Hiroshi Sato -- Shiny Lady

 

Mighty shiny building in West Shinjuku. I hope those window cleaners got a hefty bonus for their work. Not sure whether I actually set foot in there, but there was one of those towers that I did get to enter to have dinner right at the top. Wonderful view...in fact, it was so wonderful that I've completely forgotten what I ate there. If you know my appetite, that's not easy to do.

"Shiny Lady" is the first track on singer/musician Hiroshi Sato's（佐藤博）compilation album "This Boy" from May 1985. Sato of course composed and arranged this bouncy and funky City Pop tune that, for the lack of a better word, is a typically Sato-esque creation. The man is a marvel on the keyboards which include a Yamaha DX-7, a Mini Moog and a Fairlight CMI according to the J-Wiki article on the album, and the whole effect is like a walk among the modern skyscrapers of the aforementioned West Shinjuku, day or night. Yui Masaki（真沙木唯）is behind the lyrics that Sato and his backup, EVE and Miho Fujii（藤井美保）, sing out high and low.

Now that I've been listening to City Pop with all of its members including Sato, Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）and Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）among others, I've gotten some pretty solid images whenever I hear their music. With Tats, it'll either be a beach or an Eizin Suzuki painting, but with Sato, it'll be photos of gleaming Tokyo buildings.

Yu Mizushima -- Autumn Wind

 

Looks like we've got our second "Yu" singer for today. Earlier this afternoon, I wrote up on Yu Hayami（早見優）since she's celebrating a birthday, and now here is seiyuu Yu Mizushima（水島裕）.

According to his J-Wiki profile, he's been playing anime characters since 1976 but he has also been dubbing for specific actors in Hollywood movies, one being Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the NTV broadcasts of the original "Star Wars" trilogy. Now, the video here doesn't specifically state that it is indeed the Fukuoka-born Mizushima dubbing Hamill although when I punched his name and "Star Wars" into the YouTube search engine, this is what I got.

However, I'm not here to go ga-ga over the Japanese dubbed version of "The Empire Strikes Back". Mizushima also released his own set of singles and albums beginning all the way back in 1972; yes, I know that his seiyuu career didn't begin until 1976 but apparently he released his first single that year under a different stage name. Actually, his real name is Kenji Noda（野田憲司）.

Anyways, his final album to date was "Mujaki na Kankei"（無邪気な関係...An Innocent Relationship） from 1985 and doesn't he look cute in that candy-cane rugby outfit? I don't know whether the entire album is City Pop or J-AOR, but one track on Side A, "Autumn Wind", certainly has that vibe. I kinda figure with the cooler weather today and our distance toward the first day of fall getting smaller everyday, it was time to pull out the seasonal tunes. Besides, City Pop Fridays is upon us so why not get started several hours early?

Written by Tamamitsu Akaoni/Akaki（赤鬼玉光）and composed by Junichi Kawauchi（河内淳一）, the song screams so much 80s urban contemporary in Japan that I really needed to get that bottle of Perrier and that pink sweater wrapped around my waist. To be honest, Mizushima's vocals aren't bad but I don't think folks like Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）and Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）will be shaking apart their guitars in fear. Still, the AOR keyboards with a bit of twinkly Doobie Bounce go down smoothly.

Blondie -- Heart of Glass

 

On this week's regular Reminiscings of Youth, I have this memory of a song that could have been the transition between the old disco and the New Wave.

This is going to sound so weird but whenever I hear Blondie's "Heart of Glass", my memories go back to a fishing trip that consisted of my brother, myself and a friend of mine from junior high school on Centre Island which was a five or ten-minute ferry ride away from Toronto's harbour over Lake Ontario. "Heart of Glass" was playing all over the park speakers and I thought it was an odd musical accompaniment to the attempts of getting successful at the trout pond. So, it hasn't been the fragrance of cologne and tobacco at Studio 54 but the smell of fish and lake water that has been my sense memory of this hit song from January 1979. 

Still, I'm never going to confuse rainbow trout with the beautiful visage of Deborah Harry who was the vocalist behind "Heart of Glass", a song that I think mixed the disco and New Wave and has become one of my early music touchstones. It was the first time that I had heard of Blondie so I was surprised that "Heart of Glass" wasn't the debut single but something like the 10th single by the band according to their Wikipedia discography although it was first heard on their third album "Parallel Lines" from September 1978. That album cover, by the way, with Harry looking rather stern in front of her smiling band is pretty darn iconic to me.

"Heart of Glass" hit No. 1 in several countries including Canada and the United States and has even made it onto Rolling Stone's list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. 

So, according to Showa Pops, what was also coming out in January 1979 in Japan?

Hiroshi Madoka -- Musoubana （夢想花）(released in Nov. 1978 according to J-Wiki)

Mariko Takahashi -- Anata no Sora wo Tobitai　(あなたの空を翔びたい）(released in Nov. 1978 according to J-Wiki)

Alice -- Champion （チャンピオン）(released in Dec. 1978, according to J-Wiki)

Yu Hayami -- Yuuwaku Kousen Kura!（誘惑光線・クラッ!）

 

Maybe this could be the beginning of Japanese pop singers' Birthday Alley. I say this because a mere couple of days ago, it was Anri's（杏里）birthday so I celebrated with an article for her, and now today, I find out from someone I'm following on Twitter that it's the birthday today of 80s aidoru Yu Hayami（早見優）! Although Japanese music genre-wise, Anri and Hayami may inhabit different areas, both of them have been known for their sunny summery ways.

Well, then, for today, I offer you her 9th single from March 1984, "Yuuwaku Kousen Kura!" (Temptation Beam Flash!) which is this slightly disco-ish and nimble tune about a girl trying to nudge her boyfriend into a higher level of the relationship. The dynamic duo of lyricist Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）and composer Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）came up with this very Hayami-esque number which won an award in the Pop division for the 3rd Annual Megalopolis Kayo Festival（メガロポリス歌謡祭） sponsored by TV Tokyo. Plus, Hayami sang it for her second appearance at NHK's Kohaku Utagassen as the top batter for the Red Team. The arrangement was handled by Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）.

"Yuuwaku Kousen Kura!" tied with her arguably most famous song, "Natsu Iro no Nancy" (夏色のナンシー）, at No. 7 on Oricon as her highest-ranked single, and it finished 1984 as the 85th-ranked single. One last thing that I'll mention about the song is that the very last line, "Wakaru deshou? Ne ne ne"（わかるでしょう?ネッネッネッ）reminds me of a very famous catchphrase from the Monty Python gang.😁

Asagaya Romantics -- Dourotou（道路灯）

 

I recollect that I have put up this photo as an article thumbnail at least once before but just to remind folks, this is a view from my old apartment in Ichikawa one very snowy February day in 2010. Specifically, it's a view over the outside washing machine on my extremely narrow balcony. One observation that I've had about apartments and condos in Japan is that the corridors and stairwells are all exposed to the outside unlike in Canada and the United States where everything is interior. So, if you have some sort of hot pot party or the like in a Japanese apartment, most likely folks who want to get a smoke or get some fresh air will have to go out the front door and hang out there instead of squeezing onto the balcony.

And yet, I see the members of pop band Asagaya Romantics（阿佐ヶ谷ロマンティクス）happily enjoying life on a balcony of what looks like a pretty old apartment in the thumbnail image for the video above. Still, I think that it's a very appropriate shot of the guys because when I first introduced the band back in the summer of 2018 onto the pages of "Kayo Kyoku Plus", I had been writing about a bunch of us meeting up at a student's apartment in the Tokyo neighbourhood of Asagaya. We didn't crowd out on her balcony, mind you, but it was still a very homey and comfy visit so it felt like how the band looks like in the thumbnail.

By the way, the video here represents a track from the band's January 2017 album "Machi no Iro"（街の色...Colour of the Street）, "Dourotou" (Street Lights) created by Asagaya Romantics guitarist Tomoya Kishi（貴志朋矢）. I'm not sure of the lyrics but taking into consideration the title and the laidback nighttime melody, I could imagine that it is about a very pleasant evening ride in the convertible on the highway. Maybe it could be something that belongs in the city, but the arrangement doesn't quite sound Neo City Pop...just very dreamy pop aside from perhaps Kishi's rock guitar taking us home.

It's been almost a decade since I left my Ichikawa 2K and I still miss her from time to time, especially when I had friends over for dinner. Early on in my stay there, I even had as many as 20 people squeezed into the living room for that hot pot party, and yeah, it included a few guys who simply needed to get that smoke outside my front door.

Platinum 900 -- Mercedes Life

 

Back on Christmas Day last year, KKP contributor HRLE92 introduced himself and one of the underrated and overlooked urban contemporary bands, Platinum 900, and from listening to some of their material, I do feel that I should have rated and looked at them if given the chance. Alas, I had never even heard of these guys during my time in Japan between 1994 and 2011.

HRLE92 mentioned the album "Concerto für Jazz, Disco and Bossa Nova", Platinum 900's sophomore effort from 1998, and even one of the tracks in there, "Mercedes Life". Written by Jon Miles and vocalist Naoko Sakata（坂田直子）with guitarist and bassist Kazuhiko Nishimura (西村一彦), and keyboardist Hiroshi Iihoshi (飯星裕史) handling the melody-making, "Mercedes Life" is one splendid automobile journey of velvety soul and some disco strings. Sakata especially sounds as if she had temporally transported herself from a New York record studio in the early 1970s with that groovalicious voice of hers. Satoshi Nakamura（中村哲）, a saxophonist and keyboardist who's had a working relationship with the Anzen Band（あんぜんバンド）, took care of the arrangement with those strings and the flute.

"Mercedes Life" is the ideal mix of those 70s sunny soul nights and the Japanese music industry's late 90s/early 00s' foray into its own R&B filled with that disco, soul and funk which invited singers such as Misia, Bird and Tomita Lab（冨田ラボ）. I gave the analogy above about the song being a wonderful car ride. Well, obviously, that conveyance just has to be that titular Mercedes-Benz driving through the highways and byways of Tokyo. Moreover, although the Bubble Era had burst itself onto the ash heap of history almost a decade previously, "Mercedes Life" brings that sort of hedonistic mood back in a cool way. But in this case, the setting is not a chaotic Julianas dance club but a far more chill lounge several floors up in a Roppongi skyscraper.

Rajie -- Natsu ~ Hachi-gatsu no Memoir（夏～8月のメモワール）

 

September has entered rather peacefully here. It's sunny and unlike several of the past days, it actually feels cooler and drier (although I've still got the fan going in my room). Knowing Toronto, in a few weeks, we may actually be hearing frost warnings at night. Sorry to my heat-loving fellow Torontonians...I don't mean to jinx anything.

Anyways, I was trying to see if there were any other September-themed kayo out there but I did discover this song by Rajie titled "Natsu ~ Hachi-gatsu no Memoir" (Summer ~ Memoirs of August) that seems to fit the bill whenever I write anything at "Kayo Kyoku Plus" on September 1st. It's fairly contemplative with the singer's breathy vocals and that languid piano. "Natsu" does feel like the summer has suddenly gone into hibernation again and it's just a matter of time before the leaves begin changing colour. Uploader purplesound was quite accurate when he describes it as a Dream Pop number. Maybe it's a little like Fashion Music as sung by folks like Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）and Asami Kado（門あさ美）.

The song comes from Rajie's October 1984 album "Gogo no Relief"（午後のレリーフ...Afternoon Relief） with lyricist Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）and composer Takashi Sato（佐藤隆）working on it, and City Pop master Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）arranging everything.