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.
One of the first and loveliest examples of kayo kyoku that I'd ever heard come across was from this band and this song, "Aki no Kehai"(Autumn Flavor). If there is a song that just forced you to just stop and smell the roses or sit down for a bit, it is this one. Kazumasa Oda's（小田和正） dreamy vocals and relaxing arrangements just makes this ballad one of my all-time favorites.
Off Course（オフコース） had a 20-year-long run from 1969-1989 as a popular pop/folk/rock band from Yokohama. "Aki no Kehai"was released as a single in August 1977 before coming out as part of the album "JUNKTION" a month later.
(cover version)
According to an interview with Oda himself, part of which was re-written onto J-Wiki, the lyrics talk of a man sadly having to part with his girlfriend at her favorite park in Yokohama. Oda had initially felt that the protagonist was splitting up with her in such a gallant and tender way, as in a movie, but after thinking about it, he came to the conclusion that the guy was a bit of a bastard although that hadn't been Oda's intention!
In any case, it's just lovely to listen to...although perhaps you should think twice before playing it at your wedding.
Going a little more forward into Taeko Ohnuki's （大貫妙子）career. Ohnuki had completed a three-year run with Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）band, Sugar Babe, with their only album, "Songs" in 1976 when it disbanded in the same year. Ohnuki was now free to go solo and did so with Crown Records, releasing "Grey Skies" in 1976 and then in the following year, "Sunshower".
This album was part of my shopping spree for Ohnuki tunes over my final year in Japan. According to Shinichi Ogawa's（小川真一） writeup for "Sunshower" in "Japanese City Pop", Ohnuki was still developing as an artist on this album. I can agree to a certain extent. She makes some dips into genres such as fusion with "Furiko no Yagi"（振り子の山羊） "Swinging Goats", Latin with "Kusuri wo Takusan"（くすりをたくさん） "Lots of Drugs", and though I can't remember which track exactly, one of the later songs even has some techno...hinting at where she and fellow contributors to the album, Haruomi Hosono（細野 晴臣）and Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一） (of YMO fame) would be heading musically within a few years. It's interesting to see all 3 photographed in the album booklet back in the day, looking distinctly hippieish.
The above link is for "Tokai", （都会）"The City"which, according to J-Wiki's entry on the album, was influenced by Stevie Wonder. In the song, she talks about the unhealthy obsession with urban life and proceeds to leave it. The aforementioned "Kusuri wo Takusan" also gives the message of a cheerful indictment on how the medical industry was, even at that time, overmedicating its patients.
This link is of the first track, "Summer Connection". The J-Wiki comment only mentions that it was written with a summery image in mind. My observations is that it's the only song that I can remember of hers in which she REALLY hits the high notes. Ryuichi Sakamoto's arrangement is such that it has that nostalgic "Summer of '77" feel to it.
March 7 2017: I've just made a follow-up article on the album.
October 31 2017: You can take a look at a wonderful cover for "Tokai".
It's nice when I get to make an entry and I don't have to write a lot of kanji...like for these guys. And I first came across this band purely by accident. I bought their 1994 CD, "Discovery", thinking that it was this other band that I'd heard and seen on "Music Fair", a long-running music program on Fuji-TV. I soon realized my error, but at the same time, I also realized I came across a damn fine unit. These guys can funk, soar and swing!
Sing Like Talking had its embryonic beginnings as far back as 1982 when the current three members had met in high school, but their actual debut didn't happen until 1988. Chikuzen Sato（佐藤竹善）, Chiaki Fujita（藤田千章） and Tomohiko Nishimura（西村智彦） over the years have come up with songs that span funk, R & B, gospel, and even rock at times. But whenever I've visited the CD shops, any notices about them will often have the genre tag "J-AOR". Yeah, I guess this is the descendant of City Pop although according to Wikipedia, Shibuya-kei seems to be J-AOR's cooler, hipper cousin.
"Together" actually is the lead track from the album before "Discovery", "togetherness", with single and album being released at the same time in 1994. And boy, is it a fun song! It starts, strangely enough, with an excerpt from Gypsy Jazz guitarist legend Django Reinhardt's"Dinah" before it immediately explodes into this funky, danceable number with a bunch of horns that would make Tower Of Power proud. If I wanna feel good, I play this one. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only video available on YouTube of this song, so the "Dinah" excerpt isn't played at the beginning although a hint of it comes on near the end (as it also does in the original). Still, the concert video shot at the Budokan in 1996 is great to watch.
(March 3 2014: Then again, I finally found the original with Django!)
I was actually going to list the albums of 1978, but I think this list was more illuminating about who was on top for that year.
1. Pink Lady UFO
2. Pink Lady Southpaw
3. Pink Lady Monster
4. Takao Horiuchi Kimi no Hitomi 10000 Volts
5. The Candies Hohoemi Gaeshi
6. Pink Lady Toumei Ningen
7. Masaaki Hirao Canada kara no Tegami
Yoko Hatanaka
8. Circus Mr. Summertime
9. Eikichi Yazawa Jikan yo Tomare
10. Miyuki Nakajima Wakare Uta
I think Pink Lady is gonna have to be talked about soon.
