...past entries...
February 15, 2012 - Haruo Chikada: Master of Pretty Much Everything.

There's a lot of dedication in any decent rock scene...well, any scene at all, really. Add that to the Japanese work ethic, and you get a staggering amount of stuff. I've been doing the reboot of this site for about six months now, and with a handful of exceptions, every day's update is brought about by some recent activity: reissues, new bands, new songs, new permutations of awesomeness. I'm not even in Japan anymore, but it's not particularly difficult to not just find something cool, but to find something interesting enough to warrant the 900 or so words and couple of YouTube clips I usually end up throwing out there in intertubesland. Every time I think I might be exhausting the possibilities, ten minutes of digging around invariably results in something out there that proves me wrong.

And sometimes I smack my forehead and say "how the hell did I not write about this yet?" Which brings us to Haruo Chikada.

He started off in 1970,  playing keyboards in the band Rock Pilot. Rock Pilot was more pop that their name suggested, but when the band backed Alan "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" Merrill on his tour for his debut album Merrill 1, he and Chikada decided to wiggle their way into actual rock...specifically glam rock, with a group that had the unquestionably mighty name Godzilla. They ended up recording an instrumental covers album with guitarist Hiroshi Kato under the name Godzilla and Yellow Gypsy, which featured stuff like T. Rex's "Get It On (Bang A Gong)" and Led Zeppelin's "Rock 'n' Roll." This was seriously new stuff in Japan, so much so that audiences had no idea what to do with them: their main gig was as an opening act for the film (yeah, seriously) Melody.

Godzilla didn't last real long, understandably enough, and when they went their separate ways, Chikada joined Yuya Uchida's 1815 Rock 'n' Roll Band (here they are covering Zuno Keisatsu's "Comic Zashi Nanka Iranai," i.e. "I Don't Need a Comic Book." Chikada's on piano.)  It would take a whole book to even give a rough outline of Chikada's career after that, so now that we've handled the origins, let's skip around the timeline and go over a very, very quick skimming of the surface of his artist/performer/producer/composer/mastermind time in the Japanese music scene.

Chikada's background was in rock, but after his time in Uchida's band, he quickly fixated on dance music. In the 70s, dance music meant "funk," and when his band Haruo Chikada and Haruophone took to the stage, they did not dick around.


That's their appropriately titled debut, "Funky Dakko No. 1," a non-album single that'll set you back a couple of hundred bucks if you want a copy. I don't get how or why that's out of print, but given the way issues happen in Japan, maybe you could just hang on a few weeks. Anyway, weirdly out of print singles notwithstanding, Haruophone has quite the catalog...not bad for a band that only lasted for four years after their debut single.

After Haruophone, Chikada formed the gloriously monikered Haruo Chikada and Beef. I got to ask him why "Beef," and when he told me that Beef eventually became the Juicy Fruits, it hit me like a ton of bricks: he's a Phantom of the Paradise fan. If that doesn't mean anything to you, you really need to see Phantom of the Paradise: here's Beef, and here's the Juicy Fruits. But more importantly, here's Haruo Chikada and Beef, and here's Chikada's Juicy Fruits, who had a gigantic hit with "Jenny Ha Go Kigen Naname," or "Jenny's in a Rotten Mood."


And unlike the other one, you can actually get this one.

I said this would be a very, very quick skimming, so I'll throw out some names: Haruo Chikada and Vibratones (which included future members of Pearl Brothers, along with Hoppy Kamiyama...yes, that Hoppy Kamiyama...and Yutaka Fukuoka, who would later form the dance pop band Pink.) And The Pinups. And the hip-hop band (formed in 1987, for real) Vibrastone, which included members of Jagatara, Beef, Men's 5 and others. Vibrastone had releases on Chikada's label BPM, a hip hop label formed in 1986 (!) and inspired by Run-DMC's cover of "Walk This Way." Chikada himself took on the name President BPM, and you better believe he released stuff.

After I got over the whole Beef/Juicy Fruits thing, he explained that he was attracted to the artificiality of music. The glam rock of Godzilla...well, glam in general...had more than it's share of artificiality. And with the possible exception of Haruophone, that attraction to synthetic sounds isn't too difficult to detect, especially when he went full blown electronic with Rice and The Lunatic Thunder.

