Milestones

Tatsuro Yamashita

Name: Tatsuro Yamashita – Spacy
Item: Spacy
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Spacy

1977 (Rca)

city pop

by Federico Romagnoli

Tatsuro Yamashita is one of the most important artists in the history of Japanese music. Unanimous praise from music critics, the entertainment industry, the general public, and even independent musicians who regard him as a touchstone, makes him a cross-generational icon with few equals.

His work is marked by an exceptional consistency in quality, which led him to slow down his output once the euphoria of youth had worn off, releasing new material only once he was certain he'd amassed enough to satisfy his obsessive standards of attention to detail (his latest album, "Softly", arrived after an eleven-year hiatus).

Critical opinion on which is his best record is split, since there's no clear reason to single out one album as decisively superior to the rest. "Record Collectors" and "Music Magazine" back "Songs" – released in 1975 under the name Sugar Babe – now regarded as the record that inaugurated city pop, while "Snoozer" and the Japanese edition of "Rolling Stone" favour "Spacy" (1977), his third album overall (second as a solo artist). Also in contention is "For You" (1982), which turned him into one of the dominant figures of the domestic market and enjoys enormous prestige among fans, even if it hasn't scored the highest rankings in the magazines just mentioned.

Whether or not "Spacy" is truly his best record – whatever that would even mean – its impeccable balance is nonetheless plain to see, whereas in his other albums there's always some element that risks throwing the tracklist slightly off-kilter: on "Songs" not every track is written and sung by him, and the stylistic gap is noticeable; "Ride On Time" (1980) should have alternated funk numbers with ballads instead of splitting them rigidly (the former on side A, the latter on side B); on "For You" the flow is broken up by too many interludes; "Boku no naka no shounen" (1988) is one of the great synth-funk masterpieces, but its two glossy ballads blend poorly with the rest of the formidable material, while "Cozy" (1998) is perhaps his most eclectic record, but 73 minutes of music is a lot even for a heavyweight like him.

This is nitpicking, of course, since all of these are textbook pop records and every one of them is, in effect, a classic. In "Spacy", however, not only is it impossible to find anything out of place, but it also marks the debut of some of the artist's key strengths. It's also the first work made under his complete artistic control, which is why it's sometimes cited as the moment Yamashita became Yamashita.

His first solo album, "Circus Town" (1976), had stalled at number 50 on the Oricon weekly chart, selling barely 10,000 copies, despite RCA's faith in the project being strong enough that they sent him to the United States to record it.

Yamashita was struck both by the indifference shown by the Los Angeles session players, which obviously left him with a poor impression, and by the enthusiasm of their New York counterparts, in particular producer Charles Calello, who gave him his own scores to study. Calello was one of the greatest orchestrators in the American industry: he had worked with Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Ray Charles, a then-young Bruce Springsteen and dozens of other major names. Having learned his tricks, Yamashita decided to put them straight into practice for the new album, this time to be recorded in Japan.

Without a huge budget to work with, he tried to put together the best possible team, handpicking the local musicians who had impressed him most in recent times. Among others, he brought in jazz guitarist Tsunehide Matsuki, drummer Shuichi "Ponta" Murakami (also a jazz musician, but introduced to the pop-rock world by the celebrated singer-songwriter Yosui Inoue), bassist Haruomi Hosono (who had recently disbanded Happy End and played on Yumi Arai's landmark early albums), and keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto, at the time still an up-and-coming session musician. The latter two would go on to found the Yellow Magic Orchestra the following year, together with Yukihiro Takahashi.

Yamashita played all the rhythm electric guitar parts, the percussion and several keyboards, as well as arranging every track, orchestral parts included. For the lyrics – an aspect he would later handle himself as his career progressed, but which at the time only occasionally caught his interest – he enlisted the help of Minako Yoshida, who also contributed backing vocals (the exchange between the two was quite close-knit in that period: Yoshida's albums from the same years all featured Yamashita as co-writer, arranger and/or producer).

"Spacy" opens with "Love Space", one of the emblematic tracks of the refined approach that made its author famous. It's a midtempo funk track with orchestrations worthy of disco music, whose escapist lyrics turn a love song into a journey through the cosmos:

The dispersal of love makes me infatuated,

I know I'll see you soon.

Pull the rope and let's run away,

until we become one with this city's night sky.

The constant glimmer of a star

adorns our love.

I can't let you go once I have you with me,

let's fly into space

It's a simple lyric [note 1], but one that intersects perfectly with the musical construction: consider the interlude that kicks in at 1'42", with its swirling strings and Yoshida's ascending choruses that seem to mimic a take-off.

The chord progression exploits ninth and seventh harmonic tensions, alongside a skilful use of diminished chords, laying down a carpet over which Yamashita shows off his tenor voice at its best, particularly in the chorus, where he hits the B3 on the keyboard in full voice (most singers would use falsetto to reach that note): a display of vocal power that fully matches the passion of the lyrics.

