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.
Having listened to some of the tracks on VIZION's one and only album"Psychotic Cube" from 1983, I'm now kinda wondering whether this band which included keyboardist Akihiko Matsumoto（松本晃彦）, vocalist Kenjiro Sakiya（崎谷健次郎）and the late bassist Nobuo Ariga（有賀啓雄）were somewhat like Yellow Magic Orchestra but with the synthpop aspect turned way down but not totally off. Discuss.😐
To join the tracks "Dancing Generation" and "Obscure Dance Party", we have here "Gogo no Kokuhaku"(Afternoon Confession) in which the protagonist is really itching to express his love and maybe more to a lady. Written by Rinko Yuuki（有己林子）and composed by Sakiya, instead of the funk with synthesizers for the first two, "Gogo no Kokuhaku" hits me as a bright and happy-go-lucky pop tune with a 50s or maybe even an early Beatles sheen...but still with those synths. It can make for a nice accompaniment to a drive down the highway, especially with that electric guitar solo that pops up near the end.
Ahhh...so that's what the disco scene was like in Tokyo back in the 1980s (this is from YouTuber 80stoa, by the way)! When I visited the city in 1981, I was far too young and shy to enter a Japanese dance emporium but during my days studying in high school and university about the nation, I learned about places like The Lexington Queen in Roppongi. Never managed to get inside there but when I did return to Tokyo in 1989 in those JET orientation days before being shipped out to Gunma Prefecture, some of us did get to a dance place within one of those Western Shinjuku hotels. It was one of the tiniest places to have my feet repeatedly stepped on, perhaps even smaller than Toronto's Sparkles up on the observation deck of the CN Tower.
Come to think of it, I have encountered a few strange places to dance during both of my stints in Japan. There was that one place in Numata within Gunma where they had 40 minutes of karaoke and then 20 minutes of dancing with added dry ice fog pumped in during that final one-third in the hour. In the following decade, my friends and I visited a Brazilian churrasco restaurant in Ginza which had all-you-can-eat meat and then enforced dancing during which the wait staff would gently hoist all of the patrons onto the dance floor for several minutes of boogying. Not sure if that was considered to be a crime against humanity considering all of the meat inside us and that couldn't have been good for the staff when they had to clean out the washrooms. I guess that can be called paying one's due-dues.😎
Well, at least they weren't obscure dance parties. But I do have "Obscure Dance Party" by the obscure band VIZION. I mentioned about these funkadelic guys back in the spring with their "Dancing Generation" because of some of the members who are already well represented on their own on the blog: Kenjiro Sakiya （崎谷健次郎）, Akihiko Matsumoto（松本晃彦）and Nobuo Ariga (有賀啓雄) .
Both those songs that I've cited are on VIZION's sole 1983 album"Psychotic Cube". Now in that last article on Sakiya and the band, I also wondered if there were some synthpop influences in "Dancing Generation". Well, I don't think that there is any doubt about it in "Obscure Dance Party"; in fact, next to the funk and boogie, I swear that I hear something that's almost akin to a "Super Mario Kart" soundtrack anchoring things down. Try racing down the track with Mario while listening to this one. Sakiya was responsible for both words and music for this first song on the album.
Yeah, har-de-har-har! I'm going to be profiling a band called VIZION so of course I'm going to add a video featuring The Vision from Marvel. Well, I figure that it's a bit more exciting than putting up the usual 1983 thumbnail photo.
Still, this is a fascinating band not just because of "Dancing Generation", one of the tracks from the band's one-and-only album"Psychotic Cube" which was released in that year of 1983. The intriguing part is that VIZION consisted of at least a few members whose solo work has already been shown on the blog from long ago. For one thing, there is the vocalist, singer-songwriter Kenjiro Sakiya（崎谷健次郎）, bassist Nobuo Ariga (有賀啓雄) who KKP writer nikala first introduced all the way back in 2014 through his "Rain Dolphin", and keyboardist Akihiko Matsumoto（松本晃彦）who would come up with the snazzy soundtracks for the cop show franchise "Odoru Dai Sosasen" (踊る大捜査線）from the late 1990s onwards. The other members were drummer Hisanori Ikuno（生乃久法）, guitarist Jin Ishiyama（石山仁）, and keyboardist Tetsuo Otake（大竹徹夫）.
VIZION, which lasted only between 1981 and 1983, styled itself as a pop unit with some R&B funkiness. And I think with the catchy if mysterious "Dancing Generation", there is plenty of that in there although that intro had me thinking initially of synthpop. Sakiya, who composed the song alongside Rinko Yuuki's（有己林子）lyrics, plays a bit with those vocal effects, too, and come to think of it, the vocalist also reminds me a little of Noriyuki Makihara（槇原敬之）who was still a few years away from his own debut.
