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.
Shigeru Suzuki, among the Happy End/Tin Pan Alley family, is the musician closest to refined music that includes bossa nova, easy listening, jazz and AOR. What can't be definitely ignored is how his solo albums beginning from "Lagoon" (1976) have influenced artists from the 1980s onwards such as Kazuhito Murata（村田和人）and Toshiki Kadomatsu（角松敏生）. For City Pop fans, the projects that he was involved in as a sound producer including Sumiko Yamagata's（やまがたすみこ）"Flying" and Makoto Iwabuchi's（岩渕まこと）"Super Moon" have to be checked out.
The above comes from "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" (2020).
I have a feeling that I don't really need to ask Noelle Tham whether there is snow in Singapore, being so close to the Equator and all that. Mind you, considering how much of a technopolis it is, they could easily make their own snow.
The reason that I am even mentioning snow and Singapore in the same sentence is that I encountered this song by singer-songwriter Masatou Higashi（東正任）,"Singapore no Yuki"(Singapore Snow), from his one-and-only 1987 album "E La Nave Va ~ Soshite Fune wa Iku"（そして船はいく...Then the Ship Departs）. Written by Higashi and composed by Ryohei Yamanashi（山梨良平）, it's a fairly haunting metropolitan tune that also reminds me of Robbie Nevil's"C'est La Vie". I could have done without the weird bass voice blurting out "IT'S A HARD DAY'S NIGHT", though.
The only information thus far that I could find regarding Higashi is right from his own website, and between 1971 and 1988, he was involved in the music industry...participating in recording sessions with Billy Ban Ban（ビリーバンバン）, Asami Kado（門あさ美）and other singers while also helping out in the production process with Sentimental City Romance（センチメンタル・シティー・ロマンス）. In 1985, he put out a single "White Season". Since his music days, though, Higashi has gone onto many corporate endeavors, it seems.
At first glance, the band Deep Sea Diving Club had me thinking that the lunkheads from "Grand Blue" decided to form their own group instead of scheming against each other and drinking themselves blind.
But of course, such was not the case here. In fact, Deep Sea Diving Club has its four members hailing not from the Izu Peninsula but all the way west in Fukuoka. Guitarist and vocalist Sota Tani（谷颯太）, guitarist Takahiro Oi（大井隆寛）, bassist Satoshi Torikai（鳥飼悟志）and drummer Showhey Idehara（出原昌平）were once known as Sandal until they picked up their current band name from a sticker found at the Sun Selco Mall in Fukuoka City. On their J-Wiki file, I saw the phrase "TENJIN NEO CITY POP" but they have pointed out that they also like rock, R&B and jazz and other genres to the extent that they would like to be considered genreless.
Debuting in 2019 with a single, they've released several digital singles since then and in March 2022, Deep Sea Diving Club put out their first album"Let's Go! DSDC!". From there, I offer you the second track, "City Flight". I get some groovy Suchmos vibes from this one along with some of those early 80s City Pop feelings and even a hint of some ancient disco riff. Written by Tani and composed by Oi, we also get some laidback rap from Tani with the entire song exhorting the joy of having fun in the big city.
Always nice to welcome Junko Yagami（八神純子）back to KKP especially on a day of City Pop. As soon as I heard the first few bars of this particular song, I figured that this must have been one of the Nagoya singer-songwriter's 1990s creations, and it has turned out to be so.
"Ai no Honoo" (definition is right on the byline) was a coupling song to Yagami's 29th single, the very wordy "Tatoe Kanawanai Yume Demo Kore de Ii"（たとえ叶わない夢でもこれでいい...Even If It's a Dream That Won't Come True, That's Fine） which was released in July 1993. While Yagami took care of the music, Yuuho Iwasato（岩里祐穂）provided the lyrics. Just from the certain synthesizers involved and a bit of Latin mixed into the arrangement, it did feel like something from out of the 1990s. If a B-side can sound like this cool, I would love to hear the A-side.
Happy Good Friday to everyone! Hopefully, you are all taking things easy on this statutory holiday. Of course, being a national holiday, I'm doing a special Reminiscings of Youth article today for Urban Contemporary Friday, and you might consider this a sequel or a follow-up to yesterday's ROY posting on that soundtrack from the hilarious "Airplane!"(1980).
Commenter Brian Mitchell and I were exchanging comments for that one earlier today and I realized one big interesting pop culture connection between one of the funniest movies ever made and a short-lived American sitcom that was out at about the same time. In fact, I'll lift a good chunk of my comment to explain things.
Speaking about coincidences regarding planes, I realized that "Airplane!" also had a fairly surprising connection with an American sitcom "Angie" which had a short run from 1979. Robert Hays (Ted Striker) had a co-starring role in that one next to the title character played by Donna Pescow who just happened to dance with John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever". Of course, there was the famous disco scene in "Airplane!" which was accompanied by "Stayin' Alive", the official or unofficial theme for "SNF". And to top it all off, Maureen McGovern who played the nun on "Airplane!" sang the theme song for "Angie".
Indeed, that is indeed McGovern's nun above trying to solace a couple of passengers and failing utterly. That may have been her first foray into acting after starting out in 1967 and being primarily known as a recording artist. She first hit the bright lights when her recording of "The Morning After", the theme song for another serious disaster movie, "The Poseidon Adventure" from 1972, had won her an Oscar. Ironically enough, and to extend the coincidence chain, Leslie Nielsen from "Airplane!" had played the captain of the doomed cruise liner.
According to her bio on Wikipedia, McGovern had still hit some lean times between then and the late 1970s. However, things started looking up with not only the "Airplane!" gig, but also with her recording of "Can You Read My Mind?", the love theme from Richard Donner's "Superman" earlier and then as I mentioned in the comment to Brian, her recording of the theme song for the sitcom "Angie" on ABC.
I did watch a lot of "Angie" during its time between early 1979 and late 1980 because I have to admit that I had a bit of a crush on Pescow, not knowing for many years that she had that pivotal role in "Saturday Night Fever". I also remember that McGovern had another hit in "Different Worlds", the theme song for "Angie" and it was quite popular on the radio as well as each time that an episode aired on the telly. And listening to it again after so long, those happy-go-lucky disco vibes had me swooning a lot. Strangely enough, I started getting memories of Taeko Ohnuki's（大貫妙子）"Sunshower" and "Mignonne" albums as well.
A single was released in June 1979 which hit No. 1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart while it reached No. 18 on the same organization's Top 100. Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox were the songwriters behind "Different Worlds". Considering the title, I would have thought the song could have been great for "Superman" but maybe it was a little too disco for the Man of Steel. 😁
Anyways, I'm not sure on which day "Different Worlds" was released but to see what was hitting the top of the charts at around that time, let's go with June 4th 1979.
Well, seeing that we here in North America and other places are on the cusp of the Good Friday/Easter Monday long weekend, maybe it's nice that I finish off my contributions for today with something appropriate. For that matter, we're not too far off from the Golden Week holidays in Japan.
Back around Halloween 2018, I posted late 80s/early 90s aidoru Ritsuko Tanaka's（田中律子）November 1990 single"Fried Frustration"（フライドフラストレーション）onto the blog. It was a happily zany little boogie that I've heard on a Halls lozenge commercial featuring the Tokyo native.
The coupling song "Have A Good Weekend" is a more synth-heavy party-hearty sort of song for those who are planning to hit Shibuya or Roppongi. Written by Natsumi Tadano（只野菜摘）and composed by Hiroaki Suzuki（鈴木弘明）, I can imagine Tanaka and her buddies getting all gussied up for a night out on the town. Not sure if this one made it to commercial.