It's an unusual compositional style for pop music, with many nods to jazz, and it runs through practically the whole album, creating an atmosphere of emotional suspension whereby the triumphant moments still carry a tinge of melancholy, and the gloomier ones still retain a note of vitality.

The album thus treads a path balanced between songs that are at once romantic and dynamic ("Tsubasa ni nosete", in some ways comparable to contemporary música popular brasileira), pop-soul ballads ("Sutekina gogo wa", an openly declared tribute to Gene Chandler) and slow numbers built on decidedly unusual chord sequences ("Candy", which makes use of an augmented chord with a flat fifth).

“Dancer” closes the first side of the vinyl with a particularly elaborate arrangement: the verse consists of Yamashita's voice echoing over Murakami's rhythm, marked out in sixteenth notes, while faint string dissonances emerge in the distance. It's a subtractive construction that puts the drums especially in the spotlight, helped along by fleeting interventions of electric piano and guitar. In the chorus a six-piece horn section bursts in, suddenly filling the void and creating a powerful emotional impact.

The lyrics, particularly dark, are among the few written by Yamashita in that period: he was inspired by a Korean student he knew, who left Japan for North Korea because of the “Progetto di rimpatrio per i Coreani in Giappone” pushed by Kim Il-sung, whose propaganda machine (backed by the Soviet Union and the Japanese Communist Party) deceived 93,000 people: none of them would ever again have the chance to leave the country once they had returned, nor to stay in touch with relatives left behind in Japan.

We're all acrobatic dancers,

let's stay silent and keep on dancing.

We don't even choose the steps,

we only shake our cold bodies.

Outside the window, darkness.

All around, irremediably,

even heart and love burn like fire.

No voice reaches me

and the city is fading away.

Outside the window, darkness.

What should I do?

We acrobatic dancers must always

keep on dancing

“Umbrella” is a shape-shifting track, weaving whispered moments with intimate atmospheres, interludes disco music, contrasts between electric and acoustic timbres, free-form art rock passages and sounds that unexpectedly emerge from the mix (electric sitar, plucked strings, the rumble of a thunderstorm).

Three chamber-like songs follow, played almost entirely by Yamashita in the absence of a rhythm section: “Ienakatta kotoba wo” (which recycles a Calello brass arrangement discarded from the previous album), “Asa no youna yuugure” (which contains the first a cappella part recorded by Yamashita by overdubbing his own voice multiple times – an element destined to become one of his trademarks) and “Kinuzure” (a psychedelic sketch worthy of the vocal groups of the Sixties – Beach Boys and Free Design above all – with the voices of Yamashita and Yoshida soaring into bold abstract shapes over a layer of piano, accordion and a bass line synthesized with the Arp Odyssey).

Closing the album is “Solid Slider”, a seven-minute funk track recorded by a lineup partially different from the rest of the album, with Kenji Ohmura on lead guitar, Akihiro Tanaka on bass and Hiroshi “Yukari” Uehara on drums.

It stands out for the peculiar slap with bass placed on the upbeat of the fourth beat, the flute embellishments, and the ample space given over to improvisation, with guitar, saxophone and electric piano solos (the latter marking the best performance of Sakamoto's contributions on the album, showing him fully at ease with the jazz fusion of the era).

The lyrics are more unsettling than the music might suggest:

Solid slider,

in the silence of the night,

I wait well hidden,

I watch through the tense atmosphere.

I tell myself "this is the last time",

with dried-out eyes I've cornered him.

The knife gleams in the moonlight,

in an instant I could kill him

"Spacy" turned out to be a resounding commercial flop, missing the top 50 and selling just six thousand copies. It's likely that today it wouldn't be regarded as one of the masterpieces of Japanese pop had its author not gone on to become one of the country's most important artists, racking up twelve number-one albums over a span of forty-two years. But that's exactly what happened, forcing critics to reckon with the fact that this universe of complex harmonies, celestial atmospheres and funk rhythms had laid its foundations right here in these grooves.

In February 2002, the CD reissue finally hit number 29, in a week in which Yamashita boasted no fewer than seven albums simultaneously in the top thirty.

Today the album enjoys a strong cult following in the West too, aided by the rediscovery of Yamashita - and consequently of city pop as a whole [note 2] - sparked by the explosion of vaporwave. In 2018 even the Romans Colle der Fomento they even went as far as sampling "Love Space" in the track "Music e fumo (Re-Edit)".

[Note 1] It should be noted that the translation is quite far from the literal meaning and involves a strong degree of interpretation, since rendering it sensibly in Italian would otherwise have been difficult. Some forced choices nonetheless emerged, such as "la dispersione dell’amore" ("the dispersion of love"), an expression that feels a bit stiff in our language. It's a metaphor that probably aims to convey love as an entity that expands outward and strikes people.

[Note 2] Although the album is one of the cornerstones of city pop, we chose not to clutter the article with a full discussion of the genre itself. For a broader overview of the phenomenon, readers can refer to thededicated article featured on OndaRock.

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16/10/2022

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition