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.
Yesterday, I wrote an article on Ryuichi Sakamoto's（坂本龍一）October 1978 "Thousand Knives"（千のナイフ）album and mentioned that the year was a fairly busy one for the members who would become the legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra: Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）and Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）. Along with Sakamoto's debut solo album, Takahashi had his "Saravah!" and Hosono had a couple of albums earlier that year: April's "Paraiso" and then "Cochin Moon" in September.
Referring back to yesterday's article, I noted that the liner notes in "Thousand Knives" also mentioned that some of the tracks there hinted at what Sakamoto was going to do as part of YMO with the technopop flourishes and all that. I then saw a similar thing written about Hosono's "Paraiso"（はらいそ）on its Wikipedia article in that he also brought in some of those electronic sounds that would characterize that band's own material.
Maybe then, that is what I'm hearing from one track on "Paraiso" (which is officially under the name of Harry Hosono and the Yellow Magic Band), "Shimendouka" which I tried to translate as "Four-Sided Ethical Poetry". The Wikipedia entry on the album stated that although it continued to show off Hosono's tropical New Music style from the 1970s, there were those bloops and bleeps as well. I gather then that "Shimendouka" is fairly representative with the tropics coming in via those steel drums followed by some of that technopop through some tinkly synths.
It's definitely very cheerful and laid-back, and it was written and composed by Hosono. As for that title, a douka（道歌）, according to Jisho.org, is an ethical form of tanka poetry with a lesson at the end, so I gather that it's the Japanese equivalent of a fable. Harry's lyrics happen to hint that a fellow is walking off to a much happier land, perhaps the paradise mentioned in the album title, and that he's more than willing to shove any devils out of the way. In each verse, he mentions that he will be going through a door in the west, an ocean in the south, a sky in the east and finally an island in the north, so that would explain the four-sided part.
You can also take a gander at "Tokyo Rush"（東京ラッシュ）which begins the album.
I may have been less than a year old when the original "Mission: Impossible" series came on CBS in September 1966, but my earliest television memories are the opening credits montage sequence, the tape recorded message and Jim Phelps looking over who was going to be in on this week's mission. Oh, of course, there was also the theme song by Lalo Schifrin for which my mother told me with no lack of mirth that I had a very visceral reaction. Apparently, I was bouncing in my Pampers when that iconic theme came on, but I guess even back then, I had an ear for the coolest tunes.
And so for this week's ROY article, I'm going with another beloved American lawman show theme to join the themes from "Dragnet" and "Peter Gunn". But unlike those articles which had the avant-garde group Art of Noise do their cover versions, I'm sticking with the original Schifrin version. Indeed, it is one of the most recognizable themes on television no matter the nation and as soon as one hears it, I'm sure that those famous repeated scenes, mask-ditching, espionage derring-do...and Tom Cruise come to mind, although for nostalgia's sake, so do Peter Graves and Martin Landau.
These pieces of information haven't appeared on the Wikipedia article for the song, so I'm wondering if they are apocryphal. However, one piece is that Schifrin had actually originally created the theme as background music for a particularly intense scene in an episode of "The Man From UNCLE", another 60s spy show; Schifrin was involved with at least a few of the episode scores. The other trivia point is that the "Mission: Impossible" theme was played presumably once on ABC's "American Bandstand", that popular music-and-dance show hosted by Dick Clark, only for things to come to a screeching halt because the kids couldn't figure out how to dance to it.
Ah, yes. Tom Cruise. There was the late 1980s return of the series on ABC with Graves once more which started out well but petered out (no pun intended) fairly quickly. However, I was in Japan when Paramount Pictures decided to bring "Mission: Impossible" to the big screen with the actor who would become the world's most famous stunt man with the first of the movie franchise coming out in 1996. Even though I was no longer bouncing around on my butt in the theatre, it was still a thrill to catch the trailer with the famous catchphrases and the original Schifrin theme. When I first saw the movie, though, I had to admit to some disappointment since the production team decided to break two M:I commandments: they killed off the team, making Ethan Hunt the overarching one-man IMF team with a few recruits helping out here and there; plus, they made Jim Phelps a bad guy. In the quarter-century since that first movie, though, I've been much more accepting of it, and I have to say that Brian DePalma put in a lot of style and Danny Elfman put out a bristling version of the theme song.
In the leadup to the release of the 1996 movie, I was at Tower Records in Shibuya when I saw a counter selling Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen's dance remix take on the Schifrin theme. Yeah, I think that I was spending an inordinate amount of time at the listening post for that one.
Since the DePalma movie, we've had a total of six "Mission: Impossible" movies with Cruise up to now with different directors and composers. Plus, we should be getting another couple of them coming down the pike in the next few years. With all of the intrigue and "Can you top this?!" stunts (I'm guessing that Cruise will have to crawl around the International Space Station before jumping onto a Space X capsule to get back to a yurt in Mongolia in the next flick), I still look forward to the opening credit montage and how the Schifrin theme is handled. No more bouncing around, though.
Although a single of the Schifrin theme was released in 1967, I'm going to go with the debut year of the original series in 1966. So, what were the award winners at the Japan Record Awards back then?
This is another one of those bands whose origins were extremely hard to trace and they remain so. I wasn't even quite sure how to transcribe their name into romaji. I'd thought that it was Keiko to Endless which was unusual but not out of the realm of possibility considering some of the weird names that kayo groups could have.
But indeed, it was Keiko to Endy, Lewis (けい子とエンディルイス/Keiko and Endy & Lewis) from what I could find in very small print on one of their singles. As it turned out, another small grain of information that I could garner from this site is that the two guys, Endy Yamaguchi（エンディ山口）and Lewis Takano（ルイス高野）, were two of the members from Mood Kayo/pop groupPinky and Killers（ピンキーとキラーズ）who had that big 1968 hit in "Koi no Kisetsu" (恋の季節）with them in bowlers and ties.
Pinky and Killers broke up in 1972 after which Endy and Lewis teamed up with Keiko to form a far more relaxed trio in the folk genre. I couldn't track down how many singles exactly they came up with, but there was at least one album titled "Tonari no Futari"（隣りの二人...The Couple Next Door） created in 1974, and so I'm assuming that this particular song "Kaze" (Winds) came from there since I wasn't able to find it on any of their singles, either on A or B sides. I wasn't even able to find out who the songwriters were behind "Kaze", but it's a very pleasant tune accompanied by harmonica and guitar with the high and light vocals of Keiko and Endy and Lewis providing their own harmony.
I'd like to start off this article with the initially ruefully humourous reaction to "Sen no Knife", Ryuichi Sakamoto's（坂本龍一）debut solo album from October 1978. According to the liner notes for the 2016 reissue of the album via J-Wiki, the very first pressing of 400 copies got sold...only for 200 of them to be returned to the record stores.😱 Well, that reminded me of one particular movie scene.
Yeah, I guess The Professor was indeed ahead of his time. That's what avant-garde is all about after all. I picked up "Sen no Knife"(Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto) as one of the purchases in my recent shopping spree, and putting it into the stereo for the first time last week, I thought it is pretty avant-garde now. I could only imagine what those 400 first purchasers back in the late 1970s must have thought.
However, whereas those people were probably taking a chance on the fairly unknown Sakamoto with "Sen no Knife" just some weeks before his first collaboration with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）and bassist Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）would spark a future legend in synthpop music via Yellow Magic Orchestra, I made my purchase of the album after decades of getting to know him through YMO, his works with other singers such as Akiko Yano（矢野顕子）, Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）and Miki Imai（今井美樹）, his acting performance with David Bowie in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", his Oscar win for "The Last Emperor" and other solo works in various genres (dang, I think I just broke a record for longest sentence). In other words, I was long ready to try out "Sen no Knife", especially after having seen the cover in record guides over the years. Incidentally, it was his YMO buddy, Takahashi, who came up with the idea for the photo of the album cover and perhaps the fashion for Sakamoto. I guess it must have taken quite an imaginative mind to have a good friend pose in a sudsy bathtub with a live electric lamp. Moving on...
