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.
Heck of a time to put up something related to winter considering that the Humidex today in Toronto is probably hitting 38 degrees Celsius.
But there is something about this song that's quite catchy. Titled "Virgin Snow", this is a January 1994 single by the band RIO, and this could have been the penultimate single since I have already pegged their final single "Manatsu no Koi"（真夏の恋）as having been released some months later that year. "Manatsu no Koi" was the pop/rock song that greeted viewers of the TBS late-night cooking show "Chuubou desu yo!"（チューボーですよ！）on Saturdays.
"Virgin Snow" was also an opening theme, this time for another TBS program called "Cinema ni Zokkon"（シネマにぞっKON!）. However, this song has more of a technopop flair to it, and in fact, I get those PSY-S feelings from it as high-toned lyricist/singer Mike sings about hoping for a good dusting of snow to eliminate all of her ills.
Summer is now here. The season has certainly been displayed in Toronto for the past couple of days, though, with plenty of heat and humidity and lots of sun. Considering how enticing it all is out there, I hope that folks are being careful outside under the current pandemic circumstances.
Well, to give some happy greetings to the hot season, I thought that I might try something new, namely in the form of a duet between the two bands cinnamons and evening cinema. I had never heard of either band before coming across their August 2017 collaboration "Summertime" so I will have to focus on them separately, but in the meantime, I'm happy to make my acquaintance with this cheerful number that has Mariko Suzuki（鈴木まりこ）of cinnamons and Natsuki Harada（原田夏樹）of evening cinema sharing vocals, with the latter responsible for words and music.
The band cinnamons formed in 2016 and consists of Suzuki, guitarist Shinji Aoyama（青山慎司）and drummer eric, and their profile (since deleted for some reason but there's their Facebook page) states that their music features "a candy voice and twinkling sound" while providing "music for Japanese TV programs and advertisements". They've also provided their share of CDs and digital downloads including "Summertime" which is one of the latter.
evening cinema is an AOR group which with Harada also includes guitarist Tomohiro Hikawa（樋川智宏）, bassist Kazuaki Yamamoto（山本和明）and drummer Taiki Abe（アベタイキ）. It started up in 2015 and according to this website, the members have a deep love for the pop music of the 1970s and 1980s which they have incorporated into the sounds of music from the later decades.
Looks like some other fans have created their own physical interpretations to "Summertime". As mentioned, I'll have to explore both cinnamons and evening cinema on their own.
Let's try to imagine a Johnny's Entertainmentaidoru group nearing the end of its natural life as a unit and then their manager approaches them nervously. The manager then proposes an idea: "Have you lads ever thought about becoming enka singers?"
😱😨😬
Yeah, I thought as much.
That imagined reaction became a song written by Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）and composed by Kimio Mizutani（水谷公生）titled "Enka nante Utaenai" (How the Hell Can We Sing Enka?), the 25th of the 28 singles that 80s aidoru trio Shibugakitai（シブがき隊）released in November 1987. I'm sure that much hilarity came out during the production of this one. After all, it's hard for me to imagine Fukkun, Mokkun and Yakkun donning suits and warbling into the mikes while cherry blossom petals fall delicately around them (although they do look good in their tuxes in the photo at the top).
"Enka nante Utaenai" isn't a parody of an enka tune at all, and I'd say that there really isn't any enka in there. It merely throws in that old Mood Kayo trope of "wa-wa-wa" background chorus and what sounds like a single pluck of a koto while the rest of the song contains a pretty frenzied pop/rock melody reflecting the guys' panic attack. Meanwhile, Akimoto's lyrics show them pitching a fit about being forced to croon about anything wabi-sabi. It's rock or nothing.
I actually have the song on an old compilation LP that I bought at Wah Yueh in Chinatown and was surprised that I had yet to cover it. "Enka nante Utaenai" peaked at No. 18 on Oricon. Perhaps it was fortunate that they weren't invited to the 1987 Kohaku Utagassen (their last appearance to date is 1986); could have been very awkward.😉
It's a bit ironic though that Akimoto contributed to this particular single for Shibugakitai since from his work with the female aidoru groups Onyanko Club（おニャン子クラブ）and AKB48, there have been at least a couple of graduates who've gone into the enka genre.
Well, first off, I would back away slowly from her with no sudden moves and then head off quickly into another direction. Far be it from me to bother Mayumi Horikawa（堀川まゆみ）while she's making sure her cosmetics have been applied correctly. I do believe that she's sitting on a park bench in New York City.
Perhaps the fact that the picture is a cover of her 3rd single"New York Doll" from September 1979 is a clue. However, that's not the subject of this article...it's actually the B-side "Climax". Maybe the original setting for the song was the Big Apple, but when I hear this now some 40 years after its debut in the record stores, I can't help but hear Tokyo back in the day. The funk is there for that City Pop feeling but Horikawa's vocals and those strings remind me of some of the more uptempo songs that 70s aidoru darling Momoe Yamaguchi（山口百恵）was releasing also in the latter part of that decade.
The wailing guitar, the disco strings and the boppy bass are also joined by some pretty thumpy percussion at times, too. Fujimal Yoshino（芳野藤丸）was behind the music while Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）took care of the lyrics.
