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.
Either this song, "Birds" or "Kagayaki Nagara"（輝きながら...As You're Radiant) was the first Hideaki Tokunaga（徳永英明） single I'd ever heard. It was on one of those "The Best 10" video tapes that I'd rented, and I was rather gobsmacked at Tokunaga's high voice. Not that a lot of male voices in Japanese music were in the baritone/bass range (was listening to Matchy, Checkers and CCB at that time), but this guy's pearly tones could have labeled him a eunuch.
As with a lot of evergreen ballads, "Birds"just has that ability to take me back to my university days. Written by Akira Otsu（大津あきら）and composed by Tokunaga himself, it's just arranged in that pleasant swayworthy way that would get participants in a karaoke booth to involuntarily swing their upper bodies like metronomes.
Tokunaga's 3rd single, released in May 1987, didn't crack the Top 100 in the yearly Oricon rankings, although his next release, "Kagayaki Nagara" ended up becoming the 13th-ranked songof 1987, but both singles were part of his 2nd album, "Birds", which did hit the top spot in the weekly charts.
My favourite Pizzicato 5 song, "Baby Portable Rock" is quintessentially Shibuya-kei and it reminds me a lot of DeVol, the king of American 60s & 70s sitcom scores ("Bewitched", "Family Affair", etc.). It's just a happy-go-lucky jaunt of a pop song, and the video has Maki Nomiya and Yasuharu Konishi（野宮真貴・小西康陽）, who wrote and composed the number, dressing cute and dancing cute. Just watching the video, I got that craving to run down to Shibuya, Harajuku and Omotesando.
"Baby Portable Rock"was released in March 1996 and peaked at No. 19 on Oricon. The annual Oricon figures had it ranked at a somewhat humbler No. 192, but hey, it's still my darling. It did get its mainstream opening as a jingle for the Nissan Mistral as you can see below. Strangely enough, Nomiya's old group in the 80s was known as Portable Rock.
Nothing too earth-shattering in this announcement, but I just wanted to let everyone know about this Twitter account which streams Japanese pop music from the 70s, 80s and 90s called 70s-90s J-Pop Stream.
I know that there are probably countless other streaming Net radio casts for J-Pop out there but not sure about ones that specialize in what I specialize.
(April 29 2013...I've noticed the uptick in traffic for this particular article....and for some reason, I couldn't get anything when I checked the site. Perhaps, they're closed for the day....or just plain closed down. In any case, my apologies)
Tomoko Aran（亜蘭知子） is a lyricist who has been tied closely to Summer band TUBE since she penned hits for them such as "Season In The Sun" and "Summer Dream". However, she also had a singing career which lasted during the 1980s, and in fact, she and the members of TUBE along with a few other singers created a supergroup project called Nagisa All-Stars which lasted from 1987-1989.
"Slow Nights" is a song I came across via YouTube and the "Japanese City Pop" book. Originally a track on her 4th album, "More Relax", released in June 1984 (which, unfortunately, I think is probably out of circulation now....or so I thought), it's also available on a BEST compilation which was released in 2011. Written by Aran and composed by Issei Noro（野呂一生）, the guitarist for Japanese fusion group, Casiopeia, "Slow Nights" stands out since, while a lot of her other songs on that BEST album have that summery daytime sheen, this song is definitely urban contemporary music at night. As Aran points out in the liner notes in the BEST album, "Slow Nights" was written to highlight a night in a cafe bar in Tokyo....such establishments were apparently all the rage in the early 80s, and frankly, they still had a strong attraction for the young and trendy when I was there.
Noro's melody strangely reminds me a bit of the arrangement for Al Jarreau's"Moonlighting", the theme song for the Cybill Shepherd/Bruce Willis detective-comedy show, and that show came out a year later. Since I loved "Moonlighting"(both theme and show[at least the first couple of seasons of the latter]), I guess it was inevitable that I would like "Slow Nights"as well.
Toronto's definitely got its Winter back. As I was coming home from a party last night, I was doused in a coat of the white stuff. Nice to see and feel although I may have different emotions about it if it continues for another couple of months.
Anyways, this brings me up to this profile on Iruka's（イルカ） "Nagori Yuki"(Winter's-End Snow). If there is a trademark song for this veteran folk/City Pop singer, this would be it. It's a slow contemplative song with Iruka's tender vocals making it even more poignant. I think any audience or listener would tend to reflexively give a wistful sigh on hearing this song. The group of teachers who were in charge of the graduating students in my junior high school during my stint on the JET Programme gave a performance of this song for the kids, and the kids bawled out like babies...even the judo team.
Iruka's version was released in November 1975 as her 8th single. It peaked at No. 4 and was the 11th-ranked song for 1976, selling about 800,000 records. It was also a track on her 3rd album, "Yume no Hito"（夢の人....Dream Person) also released in 1975.