As I said earlier, I had all those years of Sakamoto music playing around in my head to know that what I was probably going to hear from "Thousand Knives" was going to be pleasantly out there and Sakamoto-esque. In fact, I'd already heard the first (and title) track in its YMO form when I got that audiotape of the band's BEST collection in 1982 and then through the source album "BGM". I mentioned in the article for "BGM" that I found it even more alien and weird than the songs that I'd heard from the guys at the time. YMO's "Thousand Knives" struck me as being something the band came up with to show some more rock chops.
With the original "Thousand Knives" though, after that intro involving The Professor intoning Mao Zedong's"Jinggam Mountain" through a vocoder, there is something far more epic and adventurous as if the listener had accepted that invitation into a Tokyo that was one-half Edo Era and one-half high-tech 22nd century. At over 9 minutes in length, it would have to be. At the same time, there is something everyday about "Thousand Knives" since Sakamoto's additional melodies have that bubbly and percolating feeling of pots and steamers cooking up breakfast, lunch or dinner for the local hoi polloi while the antigrav vehicles whiz by. Meanwhile, there is also a hint of minor-key space jazz at 3:16, so perhaps the neighbourhood also has a hole-in-the-wall club that's just closing in the sunrise hours with the employees groggily heading for bed or one of those yatai with the steamers cooking.
I also mustn't forget the bristling guitar solo by Kazumi Watanabe（渡辺香津美）. Maybe that could represent the dangerous street urchins lurking about, getting ready to steal a fruit from one of the shops. Anyways, by the end, it's obvious that "Thousand Knives" is all about the visit and not the stay since we're all taken away into something a little more sparse. It's quite the introduction by Sakamoto into his new world of computers and pop.
"Thousand Knives" the track is something that I was already familiar with, though. Now I was going into new territory. "Island of Woods" is taking me into the bizarre and sylvan via a tropical island run by Philip Glass (on Alpha Centauri?), it seems. Perhaps this is where those 200 naysayers had started thinking "I wonder what the refund policy is like at that record store?". But luckily for me, I already have that sense of Sakamoto. "Island of Woods" is less a song and more a soundscape. Some of those sounds include Motoya Hamaguchi（浜口茂外也）on a Brazilian bird whistle, a heart beating away and a dog barking along with the waves that finish this even longer track.
"Grasshoppers" melds the classical and the synthetics with a piano duet involving Sakamoto and Yuji Takahashi（高橋悠治）. It almost describes a movie plot on its own and I'm thinking of Pixar's "A Bug's Life" if it had been made as an unknown Studio Ghiblianime of that time with Sakamoto behind the score. There are a couple of different movements in there with the overall arc being happy-go-lucky with the grasshoppers just skipping all over the place while one part is contemplative as if the main character is handling an internal issue.
The writer for the English liner notes in "Sen no Knife", Paul Bowler, gave me the impression that "Shin Nihon Denshi Teki Minyo/DAS NEUE JAPANISCHE ELEKTRONISCHE VOLKSLIED"（新日本電子的民謡...New Japan Electronic Folk Song） is a Kraftwerkian delight delving once more into a traditional Japanese quarter like Asakusa. I can understand his sentiment completely especially with that repetitive gloppy synthesizer rhythm from the start which seems to be an aural equivalent of Gonk, one of the droids from the very first "Star Wars" film in 1977, walking all over the place.
Although that last word of minyo is in there and it's been seen as a most Sakamoto-esque minyo, Sakamoto himself has rather scoffed at it being a Japanese folk song by saying "That is nothing like a minyo. It's totally Western music". Whatever anyone thinks of it though, it was a song that was played at YMO concerts in their early years.
One other interesting point of trivia regarding "DAS NEUE JAPANISCHE ELEKTRONISCHE VOLKSLIED" is that a good friend of Sakamoto for whom The Professor helped out in his own works and concerts was dropping by the studio almost every day during the album production. Sakamoto decided to put him to work for this particular track by arming him with the castanets and indeed I do hear them. That old buddy? Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）.
In the title track, I heard some of the bloops, bleeps and the fluttering butterfly-like synth sounds that I would later hear in the brief musical bridge between "Tong Poo"（東風）and "La Femme Chinoise", two tracks on the very first YMO album. Bowler points out that "Plastic Bamboo" also has that embryonic feeling of what Yellow Magic Orchestra would have in store for us for the next few years. It does have the familiar bloops and bleeps from the songs of their early years along with a funky main melody. Not surprisingly, "Plastic Bamboo" also got performed at YMO concerts in the early days.
The final track, "The End of Asia", has actually already been covered by me in its own article but since I wanted to make this a complete set, I'm still throwing in a performance video by YMO here.
For all those synthesizer fans who want to know which instruments Sakamoto put into play when creating these most marvelous tracks, I will just transcribe what I found from the J-Wiki article:
Moog III-C+Roland MC-8 Micro Composer
Poly Moog / Mini Moog / Micro Moog / Obertheim
Eight Voice Polyphonic + Digital Programmer /
ARP Odyssey / KORG PS-3100 Polyphonic /
KORG VC-10 Vocorder / KORG SQ-10 Analog
Sequencer / Syn-Drums / Acoustic Piano / Marimba
As the commercial pitchman would say, "But wait! There's more!". Last night, I discovered this recent video by Doctor Mix that introduces his choices of Top 10 synthesizers since I was rather fascinated about some of these magical music machines after reading the above shopping list for Sakamoto. Think of this as a cool-down video.
Off the top, I pointed out that "Sen no Knife" had a rather mixed result among its first listeners back in 1978. But I think that sentiments have grown a little more fonder among folks since that time (I've got a feeling that buyers are hanging onto their copies), and I think that for any Sakamoto fan, "Sen no Knife" is a must-have now, at the very least to find out how the YMO sound had been developing and how a studio musician was able to ambitiously marry music and computers. It was certainly an interesting time for Sakamoto, Takahashi and Hosono since YMO's first album came out exactly a month after "Sen no Knife" which was released a few months following Takahashi's "Saravah!" album and Hosono's "Cochin Moon".
2/22/22 at 22:22. Just about perfect for the phenomenon known as Twos Day today. Yep, within some minutes, we'll be reaching that exact time so I'm hoping that I'll be able to finish this article by 10:22 pm. It would have been even more perfect if today was actually February 22, 2222 at 22:22 but I'm not quite willing to wait another couple of centuries. And incidentally, I brought the above image in but I forgot the source so I do apologize if the owner does see it. Let me know if you'd like me to take it down or at least have me acknowledge the originating website.
Well, I was thinking about how I would commemorate Twos Day tonight and so I thought about kayo involving the word two in the title. I quickly figured that a lot of such kayo would involved romance with the protagonists being a couple, and sure enough, I did find one via Miyako Otsuki's（大月みやこ）"Osaka Futarizure" (Osaka Party of Two) which was released as the enka veteran's 60th single in December 1982.
"Osaka Futarizure" is quite the gallant and peaceful enka as the titular couple in love stroll somewhere in downtown Osaka under an umbrella. Of course, sharing an umbrella in Japan has that huge connotation of romance blossoming. With Mizuho Ashihara（芦原みづほ）providing lyrics and Yukihiko Ito（伊藤雪彦）as the composer, it's buoyed by Otsuki's strong yet silky vocals and that Latin guitar.