I gather that this would be the ideal time to put this one up since it's indeed Friday night right now. I am talking about singer-songwriter Yudai Suzuki's（鈴木雄大）3rd single "Friday Night" which was released in February 1983.
Following a few listens to "Friday Night", my impression was that the song was far more West Coast AOR than Japanese City Pop, and then reading some notes on the song at Toshi Kanazawa's blog "Light Mellow on the web", I've found out that backing him up was The Joe Chemay Band while Suzuki was recording this in Los Angeles. To me, "Friday Night" strikes me the same way that Makoto Matsushita's（松下誠）"One Hot Love" from his "First Light" album did when I first heard that classic.
Also, continuing on with the comparison with "One Hot Love", I think both it and "Friday Night" would evoke images of cruising down the main roads of LA during the 1980s. Maybe if Crockett and Tubbs had actually done their policing via "LA Vice", those two songs would have been part of the soundtrack. But I think I'm swooning here since I've just come out of an especially hot shower.💫
Ahhh...good ol' Roppongi Hills. I taught one of my students in a café there and I actually caught the premiere of "Revenge of the Sith" in the VIP theatre one Saturday morning in 2005. Bought myself a beer on the way to my armchair-like seat...as I was watching the last of the "Star Wars" prequels, I realized indeed that the beer helped.
Only discovered about this City Pop treasure within the last half-hour. Titled "Tokyo Melody" and sung by Shoody（シューディ）, I first found it on one of the many genre compilations and then went searching for the individual song. Luckily, I could find it as a video that was originally posted back in 2012.
Nothing better than a song like this for a City Pop Friday...tight horns, groovy keyboard and the cool vocals by Shoody. A lot of City Pop fans/commenters on YouTube have wondered aloud about traveling back in time to experience life in the late 1970s and 1980s while listening to their favourite tunes. I'd say that they would do worse than pop this in their magic Walkman while making the trip back. I myself have wondered what it must have been like to walk in West Shinjuku or Roppongi in the same year that I made that trip to Tokyo as a teenager. Heck, I wouldn't mind taking a walk around the Tokyo Prince Hotel near Shiba Park in 1981 once more.
As is the case with a number of these City Pop songs and singers, I couldn't find out a whole lot about them. From one source, I gleaned that Shoody is the daughter of a man from Mozambique while her mother is a Swedish-American. She released two albums, the first of which was "Tomorrow's Child" from 1981 which has "Tokyo Melody" as a track. The single version of the song was released ahead of the album. From another site, I found out that Shoody was backed by Tetsuji Hayashi's（林哲司）disco band, The Eastern Gang. Indeed, Hayashi was responsible for music and arrangement while someone named Gregory Starr wrote the lyrics according to the JASRAC library. Somehow, I don't think that it's the same guy who worked at the United Nations.
Once again, the YouTube comment of "(name of anime) sent me here!" is alive and well. I first saw it applied via "Hibike! Euphonium" when the high school band covered Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Rydeen" and The Square's"Takarajima" in respective seasons. All I had to do was check out the original versions of the songs to see the many "Hibike! Euphonium sent me here!" comments. Then, a mere two weeks ago, Episode 10 of Season 2 of "Kaguya-sama: Love is War" pulled one off when the title character tried out some voguing to find her calming ritual, sending rapt fans off to check out Madonna's "Vogue" and leave those famous comments.
Looks like "Kaguya-sama" scored another point last week as the usually fluffy Chika Fujiwara unleashed Gordon Ramsey fury on choreographically-damaged Student Council President Miyuki Shirogane. It was only a surprise that the lass didn't pull out two slices of white bread and slam them on either side of Miyuki's head. The issue was that the President had two left feet when it came to performing the famous traditional dance of Soran Bushi, and considering that Fujiwara had gone through hell and back to teach him the basics of volleyball and singing, the temper finally snapped.
Happily, within a few minutes of some rather unconventional tutoring and arguing between Chika and Vice-President Kaguya Shinomiya, Miyuki finally found his groove just in time for the dance presentation at the annual sports festival.
Of course, probably within a few minutes of the end of that episode, fans clambered over each other searching for that actual YouTube video of folks performing Soran Bushi, first sung by the fishermen of Hokkaido according to the Wikipedia article. The above video here was posted up on 2012 but I can guarantee that viewership and comments for that video exploded in the last six days, probably all of them having to do with Miyuki's education.
Both Chika and the Wikipedia article describe what Soran Bushi is all about with each move in the dance representing the actions in the raucous environment of catching all that fish (herring from what I've read in the J-Wiki article). The Hokkaidominyo itself may have been around for quite a while longer, but apparently 1974 was the year that Soran Bushi got its due nationwide. If anyone can give me an earlier year for its origins, please let me know.
The "Kaguya-sama" version of Soran Bushi had some good pizzazz but I have to admit that all sorts of singers and dancers and musicians haven't slouched when it comes to bringing the dance onstage. I found this video of enka singers Hiroshi Miyama（三山ひろし）and Kouhei Fukuda（福田こうへい）going for the gusto with a small army of dancers.
Compare Soran Bushi with another traditional song that I've written about, Tanko Bushi.
