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.
Back in June 2024, I introduced a band called shaky which was anything but shaky. In fact, I really loved their debut digital single from 2019, "Closer". It was some really nice soulful Neo-City Pop.
The band finally put up a website but things are still rather sparse although they have a brief profile section. From what I've read there, the members are influenced by R&B, soul, funk, jazz and other genres. Any other news on shaky only comes as far as 2020 so I'm not sure what their current status is. However, speaking of that year, the Fukuoka group did release another single in March 2020 titled "silhouette". It's quite the percolating and funkier tune which makes one feel like taking a night drive into the big city.
Well, I did have another AI photo of the calico cat sipping iced coffee in that futuristic city to join the one that I used for Mebae Miyahara's（宮原芽映）"Milky Cat", so why not put it to good use. Mind you, I had to convert it from a jfif file to an mpeg. Maybe he can become part of the Kyokuverse and join Kayo Grace as her manager, Mr. Calico.
Now, to be honest, there's been a period of several hours between "Milky Cat" and this song because I had been out to dinner with my good friend Danny and Larry Chan, fellow contributor of KKP articles and co-administrator tonight. We partook of many skewers of yakitori at Zakkushi in the old district of Cabbagetown. And it was made very clear that my once-incredible abilities of chowing down tons of food are now largely gone...for good or bad.
To get to this song, I'm talking about "Closer" by the band shaky. In looking up all the tracks on "City Music Tokyo: Junction" a couple of weeks ago, I managed to find the video for "Closer" just by chance and enjoyed it very much, so here it is. It was released as the band's first digital single back in October 2019 and I'm savoring it as a pleasingly languid number that oozes relaxation and warmth as the main vocalist invites a lover to come over to simply be together.
There's not much information on shaky except that they hail from Fukuoka and it consists of five people who at the time had an average age of 18, so they were basically a high school-aged group. Well, for such a group, they sound very smooth and self-assured in their exploration of the urban and mellow.
