Furui Nikki (古い日記)— Akiko Wada

#365Songs: August 15

There’s no diagram for music discovery. Sometimes what little guidance we get isn’t even in our native tongue.

Many years ago, I purchased an album called Nippon Girls Vol 1: 60’s Japanese Pop, Beat & Bossa Nova 1966–70 during the Record Store Day festivities. I snatched it up because Pizzicato Five had turned me onto a number of these artists by association. It became an instant favorite, a treasure in my rapidly expanding collection.

Here’s a YouTube clip of the full record:

I loved it so much I wanted to create a playlist of these songs in Spotify to take with me — except for one problem. Spotify doesn’t have many. And sometimes if they do have them, the profiles are only in the Japanese characters and the search doesn’t pick up the translation.

So I floundered. The playlist remains very short. However — and since I’m writing this post, there must be a silver lining somewhere — I kept searching and digging and sampling other users’ playlists and sometimes playlists from the Japanese artists (who are “on” Spotify even if their music is not). And then there’s the joy of following the career of artists that kept recording music beyond the 1960s Nippon pop era.

This particular journey introduced me to Akiko Wada, an artist featured on Nippon Girls Vol 2 : 60’s Japanese Pop, Beat & Bossa Nova 1965-70. The song I wanted wasn’t present, but 古い日記 or “Furui Nikki” popped up on her tracklist attached to this cover for her 1974 two-song EP.

I’m getting Akiko Wada as Roger Moore James Bond vibes. A brandy snifter and head filled with bad ideas. I don’t know about you, but there was no way I’m not listening to that record. Big horns, funky bass guitar that could have been lifted straight out of Isaac Hayes’s back pocket.

The song has something to do with returning to an old diary and digging up memories of a past love, but just give me the horns and her bold and brassy vocals. When she rips into the chorus, there’s a distortion on the low end that’s sexy and sultry and straight out of the Shirley Bassey vocal academy.

It’s certainly not the kind of music I went looking for — but I’m never going to complain about pure 1970s female-fronted funk. In Japanese. And since I can’t get distracted by lyrical depth (or the lack thereof) or clever twists of phrase, it’s the kind of pure, unadulterated music I celebrated in my July 24th post about Maybeshewill’s “Red Paper Lanterns”— the search of the aural equivalent of “pure cinema.”

But since you asked, here’s a rough translation I found on the Interwebs.

Not sure why
But back then, you and I
Lived in the tiny apartment of our love
Cynical of society

Not sure why
But back then, you and I
Wasted our youth
Huddling our loving bodies against each other

I used to like you
But I’d never ever say I loved you
I don’t mind that we spent those days
Tucked away from the city though

Back then, you and I
Wouldn’t put our faith in anybody
Just each other
We didn’t care about anything else

Back then, you and I
Would think about the future
We didn’t have any free time
And didn’t treasure the love we had, either

I used to like you
But I’d never ever say I loved you
I don’t mind that we spent those days
Tucked away from the city though

Back then, you and I
Got wet in the rain on rainy days
We lived and loved much more carelessly
And freely then than we do now

Back then, woo
Back then, woo
Back then, ha!

These are the holy grails at the end of every quest to find and discover new music. Akiko Wada is the reason I’ll never understand the braindead slaves to atrophy, the music listeners that flip on the oldies channel playing the music of their youth and let it ride.

They’ve accepted the fact that you’ve nothing left to discover, no music that could possibly broaden your narrow frame of reference. Just roll over and die already.

I prefer to live, to keep digging for forgotten and misplaced relics. There’s just so much great music out there and music — music of all shapes, colors, tempos, and volumes — makes this long journey worth the doing.

~

Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!