Last week, I got to see the teaser for the remake of "The Naked Gun", this time starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., the son of the hilariously famous Frank Drebin played by the late Leslie Nielsen. So, of course, all the zany humour in this new version can go back to the original movie from 1988 and that movie can go all the way back to the 1982 short-lived series "Police Squad!".
Nielsen cemented his newfound status as a comic actor late in his long entertainment career in "Police Squad!" but it had been discovered a few years earlier in 1980 on "Airplane!" which had him playing straight-talking Dr. Rumack.
In recent months, a lot of the younger generation and their YouTube reaction channels have also been discovering the humour onslaught loaded like bullets in a machine gun in "Airplane!". One of my cinematic regrets is that I never got to see any of the 1970s Mel Brooks movies such as "Blazing Saddles" at the theatre (probably wouldn't have been allowed to get into the cinema anyways at my age), but all that was countered when my brother and I got to see "Airplane!" in its first run when it was released at the end of June 1980. I don't think I've ever had that much fun at a movie...before and since. Laughter was ranging from loud to absolutely screaming.
David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams were the geniuses at overdoing Brooks' humour in terms of quantity and speed, and as I mentioned in the "Police Squad!"ROY article last year, one of the big factors in the success of "Airplane!" was casting familiar straight dramatic actors from television and movies as some of the characters such as Peter Graves from "Mission: Impossible", Robert Stack from "The Untouchables" and Nielsen himself who had been in all sorts of serious roles ranging from starship captain to corrupt corporate executive.
The actors themselves were initially skeptical about whether they could actually pull this off and say these lines like "Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?", so they needed some reassuring from the Zucker Brothers and Abrahams. However, one person involved in the production got it right away apparently, and that was movie composer Elmer Bernstein. This is the same man behind the epic soundtracks for "The Ten Commandments" and "The Magnificent Seven", and he was asked by the guys to not come up with anything epic, but something befitting a B-movie suspense movie...something corny and overdone.
And yet, when Bernstein completed his work, the "Airplane!" soundtrack not only fulfilled the producers' requests but it was still epic. I can hear any part of this soundtrack in a "Name That Tune" situation and I'd still recognize it more than forty years later. Of course, it all starts with the main title with a goodly nod to John Williams and a certain shark, before everything kicks in. At 4:38,"Lisa/Farewell/Take Off/Another Meeting" expresses the situation about the sick girl needing that heart operation but it also goes into one of my favourite scenes when a young couple sadly separates as if the lad were getting on a train rather than a plane.
I also wanted to show the scene as well as the music accompanying it if I can. At 8:48 on the soundtrack above is the Bee Gees' classic "Stayin' Alive" which of course provided the music for the flashback disco scene right here. The video doesn't show it but there was also the aftermath with Ted and Elaine sharing that cheek-to-cheek dance as they danced to the nighty-night jazz of "Love Theme from Airplane!" (13:31), a theme that gets picked up all throughout the movie in various versions.
At 23:38 is "Thar She Blows" which is a very appropriately titled track considering the scene that it accompanies. I wasn't sure whether Bernstein and the orchestra were trying to stifle laughter while recording that one. All I can say is that I had never heard of a pilot joining the Mile High Club until this movie.
27:27 is "Punch-Up/Kramer" which contains another one of my favourite scenes where Robert Stack's no-nonsense Rex Kramer shows in no uncertain terms how he feels about religious groups asking for donations at airports. At the time I saw "Airplane!", I recognized Stack's face, probably from guest roles on dramas but I hadn't known that he was the first TV Eliot Ness from "The Untouchables".
Finally at 39:47 is the song that had Ted regain his mojo and save everybody by the end. I hadn't known it at the time but that was the "Notre Dame Victory March". It also showed up at the end credits (always loved Stephen Stucker as Air Traffic Controller Johnny...he pretty much stole the show).
Considering that "Airplane!" was released in the Toronto/Buffalo area on June 27th 1980, let's see what was on top of Oricon. I've got the first three here from June 30th.
