Rajie -- Rajie All Time Selection, Disc 2

Happy Monday! It's been less than 24 hours since I put up the article for Disc 1 of Rajie's "All Time Selection" from 2018, but since I was able to get all my work done today, I now have oodles of time to write about Disc 2 now.

Disc 2 includes selected tracks from d) Mahiru no Hodou (真昼の舗道...1980) e) Acoustic Moon (1981) f) Gogo no Relief (午後のレリーフ...1984) g) Espresso (エスプレッソ...1985), and yeah, I'm keeping the order that I had from last night's Disc 1 article so that's why it's starting from d).

Unlike in Disc 1, you won't be finding any links under here and only a few lettered tracks since neither nikala nor I have talked about Rajie's material beyond nikala's article for "Mahiru no Hodou". However, this gives me a chance to find out more about the songs that she performed for those last three albums.

The lineup for the second disc then.

1. Last Scene（ラスト・シーン）(d)
2. Itsuwari no Hitomi（偽りの瞳）(d)
3. Radio to Futari（ラジオと二人）(d)
4. Yojirean Twist（ヨジレアン・ツイスト）(d)
5. ROSY BLUE
6. Black Moon（ブラック・ムーン）
7. Bara no Glass（薔薇のグラス）
8. Do you wanna dance
9. Memory Through (Tsuisou)（メモリー・スルー (追想)）
10. Ce Soir（セソワ）
11. Goodbye Transfer（グッド・バイ トランスファー）
12. Ruriiro no Koibito-tachi（瑠璃色の恋人達）
13. Double Moon（ダブルムーン）
14. MAMAMIYA ~ Uchuu kara no Okurimono（宇宙からの贈物）
15. Espresso
16. Misshitsu（密室）
17. Yumeiro Densetsu（夢色伝説）
18. Hikari to Kage（光と影）

Tracks 1~4 are d), 5~9 are e), 10~14 are f) and 15~18 are g). For those first four tracks, originally from "Mahiru no Hodou", you can just click the link in the second paragraph to find out more about them.

Since "Mahiru no Hodou" is already well represented, shall we begin with Rajie's 5th album "Acoustic Moon"? Above is "ROSY BLUE", a happy-go-lucky number that weaves between down-home and classy. Written by Keisuke Yamakawa（山川啓介）and composed by Masamichi Sugi（杉真理）, it might be telling a tale of a woman teasing a new beau over his past while tripping the light fantastic. Despite the songwriters involved, I couldn't but feel that there was a feeling of Eiichi Ohtaki（大滝詠一）infused into this song. "ROSY BLUE" was also the B-side to Rajie's 8th single "Do you wanna dance" from 1982.

Speaking of that A-side, here is "Do you wanna dance" which is another rather split-personality song which has a doo-wop refrain sandwiched in slices of what sounds like French jazz of the 1960s. Rajie is playing into this quite well with her flirty vocalization. Shigesato Itoi（糸井重里）and NOBODY took care of words and music respectively.

"Black Moon" from "Acoustic Moon" has Rajie seemingly channeling some Junko Yagami（八神純子）and Hi-Fi Set（ハイ・ファイ・セット）from the 1970s. Etsuko Kisugi and Yoshitaka Minami（来生えつこ・南佳孝）have teamed up to create this tribute to some classy City Pop with European undertones. No fusion of genres here....just some pleasant music that I would enjoy having some steak and alcohol with at The New York Grill in Shinjuku. "Black Moon" was also her 7th single from 1981.

Going into Rajie's 1984 "Gogo no Relief" (Afternoon Relief), "Goodbye Transfer" is a pretty atmospheric piece straddling between 1980s City Pop and the sophisticated pop coming in the latter part of the decade. Kingo Hamada（浜田金吾）was responsible for the moody music and Kazuko Kobayashi（小林和子）took care of the lyrics which talk about a woman getting ready to take off from a fogbound airport to leave her romantic woes behind.

