Greetings and salutations Hivers. Today let's go into another Evening Groove / Three Tune Tuesday post.
As always, thanks to 
Today I have another mix of different genres. As always, trying to keep it interesting.
Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love
If you were paying attention to YouTube trends a few years ago, you may have seen this song. It was everywhere for awhile. Some YouTuber discovered the song, liked the groove and so shared it, and from there it spread across YouTube like wildfire going completely viral, with everyone posting their own remixes of it or reactions to it. It became so popular that the label couldn't get the videos taken down as quickly as a hundred more were put up, so they instead decided to do a special rerelease of the song using the cover photo of Takeuchi's "Sweetest Music" album because YouTube had decided that photo belonged to Plastic Love instead. A 40 year old song going viral on YouTube forcing a rerelease... what a crazy world we live in.
The genre is called city pop and is simply described as "pop with an urban feel". It was fairly popular in Japan for a brief period in the 80s before vanishing as the trend quickly changed. Before YouTube rediscovered the song, this was not one of her bigger hits. Funny how a lessor track from long ago can be rediscovered and given new life. See what you think.
Caitlin Myers did an English cover. Her performance is pretty good, making it worth a listen. Listen here.
In part due to this event, many city pop songs from that time period have become quite popular on YouTube. Do a search for "city pop" and you will find tons of them, often with anime title images.
The Raven - The Alan Parsons Project
Poe's "The Raven" has always been one of my favorite poems. We had to memorize parts of it in high school and recite them for the class. When I told about that to my family, my grandma told of how she memorized the poem in her high school years and performed it for the entire school. That motivated me to learn it better for myself, and the better I learned it the more I liked it.
This song has some wild sounds. The lyrics are random bits from the poem. Both combine to make a great tune! It was originally released in 1976 and reissued in 87 with a few additions.
REM - Man on the Moon
This was the second single from their eight album in 1992. You may know this song from the movie of the same name that was released at the end of the decade. This was REM's tribute to Andy Kaufman, the eccentric and controversial comedian of the 70s and early 80s who died of lung cancer.
I was too young to have been aware of Kaufman when he was alive, but I met him when Nick-at-Nite started running reruns of Taxi, the show that made him famous. I was also a fan of REM when these reruns were playing, making me instantly love this song.
If you've never seen it, here's Andy goofing on Elvis.
So what's your favorite?
| David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
