Considering that one of my main goals with this blog was to find a way of integrating City Pop with my favourite western music, I think it's high time I looked at another record from that particular region and era. Sexy Robot by Hitomi 'Penny' Tohyama (who from now on, as her debut album implores, I'll just call 'Penny') is quite a different take on the broad and blurry-bordered umbrella term of City Pop when compared with the previously reviewed For You by Tatsuro Yamashita, but it is no less quintessential to the genre. It simply showcases another side of it - the roots and influences come from similar places, and ultimately both albums boil down to being outstanding products of the 1980's Japanese economic bubble. While busy exporting brands to the western world that we now consider household names, something of a cultural exchange was occurring without us ignorant westerners even noticing, with Japanese musicians borrowing from soul, disco, funk and pop, and infusing with it their own sensibilities and the latest technologies. The results were, as you may expect, both extremely varied and oftentimes very transparently referential.
When you listen to certain (excuse the colloquialism, but I need to be frank) bangers from Sexy Robot, it's hard not to let a part of your mind guiltily think of the music as derivative. If you've ever lurked such dark and hostile corners of the internet as City Pop themed reddit pages, you'll have seen posts about how artists like Toshiki Kadomatsu have 'ripped off' forgotten 12" bass riffs from the 70's. You'll click on the link and listen, and think to yourself with immense reluctance, having thought your Japanese discovery was a work of original genius, "yeah, ok, that is almost identical actually". The most glaring parallel when it comes to Penny's music is Wanna Kiss, whose thudding bassline is the fraternal twin of Queen's Another One Bites The Dust. I didn't notice until I saw one of these obsequious posts pointing it out, the commenter almost salacious in trying to discredit Penny's song, and now the comparison has forever (admittedly, mildly) tainted Wanna Kiss in my mind as a known imitation, no matter how much I adore it and how much effort I can see has been put into making it unique and wonderful in its own right.
But here's the thing: who fucking cares? In addition to such melodramatic exposé-type posts on these often insufferable forums, largely kept aground by Gen Z-ers hiding behind excessive emojis and memes, you'll also find posts of 'new' music, praising acts like The Weekend for 'sampling' Tomoko Aran's Midnight Pretenders (sampling is an understatement, it's basically taking the track unaltered and singing over it) and 'bringing it to a new audience', as if the majority unfamiliar with Tomoko Aran's original track would even consider that he didn't come up with it himself. And you can guarantee they'll be the same people who prefer the 'slow and reverb' version of an Anri song, or gush about bootleggers like Macross 82-99's bare-minimum remixes of 80's tracks being passed off as their own work, without due credit to their original sources. In my opinion, these are far worse crimes than a bit of light musical imitation - these are bonafide regurgitations! I'd much rather listen to something independently generated from Japan that sounds a lot like (for example) Kiss by Prince than something that literally steals and recycles and bastardises a heartfelt article of musicianship and turns it into a mangled effigy of something that was once pure. I have no problem with sampling, but when the line is crossed and these lazy 'mixes' are passed off as new creations by new artists, it boils my blood. Especially when the whole movement is carried by zoomer trolls with moral compasses so warped by modern concepts like accountability and cancel-culture that they can't see any kind of evil or injustice that isn't bathed in a light of woke-ness.
Ok, rant over. Let's rank this shit!
- Wanna Kiss
- Let's Talk In Bed
- We Are In The Dark
- Tuxedo Connection
- Be Mine
- Sexy Robot
- Cathy
- Behind You
- Try To Say
- Slow Love
Average Score: 5.8
Before the advent of the compact disc, it wasn't uncommon for albums to be divided in theme by their sides of play. Overt examples are Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love or, to stay on theme, Mariya Takeuchi's Miss M. While not explicitly annotated as such, what would be 'side A' of Sexy Robot on vinyl or cassette is definitely the more upbeat, danceable half of a clear division, while the second half of the album is slower in pace and much more soulful. While both halves are smoothly but boldly rendered and certainly not disparate, the division itself between the two moods feels a little jarring. Also, the first part is just so much catchier and alive! Of course the slower, moodier side is going to waver somewhat after listening to the strutting, fun, outspoken flamboyance displayed across the first five tracks - there's no escaping this. And it's not a criticism as such, more just an observation, and something of a justification for why my ranking echoes the two halves of the record so closely, with just the middle-most two tracks saving the order from dividing the songs down the middle in the same two parts as the actual tracklist.
Putting any derivation aside, Wanna Kiss is still my top-rated track, and it's a blunt, booming spectacle of sophisticated, refined disco, brought up-to-date for the 80s, with a synth bass laying down the foundations for more experimental ancillary electronic fills. These sounds, by today's standards, are almost retro-futuristic, the wonky, artificial timbres verging on cute or humorous. But just before they reach the level of comical, they evoke the bygone era - that familiar safetynet of nostalgia for something you were never part of that City Pop manages to oh-so-often conjure - and you're transported to a time and a place where these quirks aren't quirks at all, but part of the biome of the music. Along with Wanna Kiss, the confident yet coquettish, partially rapped Let's Talk In Bed carries a kind of restrained sparseness in its musical arrangement, foreshadowing the conventions of modern-day r&b. Reinforcing their western inspiration, songs such as this one and Tuxedo Connection use English lyrics to punctuate the cosmopolitan soundscape with references to alcohol and sexual attraction, selling the record as a soundtrack to a hedonistic and aspirational lifestyle, exemplary of the aforementioned economic bubble long before it was due to burst.
Penny's voice matches the music well - there's something a little ham-fisted about the way she sings, exuberant and verging on brassy, but a gentler or more restrained singer would risk being overshadowed by all of the cutting-edge synths and such. By competing with the instrumentation a little, her voice's boldness wins out and actually reinforces the prevalent themes of confidence and frivolity, and her decisive, expressive phrasing makes sure the spotlight remains on her vocals. That said, she's never uncompromising to the point of being detrimental; when a mellower vocal is needed, such as for the silken and understated We Are In The Dark or one of the more heartfelt tracks in the second half, she is able to rein it in and channel her power into emotion. Penny's voice, to me, feels more typical of a musical theatre or cabaret singer than someone making pop records. But her personality and its placement within the bubble-era zeitgeist is what makes it work, and the result is an unorthodox but striking sound that really distinguishes her from her 1980's peers.
With all the fandango around electronics and drum machine, the music can, at stages, feel a little clumpy and overly automated. The title track suffers from this in particular; despite its distinctive hook and zealous vocal performance, the four bars of solo drum machine at the 2:13 mark do it zero favours, tipping the balance from state-of-the-art sophistication to sounding like it was homemade on a primitive home computer and saved onto a floppy disc. Luckily, the virtuoso guitar and key contributions throughout, from the likes of multiple other City Pop dignitaries such as Makoto Matsushita and Hiroyuki Nanba, bring the music back down to earth and, alongside Penny's singing, insert some much-needed corporeality into what could easily have been quite a robotic affair. Of all the album's offerings, I found Slow Love to be the weakest - assumedly some kind of relaxed, modern take on Motown, but bumbling and quite diluted, and not suited to Penny's ability to bring the levels of drama achieved in the comparably epic closer Be Mine, or any of the funky jams from the first half.
It can sometimes be difficult to know where to start with certain artists, especially when it comes to City Pop, with Penny herself having made too many albums to count on both hands, and a lot of her repertoire similar in flavour. Sexy Robot feels perhaps the most exemplary of her vivacious, flirty, courageous side, and is definitely the harder hitting sibling of her other 1983 release Next Door, which touches on these strengths but pulls several of its punches and feels a little 'naff' at times. This overarching cheapness is something that does unfortunately find its way into other examples of Penny's work, but is largely avoided when she opts for a more acoustic accompaniment (see Just Call Me Penny and Five Pennys). However, with these albums, her unique brand of charismatic, girly confidence is lacking, and the themes of luxury and pleasure-seeking take a backseat. Only with Sexy Robot are all of Penny's biggest strengths able to be experienced without compromise, making it the perfect entry level album to help decide what in her discography to explore next.
I know I spent a little longer on this review than others (not least because I got sidetracked by my resentment of modern appropriation of my favourite musical genre) but hopefully it has been informative and beguiling and not just fanatic rambling. I think it's pretty obvious from the length and depth I went into, as well as the sheer quantity of hyperlinks to discogs pages, that this is something of an area of passion for me. If it inspires anyone to listen to some City Pop, for the first time or the umpteenth, or even just piques your interest or sets off a spark somewhere in your brain, then I am happy.