"Double Moon" is a another heady song with some bossa nova. Lyricist Rui Serizawa（芹沢類）and composer Akira Nishimoto（西本明）created this one.

"Espresso" is Rajie's final original album and the title track is a smooth and light technopop number by Serizawa again and Yuji Karaki（唐木祐史）. For some reason, I'm quite attracted to these cabaret-type songs done with synths.

Then on the same album, there is "Misshitsu" (Secret Room), a sultry song in which a woman and her paramour have a little tryst in an elevator while heading up to the 15th floor. I gather that back then, apartment or hotel elevators weren't all that fast. The same fellows behind "Double Moon" in the previous album also took care of this technopop tune which is about as different as Rajie could get when compared to her earliest City Pop entries. Again, I have yet to get "Espresso" the album but my feeling is that it could be similar to "Quatre" from 1979 which also had Rajie going for a more synthesized sound.

And that is what makes this BEST compilation interesting since Rajie didn't settle on one particular sound during those years between 1977 and 1985. She continued to evolve so it's been fun listening and comparing the songs.

Rajie -- Rajie All Time Selection, Disc 1

Considering that she may not be all that well known anymore, I was not only surprised to find out last month that there was indeed a Rajie BEST album but that it had been released only in February of this year. Not that I'm complaining at all. I think of Atsuko Souma（相馬淳子）as one of the hidden unsung gems of the classic City Pop era, and now that I've got this compilation, I can get to know some of the other songs that I've yet to discover outside of the albums that I've already gotten by her, "Heart to Heart" (1977) and "Quatre" (1979).

The 2-disc set of "Rajie All Time Selection" doesn't have Rajie's best songs scattered all over the place or categorized into some arcane order. It just starts from her early years on Disc 1 and goes to her final album in 1985 "Espresso" by the end of Disc 2.

First off, let me introduce her albums: a) Heart to Heart b) Love Heart (1978) c) Quatre d) Mahiru no Hodou (真昼の舗道...1980) e) Acoustic Moon (1981) f) Gogo no Relief (午後のレリーフ...1984) g) Espresso (エスプレッソ)

As I said at the top, I've got a) and c) while nikala who gave her opinions on "Mahiru no Hodou" has d).

Now here is the lineup for the first disc of "Rajie All Time Selection":

1. Hold Me Tight
2. It's Me...It's You (a)
3. Ai wa Tabun（愛はたぶん）
4. The Tokyo Taste
5. Suteki na Feeling（素敵なフィーリング）(a)
6. Kibun wo Dashite Mou Ichido（気分を出してもう一度）
7. Heart to Heart
8. Kaze ni Yosete（風によせて）
9. Cool Down（クール・ダウン）
10. Love Heart（ラヴ・ハート）
11. Fuyu no Shouzou（冬の肖像）
12. Last Chance（ラスト・チャンス）
13. Just in the Rain（ジャスト・イン・ザ・レイン）
14. Quatre（キャトル）(c)
15. Tokidoki Mahou（ときどき魔法）(c)
16. Watashi wa Suteki（わたしはすてき）
17. Kaze no Michi（風の道）

Tracks 1~7 are a), 8~13 are b), 14~17 are c). Also, if the particular track above is linked, it has its own article, and if a track is lettered, it means that the album article features that song.

"Ai wa Tabun" (Love is Probably) is one of the songs from "Heart to Heart" that hasn't been covered at all so allow me to rectify this. It's quite the breezy pop tune by Keisuke Yamakawa and Nobuyuki Takahashi（山川啓介・高橋信之）, and that is probably because it was used as the campaign song for the Nissan Skyline back then. Nice for a drive. Incidentally, "Ai wa Tabun" was also the B-side to Rajie's debut single of "Hold Me Tight".