Iruka's take on "Nagori Yuki" may arguably be the best-known cover of this classic folk song, but it wasn't the first. Shozo Ise（伊勢正三）, the composer and writer of the song, and his band, Kaguyahime（かぐや姫）, which was also behind one of the most well-known folk songs in Japan, "Kandagawa"（神田川....The Kanda River), was the original artist. As for the lyrics behind it, they talk of a bittersweet parting between boy and girl at a train station while some unseasonable snow is falling at the end of Winter. One of the great lines at the end of the chorus is: "Kyonen yori zutto kirei ni natta"（去年よりずっときれいになった....You've become even more beautiful than last year). Another interesting trait which distinguishes this original version is that whereas Iruka's version is soft and lilting throughout, Kaguyahime's "Nagori Yuki" has this rather triumphant trumpet part in the arrangement which might illustrate that although the parting is sad, there is also pride in the time that the two lovebirds had together.
The Kaguyahime original was never released as its own single, but was a track on the band's 4th album, "Sankai Tate no Uta"（三階建ての詩...Three-Floor Poem), released in March 1974. The album did very well, hitting the top spot and not only becoming the 5th-ranked albumof the year but also held in there to become the 27th-ranked album for 1975.
Since Iruka's cover version, lots of singers have covered the song from aidoru Hitomi Ishikawa（石川ひとみ）to pop singer Ayaka Hirahara（平原綾香）.
Although the title is about the final snow of Winter, I still rather enjoy playing "Nagori Yuki" over the Holidays. And it's a song that I would recommend to anyone who's interested in kayo kyoku.
From around the late 70s/early 80s, there are three songs I know that have the theme of "morning": Kazuo Zaitsu's"Wake Up", Hiroaki Igarashi's"Pegasus no Asa"（ペガサスの朝）and Satoshi Kishida's"Kimi no Asa". All three of them are perfectly made to listen to during those hours slowly rousing out of bed. Of the three of them, Kishida's "Kimi no Asa" is the most laid-back.
Singer-actor Satoshi Kishida（岸田智史）from Okayama Prefecture, first debuted in 1976 with "Aoi Tabi"(蒼い旅....Blue Journey). Three years later, he came up with his biggest hit, "Kimi no Asa"(Your Morning), a very comforting ballad that's less the drinking of coffee of Zaitsu's "Wake Up" and more the slow wafting of said coffee from the kitchen into the bedroom as it's brewing away. Whenever I'm reminded of it, the chorus of "Morning, morning...." rings in my ears.
Composed by Kishida itself and written by Osami Okamoto（岡本おさみ）, "Kimi no Asa" was the theme song for a TBS drama "Ai to Kassai to"（愛と喝采と....Love And Acclamation), a show that Kishida also starred in. The single was released in March 1979, and it hit No. 1 for 5 weeks straight in July and it sold over 600,000 copies before becoming the 15th-ranked song of the year. It is also the first track on his 4th album, appropriately titled "Morning" which also hit the top spot and became the 4th-ranked album of the year.
"Furimukanaide" (Don't Turn Away) is another evergreen kayo kyoku tune by The Peanuts. I've heard it a number of times over the decades by various singers, male and female, and apparently The Peanuts' version is not the original one but it is the first version to become a hit. Written by Tokiko Iwatani（岩谷時子） and composed by Hiroshi Miyagawa（宮川泰）, this version was released as the duo's 21st single in March 1962. The song is written in the style of what American pop sounded like in the early 60s, and it strikes me as being a bit Del Shannon. And I kinda wonder if Yumi Arai（荒井由実） had taken some inspiration from the song for one of her own early hits in the 1970s, "Rouge no Dengon" （ルージュの伝言...A Message in Rouge) (already profiled).
15 years later, aidoru group Candies, gave a straight-on cover of "Furimukanaide" with a very similar arrangement to the original. It was never released as a single but was a track on the trio's 9th album, "Candy Label" released in September 1977. For those who may be interested in acquiring it, that's the front cover right there.
I gotta say that if I had been a card-carrying member of Wink's fan club right now, I would've had to hand in the card in shame, since I hadn't been aware that the duo had even done a cover to "Furimukanaide". This was Wink's 15th single released in July 1992, and it was given a Eurobeat sheen. At the same time, I wonder if Stock, Aitken or Waterman dropped in on Tokyo and given the producers a few tips for this one. Wink's take on the classic was probably not too surprising since in the early 90s, there was a small boom in updating some of the old 60s kayo kyoku classics. In any case, the song peaked at No. 7 on Oricon and was also a track on Wink's 9th album, "Nocturne" which was released in November and got as high as No. 19.