And I can not let the following go unposted. In 1985. Chikada wrote the music to the very, very Phantom of the Paradise-esque Hoshizuku Kyodai No Densetsu (i.e. The Legend of the Stardust Brothers.) It actually looks like it might be a remake. Dunno for sure, but that's Shingo Kubota from Tokyo New Wave band 8½ as, uh, Shingo. And that's Jun Togawa's sister Kyoko as the blue woman ignoring the band.


Chikada's in the movie as a "ruined musician." Talk about playing against type. And here he is performing that song (for once) by himself.

And, well, Chikada "presented" it, too. He's an actor, producer, anime voice, radio show host, pop culture commentator, rock historian (who provided running commentary in the Japanese edition of Julian Cope's Japrocksampler,) and will probably cure cancer when we're not looking. I have no idea if, how or when this dude sleeps.

February 14, 2012 - Roman Porsche: Have a Manly Valentine's Day.

Take a good, long, steamy gawk at this:


You're welcome.

That's the album Mago (Grandson) by Roman Porsche. Roman Porsche is a DJ/performance duo who were once described to me (by someone who would know) as a Japanese Suicide. The stuff they played for me certainly fit the description, but when I went out to find more, well, that there cover stared me right in the face.

Obviously, there's a bit more to this.

Roman Porsche are two guys, hence the "duo" part: Roman Yuhikari and Okite Porsche. Roman's the baby. They have a tendency to get naked in public.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Roman Porsche started off in 1997 as a reaction to the ever increasing tendency towards sterility and repetition in electronic music in the 90s. They (quite rightly, I'd say) felt that the spontaneity of 80s electronic music, often the result of "flaws" both small and large, had given way to artists who gave identical, mechanical performances due to inevitable "improvements" in electronic instruments. They wanted to bring the sweat and danger back. Not surprisingly, they're big 80s guys. BIG 80s guys.

They're also kinda smart-asses. This song's the 2006 single "Otoko Wa Hashi O Tsukawanai," which means "A Real Man Doesn't Use A Bridge," which I'm guessing means it's a deceleration of manliness. Bridges are totally for pussies. Just jump the fucker. The chorus is a defiant "I'm a man. Just a man!" In fact, a lot of their song titles involve the word otoko (man.)

Sit back and bask in the mannish manly manhood on display here.


Yeah. The Suicide comparison certainly makes a lot of sense in terms of their earlier stuff (which I can't find any examples of online,) but Messrs. Roman and Porsche obviously got away from that as they went along, and they have a goofy sense of humor that Vega and Rev didn't exactly wear on their sleeve. When I first saw their videos, I wasn't entirely sure about them. I mean, the thing about satire is that sometimes it plays it so straight that it's indistinguishable from the real thing. Every once in a while, especially in the 80s, you'd see something where you just couldn't tell. God knows I've been in enough goth bars where guys act like that with absolute sincerity, so maybe I was imposing my own wishful thinking on their (maybe) dead serious attitude.


No.

That's "Oyaji No Lingerie" (i.e. "Dad's Lingerie.") Manly, I say. That's a track recorded for their 2008 greatest hits comp 10 Shunen Kiken Best Album (Mo Sukoshi Majime Ni Yatte Okube Kidatta,) which means Tenth Anniversary Best Album (Maybe We Should Have Taken This A Bit More Seriously.) I'd have to disagree with that, as their unironic 80s irony serves the dual purpose of feeding the 80s nostalgia bug while acknowledging how utterly ludicrous it all could be. They also inject a sense of humor into a genre that was often way too self impressed, like their most recent single (featuring girl pop duo Vanilla Beans,) "High School Lullaby."


That's from their most recent album, Nusunda Bike De Amagikoe, which means Driving Across Amagi by Stolen Motorcycle. I have no idea what the rather familiar looking cover art has to do with that, and I'm a bit afraid to find out. I also don't know whether to be annoyed or relieved that there's no YouTube footage of the public nudity (wait...yes I do) but I can remedy this sad situation somewhat by insisting that you scroll down this page from Smashing Mag.

If you're still talking to me after looking at that, I'd like to finish with saying that the duo also DJs semi-regularly, with an unsurprising tendency towards 80s synth pop. They've even released three rock solid mix CDs that prove that, joking or not, they seriously know their shit. They also cover Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" (Volume 1,) The Stalin's "Kaibou Shitsu" (i.e. "Dissecting Room," Volume 2,) and New Order's "Blue Monday" (Volume 3.) If you're in The Land of the Rising Sun anytime soon, you can check Porsche's blog for dates.

Long live the 80s.
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