I never got to the title track for the album "Heart to Heart" so I have a chance to write about it here. Very pleasant song thanks to Rajie's vocals and creamy arrangement by Tsugutoshi Goto（後藤次利）with all of the instruments on languid mode. Yukihiro Takahashi and Chris Mosdell（高橋幸宏・クリス・モズデル）took care of the lyrics while Takahashi created the melody. I could drink a glass of wine to this.

Have yet to get "Love Heart" so I'm glad that I've got the opportunity here to talk about at least some of the tracks represented on this BEST disc. If the tracks there all sound like "Cool Down", then I can be enticed to invest in that one as well. As the title hints, it's the relaxing mid-tempo to bring a person down from a hard or overly exciting day. Yoshitaka Minami（南佳孝）, who duets with Rajie here once again, composed the music with Etsuko Kisugi（来生えつこ）providing the words. "Cool Down" is a bit of a sangria of a song with some bluesiness, AOR and a hint of Latin.

Yeah, I think I will get that "Love Heart" now, especially when "Last Chance" sounds so good. Takahashi took care of words and music and he knows how to weave a cool City Pop number along with co-creating those technopop hits as one part of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Speaking of YMO, Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）was on the electric piano and rumbling bass synthesizer. For those listeners who have only heard of The Professor through his later solo works and his Oscar-winning soundtrack for "The Last Emperor", I would be happy to introduce "Last Chance" to show some of his cool funky chops.

My last paragraph here will be devoted to "Fuyu no Shouzou" (Winter Portrait) with Goto providing a melody that initially, at least, reminded me of something Eagles-ish or perhaps something poppy from the West Coast. Rajie's vocals are especially soaring in this power ballad. Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）wrote the words.

I will see about getting an article on Disc 2 sometime in the next 24 hours.

Yukiko Okada -- Little Princess（リトル プリンセス）

After answering that inquiry on what aspiring singer-turned-teen aidoru Yukiko Okada（岡田有希子）sang in the audition phase of her career, I felt that I couldn't really let things go until I added another official Okada article onto the blog.

"Little Princess" was Okada's 2nd single from July 1984, and like her debut single "First Date"（ファースト・デイト）from a few months earlier, it too was written and composed by Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）. As would be the case for a Mariya-penned song, the melody is gently swinging away as if Okada were riding it like a playground swing with that hint of old-style American pop. Watching the video above and listening to "Little Princess", I can understand why Okada had been referred to as the "post-Seiko Matsuda"; there was something about the way she looked and sang that reminded me of the Seiko-chan of 1980, and as I've probably mentioned before, she seemed to have that It quality which may have resulted in a number of the big songwriters such as Takeuchi being attracted to her.

The song managed to peak at No. 14 on Oricon. The song earned her a couple of awards as well in the Best New Artist category at the 10th Annual Nippon Television Music Festival and the 3rd Metropolis Kayo Festival. For all those Yukko fans, considering the importance of April 8th, perhaps you can also take a gander at my own BEST article for her as well as JTM's "Premium Best" article.

Sawako Kitahara -- My Boyfriend（マイ・ボーイフレンド）

A few hours ago, I received an e-mail via the Contact Form regarding the late aidoru Yukiko Okada（岡田有希子）who had committed suicide back on this day in 1986. The person was inquiring about the "Star Tanjo"（スター誕生!...A Star Is Born!）audition program on NTV in which Okada, under her real name of Kayo Sato（佐藤佳代）, entered the singing contest on the show. The question was that although Sato had sung Akina Nakamori's（中森明菜）"Slow Motion"（スローモーション）at the national level at the March 30 1983 competition, the inquirer wanted to know the other song she had performed in the preliminaries to get to the nationals.

Well, it was a lucky thing that I got the question on a day in which 1) I wasn't off to see my anime buddy and 2) there were no translation tasks miring me down, so I was quite free to do some investigative work. Doing a bit of digging into the J-Wiki article for Okada through her quite voluminous history, I was able to find out that the Aichi Prefecture-raised teenager had skipped school to try out for the the Nagoya preliminaries of the contest. The song she sang was "My Boyfriend" by aidoru/actress Sawako Kitahara（北原佐和子）which you can see from 0:22 of the above video.

For some reason, the footage above states that this was an October 1983 broadcast so I'm not sure whether there was some long delay between the actual taping and the broadcast (doubtful) or whether the October show was some sort of retrospective showing past auditions. In any case, Okada had done well enough to receive her invitation to the nationals albeit not without some major conflict with her family and homeroom teacher, according to the book "Yukiko Okada ~ Ai wo Kudasai"（岡田有希子 愛をください...Yukiko Okada - Love Please）via that J-Wiki article.

As for Sawako Kitahara, she was born in Saitama Prefecture in 1964 and made her debut as an actress and as an aidoru around 1982. Just before that, she had been in a 1981 aidoru group called Pansy（パンジー）before going solo. "My Boyfriend" was her debut single from March 1982 with lyrics by Mari Horikawa（堀川マリ）and music by Tatsushi Umegaki（梅垣達志）. From that year to 1986, Kitahara would release 10 singles and 6 original albums.

Although she has long finished her singing career, her acting career has been continuing and she is also a certified care worker. In any case, I hope this article has answered that one question.

Yuiko Tsubokura -- San-byaku-rokujuu-go no Yoru to Hiru（365の夜と昼）

The above photo is one I took on Tokyo's Yurikamome Line going through the bayside Odaiba district back in 2014. Odaiba has remained one of my favourite places in the capital and I'm proud to say that I was one of the earliest visitors to the area when it was being built in the mid to late 1990s. The Yurikamome was already running but the only thing that was erected at the time was the humongous Meccano set that would become the new headquarters for Fuji-TV. Everything else was sand quarry.

Now the area is just chock-filled with shopping malls, hotels, convention facilities, restaurants and a Gundam robot with the Yurikamome coursing through the area like an aorta. Plus, it will be getting the Olympic Village constructed nearby in the next year (I hope). All of it is on a combination of reclaimed land and garbage which, as signs everywhere tell visitors, will liquefy in the event of a major earthquake. Basically, the government is telling us that we have been warned. Lovely.

Anyways, I just want to devote this space to the lovely vocals of Yuiko Tsubokura（坪倉唯子）via "San-byaku-rokujuu-go no Yoru to Hiru" (365 Nights & Days). It's not the cool City Pop that a lot of us have heard her sing on "Tsukanoma Yotogi Bito"（一瞬夜伽伴侶）which has garnered a lot of popularity on YouTube, but it is reflective of the urban contemporary music which was coming out during the turn of the decade from the 80s into the 90s. Perhaps it can be an example of that Quiet Storm that I was talking about last night.

"365 no Yoru to Hiru" was used as one of the many ending themes for the TV Asahi midnight news and information show, "Tonight"（トゥナイト）. From my more-than-occasional viewings of the show from my futon, it seemed to enjoy placing these mellow numbers at the end, I guess, to act as a lullaby for those late sleepers. The song was also the coupling tune for her 3rd single "Koufuku Game"（幸福ゲーム）which came out in June 1990. As with that song, "365 no Yoru to Hiru" was composed by Hiroshi Terao（寺尾広）but the lyrics were provided by none other than Miyuki Nakajima（中島みゆき）. I realize that Nakajima didn't have anything to do with the melody but still the song struck me as being of a type that I wouldn't have usually imagined as one of hers.

If you like, you can enjoy this before you head off for slumberland yourself.

H2O -- HELLO VIBRATION

Hello and good weekend to you! It's been a good long time...perhaps around 4 years since I put up the last original H2O article onto "Kayo Kyoku Plus". That's because when it comes to seeing any of the duo's presence on places like YouTube, it's almost always centered on their most famous song "Omoide ga Ippai"（思い出がいっぱい）, a song for graduation ceremonies everywhere in Japan.

