Happy End #1

While poking around the web yesterday I came across this article about Rolling Stone Japan's list of the 100 best Japanese albums. The article is interesting for a few reasons. One, because it points out that magazines in Japan have tended to not compile these kinds of lists, as they might piss off their advertisers. (Apparently cover stories are auctioned to the highest bidder, and album reviews are all positive.) And two, because the number one album is one that I actually own.

Happy End (はっぴえんど) was an early-'70s band fronted by one Haruomi Hosono, whom you might know as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan's answer to Kraftwerk and the launch pad for another famous Japanese musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto. I first learned of Happy End from the Lost in Translation soundtrack. The song "Kaze wo atsumete" is played over the ending credits, and can be heard briefly in a karaoke rendition during the film. At the time I had no idea that Hosono was responsible for the song, or how popular it was.

Here is is in its entirety:

When I arrived in Japan this year some friends in Tokyo presented me with the album the song is taken from, Kazemachi roman. I was delighted, and after listening all the way through became an instant fan. "Kaze" is nice folk rock, but the album is much more varied than that. Country, blues, psych... all with a wistfulness and sadness that gets under your skin.

I guess I'm not the only one that feels this way, judging by the album's placement as the number one Japanese rock album of all time. The article also mentions a rival magazine that decided to make its own list, and went out of its way to mention that it would absolutely not be putting Kazemachi roman at the top. It gave it #32, but a lot of people must consider it number one for the magazine to make that statement.

Hosono left Happy End after only a few albums. He recorded as Harry Hosono and Tin-Pan Alley for a bit, releasing some really cool jazz-influenced stuff, before forming YMO in the late '70s and changing the way we think about electronics in pop music. He's also released a lot of ambient albums, also something up my alley.

So, does it deserve to be number one? I don't know, give me a few more decades to absorb Japanese music. There's so much stuff on that list I've never heard!

Comments

[rupan777]

What a weird list. Merzbow? Violent Onsen Geisha? Utada Hikaru? Hellooo, where's the freaking rock? No freaking Kuwata Keisuke? Triceratops? Unicorn? Wakusei? Moritaka Chisato? Barring subjectivity, I get this sneaking suspicion that he made that list keeping our gaijin eyes in mind.

Speaking of Happy End, if it wasn't for YMO, their drummer, Matsumoto Takashi, would have been the wunderkind of the group. He's played with almost everyone in Japan at some point.