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.
It may have the same name as Chu Kosaka's（小坂忠）song but it is a different animal, and on top of that, it's undoubtedly a great tune as well. Original Love's"Ryuusei Toshi" is a medium-tempo ballad with a gentle blue-eyed soul feel riding on top of a city soul rhythm. Realizing that the night view while driving on an expressway is beautiful, there is also the point of seeing the lights of the city as stars in the galaxy which is the best.
The above comes from "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" (2020).
As people who have lived in or have known about Japan for a while already know, the address system there is something to behold. Usually here in Canada and the United States, if someone invites me to their home for dinner, I will get a street name and a preceding number. If it's a main street, then all I need is the nearest major intersection and perhaps a map for reassurance and I'm good to go. Even if it's a side street, maybe some general directions and a map for reassurance is all I need.
However, when I've had to go to a friend's or a student's apartment for the first time in Japan, it's been the custom for that friend or student to meet me at their nearest train or subway station and then guide me over. Without the guidance, a map (homemade or otherwise) is absolutely essential because of the address system. It goes by descending order of area unit. For example, if I wanted to go to a friend's apartment whose address is Shinjuku 1-2-3, I would need to head into Shinjuku's 1st district before searching for the 2nd block there and then finally the 3rd building...theoretically. My old address was Fukuei 3-15-17 so the 3rd district of Fukuei, the 15th block in there and the 17th building within that block. But what determines the designation of any of those numbers?! Map please!
Anyways all that preamble ramble was there to introduce a song by NSP, a group that I haven't mentioned in quite a long time. "Go-chome Ni-banchi"(5-2...5th District 2nd Block) is a track on the band's 7th album "Tasogare ni Se wo Mukete"（黄昏に背を向けて...Turning Your Back on the Sunset） from November 1977. Written and composed by vocalist Shigeru Amano（天野滋）, that titular neighbourhood was apparently the scene of some really dramatic and romantic development.
Like a number of folk groups and singers in the 1970s, there was that leap into somewhat more urban contemporary music such as AOR and City Pop for NSP. But I hadn't known that Amano and his group leapt quite that early. When I first listened to "Go-chome Ni-banchi", I had assumed that this was a tune from their early 1980s period but actually it was quite early on in 1977. It is quite groovy with the Santana-esque guitar work and the keyboards, and I can only imagine the plot happening in some downtown neighbourhood not too far away from the rising skyscrapers of Shinjuku. I just hope that the two lovers involved here were able to find each other in the neighbourhood.
Commenter and then KKP contributor nikala was most likely the first one to relate the music of Chu Kosaka's（小坂忠）great 1975 album"Horo"(ほうろう) with the Philly soul of "Shirakechimauze"(しらけちまうぜ). Listening to that one, I definitely got the feeling that outside of the usual enka and kayo kyoku singers who got their fame on television back in the day, there were artists such as Kosaka pushing the boundaries of truly New Music. In a few months, it'll be two years since Kosaka left this mortal coil at the age of 73.
Right after "Shirakechimauze" which starts off the B-side of the original 1975 LP comes this laidback tune "Ryuusei Toshi". If that title sounds familiar to you, then you must have read last Friday's article on "Ryuusei Toshi" by Original Love and then covered by Junk Fujiyama（ジャンクフジヤマ）. Indeed, it is the same title but a wholly different song as it is written by Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）and composed/arranged by Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）.
To further distinguish Kosaka's song from the Original Love song, I'm actually going to go with the translation that YouTuber Purplesound had provided for "Ryuusei Toshi", and that is "Meteor City" rather than the more romantic-sounding "City of Shooting Stars" I gave for last week's tune. But then again, Kosaka's "Ryuusei Toshi" is in itself a romantic song about a couple languidly enjoying their time in bed while the titular meteors are flying through the sky and burning up. Hosono's arrangement includes some wonderful guitar playing by Shigeru Suzuki（鈴木茂）and keyboard work by Masataka Matsutoya（松任谷正隆）and Akiko Suzuki（鈴木晶子）...who's better known now as Akiko Yano（矢野顕子）. By the way, Matsumoto even includes some references to author H.G. Wells and fictional character Captain Nemo.
As well, Kosaka's "Ryuusei Toshi" will be showing up on Yutaka Kimura Speaks next week.
On Christmas Eve Eve (and that's not a spelling error...just being cute), I wrote about jazz chanteuse Mami Horie's（堀江マミ）take on "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and was reminded that a few decades previously, she had also tackled City Pop.
In fact, my first ever article on Horie was her 1979 debut single"Loving You", a City Pop tune that begins with some smoking jazz balladry before the rhythm jumps into a jaunty metropolitan beat. Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）was the fellow behind the melody there. Well, this time around, there is another famous singer-songwriter who took care of the B-side, "Camouflage", and it's none other than Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）under her pen name of Karuho Kureta（呉田軽穂）with Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）on lyrics.
Whereas "Loving You" feels like a morning brunch-happy City Pop tune, "Camouflage" sounds like something to sip an evening cocktail to in the style of Junko Yagami（八神純子）. The piano takes us rolling downtown with a bit of Latin feeling while the electric guitar and saxophone arrive to transport us up to the hotel rooftop bar. I can even imagine Horie herself in the bar playing this song itself.
The above AI Bing image was one of the first I concocted after throwing the title for Miki Matsubara's（松原みき）City Pop classic into the image creator. I hadn't been aware that begging that guy to stay with the lass at midnight involved luring him with McDonalds fries!
Anyways, my good wishes are belated but congratulations to "Mayonaka no Door"（真夜中のドアー）on its 45th anniversary which occurred last November. However, I am using this space and time for something a bit more unusual, and it's to let City Pop fans know of a couple of media creations.
Once again, this first one is a belated affair but the music podcast "Primer" started its run last May with an episode devoted to Matsubara and her debut album "Pocket Park" from 1980. Host Christian Dueñas, music writer Yosuke Kitazawa and radio/tv presenter Linda Marigliano spend the better part of an hour discussing and enjoying the various tracks including the most famous one on it. A couple of days ago, I'd been looking for any sort of podcast to while away the time as I was typing something else when I stumbled upon "Primer" and enjoyed it quite a lot. I've also come across another several "Primer" episodes here as well, so why not give them a spin as well?
The second creation is actually the opposite of my discovery of "Primer" in that it has yet to be released. If the name DJ Notoya is familiar to you, then you probably own a copy of his City Pop compilation "Tokyo Glow" from 2021. And from there, I was able to find out about and post a few songs from that album such as Kumi Nakamura's（中村久美）"Kimagure"（気まぐれ）.
Well, this time around, a new DJ Notoya album is coming out on February 14th 2025 titled "Tokyo Bliss", and it is once again chock-filled with songs of the genre between 1974 and 1988. One of those tracks is Kumiko Sawada's（沢田久美子）"Your Love's Away". The only difference here is that "Tokyo Bliss" will just be the one LP or CD instead of the two-record set of "Tokyo Glow".
On the most recent episode of NHK's "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新・BS日本のうた...Songs of Japanese Spirit）, veteran singer Kenichi Mikawa（美川憲一）appeared to sing a song titled "O-kane wo Choudai" (Please Give Me the Money) and from the arrangement, I figured that it must have been created decades ago.
And as it turns out, it was indeed made decades ago. It was released in November 1971 as Mikawa's 21st single and written by Tetsuro Hoshino（星野哲郎）and composed by Hiroyuki Nakagawa（中川博之）. Based on conversations that lyricist Hoshino had overheard among hostesses (and perhaps clients) at a cabaret, the song deals with one hostess' final reluctant goodbye talk with a soon-to-be former paramour. The lady asks for money to deal with the expenses racked up because of her relationship with him, and the way Mikawa sings it, it sounds like her imploring him rather than threatening him, although in the end, she hints that's the only way he'll finally be rid of her.
My mother had never heard of the song either before that episode so she reacted with a bit of surprise and disgust at the title, and apparently "O-kane wo Choudai" did cause some controversy at the time that it was released. For one thing, because of the lyrics, it hadn't been allowed to be performed on NHK although over the decades, the network finally relented. Women had also complained to Mikawa or his representatives about showcasing such a supposedly grubby hostess but somehow the singer was able to convince the detractors that it wasn't the woman who was the villain here. "O-kane wo Choudai" reached No. 40 on Oricon.
When it comes to the long-running prime-time animated series "Family Guy", I've been somewhat of an in-betweener fan. I remember catching the early episodes back in the late 1990s and enjoying the show for all of the pop culture references via their famous cutaways and it got to the point that I ended up buying the first seven seasons of "Family Guy" on DVD in Japan. Since then, it's basically been just the cutaways that I've been watching since they've generally been more hilarious than the main story which has often gotten a little too dark for my tastes in recent seasons.
However, one thing that has generally remained the same all these years since 1999 is the opening credit sequence with Peter and Lois Griffin making like Archie and Edith Bunker as they sing on the family piano. Plus, there is that jazzy and snazzy theme song by Walter Murphy that reminds me of another theme song from another much older animated series. Murphy, strangely enough, is someone I've known about since I was a kid (although I didn't know the name at the time) because he was also the fellow behind the disco "A Fifth of Beethoven" all the way back in 1976.
Well, years later, I see him as the maestro of the swinging jazz orchestra that has often inhabited the soundtrack of "Family Guy", and I've been a big fan of the main theme. In fact, years later, I finally got the album "Family Guy: Live in Vegas" just for a full version of the theme by Murphy, and he, Seth MacFarlane (and his multiple voices), and the rest of the cast don't disappoint. One YouTube commenter said he hoped that this would be the version that would end the entire show once that comes to pass. I wouldn't mind that at all either...having everyone come on stage to do one big brassy take on the theme. Maybe the humour in "Family Guy" is often crass and cruel, but when it comes to the Murphy music, it's all class.
Yup, I know...this is really a Reminiscings of Young Adulthood more than Youth, but I just had to include this one. So, what was being released in Japan when "Family Guy" made its premiere in January 1999?