Well, last night, I was able to find something different by Kenji Nakazawa and Masaki Akashio（中沢賢司・赤塩正樹）at last in the form of "HELLO VIBRATION" from July 1982. This was their 4th single and the one preceding their hit "Omoide ga Ippai", and it's an interesting one since it starts out sounding almost like a contemplative number on the level of Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）from the same period. But then, it breaks out into a mellower quasi-Beach Boys pop song out on the surf.

If you are well-versed on the Beach Boys' oeuvre, half the title for this song pretty much gives away the game about what the songwriters were going for, and they were not Nakazawa or Akashio. Actually it was Tetsuya Chiaki（ちあき哲也）on words with Katsu Hoshi（星勝）coming out with the music. "HELLO VIBRATION" was also a track on their 4th album "Pool" from October 1983. And although it wasn't used as one of the theme songs, it was inserted in one of the episodes from the 80s anime "Miyuki"（みゆき）, a show that was quite happy to have H2O's presence in there.

Koichi Miura/Hibari Misora/Kiyoshi Hikawa -- Benten Kozo (弁天小僧)

Shirazaa itte kikaseyashou...
...
Benten Kozo taa ORE NO KOTO DA!

These lines right here are apparently from one of the most iconic scenes from Kawatake Mokuami's (河竹黙阿弥) famous play called "Aoto Zoshi Hana no Nishiki-e" (青砥稿花紅彩画), also known simply as "Benten Kozo". This proud declaration was announced by Benten Kozo Kikunosuke (弁天小僧 菊之助), one of a group of five (as I quote from the Wiki) gizoku/honorable thieves, when his plot to rob a kimono store in drag was revealed - well, now, that's one way to go about doing that, alright. 

I'm not all that well-versed in kabuki theater, so as usual enka served as my introduction to the aforementioned play via the song with the same name. I had seen that the original singer of "Benten Kozo" was Koichi Miura (三浦洸一), though I only got fully acquainted with it through Kiyoshi Hikawa's "Shin Enka Meikyoku Collection 2" (新・演歌名曲コレクション2 −愛しのテキーロ／男花−) as a cover. With such a romping score, courtesy of renowned songwriter Tadashi Yoshida (吉田正), and Hikawa's expressive delivery, this catchy tune from 1955 quickly grew on me and eventually piqued my interest on Kikunosuke enough to read up about his story on the J-Wiki. 

Miura's version

From there, I learnt that Takao Saeki's (佐伯孝夫) lyrics are actually based on the aforementioned lines (plus everything in between) and some of the young thief's other exploits from the original play itself. It definitely brings to mind Hachiro Kasuga's own kabuki-themed hit "Otomi-san" (お富さん), and it seems like Miura's "Benten Kozo" was created when Victor Records saw how warmly the former (from King Records) was received about a year before. Not surprisingly, it became one of Miura's biggest successes.

As with other popular plays, besides being adapted into mainstream music, "Benten Kozo" the play had its fair share of movie renditions, one of which titled "Hibari Juu-hachi Ban Benten Kozo" (ひばり十八番 弁天小僧) from 1960 starred Hibari Misora (美空ひばり) as the thief himself. That initially took me by surprise, but on second thought, with Misora's ability to bring out a gruff and masculine persona, her role there did not seem as strange anymore. Hmm, I wonder how she found having to act as a man trying to act as a woman during the kimono shop scene. But anyway, you can check out excerpts of the this movie from the video above with Miura singing away, and listen to Misora's own take of the song in the video immediately above this paragraph.

Comparing all three renditions of "Benten Kozo" the song, I have to admit that I prefer the covers to the original for I find that in the latter, both Hikawa and Misora make it sound as if they were the character themselves, whereas Miura sounds like he's just narrating the story. With that being said, I think Hikawa could play a convincing Kikunosuke.

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