okuda, but I only became aware of it just several years ago when I had bought a compilation of J-Xmas tunes at HMV in Shinjuku one day.

Y'know, listening to "Yuki ga Furu Machi",  I can't help but feel that there is a bit of Phil Spector or Eiichi Ohtaki（大滝詠一） in the melody. It just has that sound from way back when. And considering that this is a rock band singing an Xmas rock song, there is also that down-home traditional message from Okuda telling listeners during the Yuletide to slow down and take it easy from all the partying and hullabaloo on the streets. Just let the snow fall and relax for a while. At the end, he even asks everyone to be well and be careful out there. He sounds like the nicest, most relatable guy singing about what every young person in the city feels during the last couple of weeks of December. And I think the official video is just so well done with Unicorn performing on a stylized Xmas-y set interspersed with Yuletide scenes.

"Yuki ga Furu Machi" did pretty well, hitting No. 8 on Oricon, but it also had another benefit in that Yosui Inoue（井上陽水） took notice of Okuda through the song and initiated this long collaboration with the lead vocalist. One of the products of this partnership was the song "Arigato".

Initially, the song started out life as something solely for the Christmas season, and Okuda himself had started creating it as Unicorn's Christmas song, but his thinking altered somewhat as the process went along. He thought if he could incorporate elements of the year-end (which he did), "Yuki ga Furu Machi" could also be played up to December 31. It is truly a Holiday-spanning love letter of a tune.

A nice LED Xmas tree in Tokyo 2009!