One of the reasons that I probably got into kayo kyoku is that the Japanese popular music of that time was more than happy to be influenced by various Western music genres such as jazz, chanson and Latin...to a larger degree than was the case in North America.
Junko Yagami (八神純子）was just a teenaged Nagoya native when she broke out into the music business, and she later made quite an early impact with her second album, "Sugao no Watashi"（素顔の私）(An Honest Me), reaching the No. 1 spot on the Oricon album charts sometime in 1979. "Mizuiro no Ame"(Azure Rain) was one of the tracks, and released the year before as Yagami's 5th single, it got as high as the No. 2 position on the weekly charts, and ranked 59th for the year.
"Mizuiro no Ame"was one of the first songs that I'd heard since my conversion to kayo kyoku 30 years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. Yagami has a powerful voice on the same order as EPO and Misato Watanabe（渡辺美里）, but she has a certain delicateness melded into her delivery as well. This song is definitely a dynamic Latin-tinged number, but she has also dipped into rock, disco and R & B.
She is performing even now almost a couple of decades since moving to the United States and under her married name of June Stanley. In fact, she just released a new album, "Vreath -- My Favorite Cocky Pop" (yes, please refrain from giggling too much).
In the last couple of years, I've become a huge fan of this lady's work. Strangely enough, I'd bought her BEST double-CD set close to a decade ago but I guess I hadn't been too impressed on my first listen since I let it sit in my CD case for a few more years before I finally heard the light. That double-CD set mostly focused on her 80s technopop/European songs which were more than enough to start scouring for the original albums. However, once I got those under my belt and on my shelves, I wanted to search for some of her older work, before her fateful collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto(坂本龍一): namely, her first two solo albums, and then even earlier with her time as co-vocal in New Music band, Sugar Babe(シュガー・ベイブ）.
Taeko Ohnuki(大貫妙子) was born in Suginami Ward, Tokyo, in 1953. Twenty years later, she, along with four others including singer Tatsuro Yamashita(山下達郎) (who I wrote about a couple of entries ago for "Ride On Time"), created Sugar Babe. Now, I mentioned that this was a New Music band...and this is where things get confusing even for me. According to the definition on J-Wiki,New Music was an urban contemporary form mixed in with Japanese popular music, ergo kayo kyoku (mixologically speaking, rum and sake?). OK, so then where does City Pop come in? Well, just for the sake of this blog and these brain cells (or cell) in my head, I'm gonna consider New Music to be more of the Western-style Japanese pop songs in the early/mid 70s, while City Pop starts up in the late 70s and into the 80s. In any case, the J-Wiki write-up on Sugar Babe itself talks of how the band used different Western chords which would further set it apart from other popular forms of the time such as enka and aidoru.
Back to our regularly scheduled entry. "Itsumo Douri"(As Usual) is a short mid-tempo upbeat tune about someone just getting on with life in the big city. There is a fusion of 70s pop, big city sax and strings which helps in relating that feeling of a young woman's life in Tokyo. And after listening to Ohnuki's breathy, almost whispery voice in the 80s, it's a revelation to hear this song which is very different from her work with "Professor"Sakamoto. The song itself was released as the B-side for the single "Downtown", sung by Yamashita and now a Japanese pop standard. The album, "Songs" was released at about the same time in April 1975.
I'll be going further into Ohnuki-san's career over the next number of months since she, in my estimation anyways, did some remarkable work through the late 70s and early 80s.
I introduced the program "Enka no Hanamichi"(The Flower Path of Enka) via the entry for Ikuzo Yoshi's（吉幾三）"Yukiguni" (雪国) under the Enka category some days ago. This was a program that used to be the filler stuff for the remaining few minutes on VHS tapes when the main taped program finished up back in the days when my parents used to rent from "Nippon Video" back in the 80s.
Of course, the program got a lot more respect in the home country. "Enka no Hanamichi" had a 22-year run on TV Tokyo from September 1978 to October 2000. It was a half-hour show which was broadcast on Sunday nights from 10 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. and featured some of the top enka singers crooning fan favorites in the first two-thirds of the show before singing their latest stuff in the last 10 minutes.
During those first 20 minutes, singers would perform on rather elaborate sets, whether it be a windswept port at night while ships sounded their horns or inside an expensive Akasaka bar, or even someone's nicely designed Western-style home. For the remainder of the program, the same singers would perform in front of a studio orchestra.
According to Jean Wilson's article on the show, printed in the July 1993 issue of "Eye-Ai" magazine, the original producer had wanted a different concept for the show to distinguish it from the music ranking shows that were popular at the time. All those sets and the singers in their literally Sunday best were to provide a mini-musical story illustrating the usual enka tropes of lost love and urban ennui...it would explain why the performers looked so serious and heartfelt. Everything is all tied down with the narrator, played by Ryoko Kinomiya (来宮良子）. From the same article, Kinomiya's whiskey-and-cigarettes voice apparently came from the voice actress actually hitting a bar and knocking back a few before showtime. It's a tribute to her professionalism (and probably her liver) that she could get through taping.
Part of the reason for the show's eventual demise was the changing tastes of people for music. Enka is no longer as big a musical force as it once was, but "Enka no Hanamichi" still lives on in DVDs and YouTube.
