Fingerprints of Future Funk: Taeko Onuki’s Mignonne
Taeko Onuki’s debut on RCA was a turning point for her career and the nascent genre of city pop.
Fumble through some city pop records long enough and you’re bound to come across some of the genre’s staples. The blue sky cover of Anri’s Timely!! is sure to crop up, along with any number of Tatsuro Yamashita and Toshiki Kadomatsu albums. Artist Hiroshi Nagai is sure to have designed the artwork to a few records you’ll find, just as you’ll try (and fail) to escape Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love”.
Among that vaunted list of stellar talent is Taeko Onuki. Onuki debuted in Tokyo’s music scene as a member of Sugar Babe. Alongside her bandmates, the aforementioned Yamashita and guitarist Kunio Muramatsu, Onuki and Sugar Babe bucked the era’s growing interest in hard rock.
Sugar Babe instead relied on a budding pop fusion sound, which carried into Onuki’s debut solo album. Grey Skies was aided both by Muramatsu’s sometimes folksy guitar, and the jazz taps of renowned composer Ryuchi Sakamoto, but emphasized Onuki’s earnest delivery.
By her second album, Sunshower, Onuki further explored fusion sounds, thanks in part to her growing list of contacts. Drumming by Chris Parker, who would continue to play on projects from Teddy Pendergrass, Kashif, and Cher, injected Sunshower with life. The album’s intro cut, “Summer Connection” oozes with the breezy, finely arranged sound that helped build City Pop into a lauded genre. Sakamoto, who played keyboard on that track, provided musical direction, which included string and brass sections that helped Sunshower rub shoulders with the budding disco sound in the US.
Though Sunshower might be Onuki’s most inescapable album, her third solo album came packaged with the sounds that made her synonymous with the City Pop genre. Mignonne, which is French for cute or petite, released in 1978 on RCA. While Onuki previously enlisted trusted artists to contribute to her sound, production on Mignonne was spearheaded by international Japanese music critic Eji Ogura.
With Ogura onboard, Mignonne took a decidedly more commercial approach. Years before collaborating with Onuki, Ogura played guitar on the self-titled debut album for Japanese rock group Happy End. Featuring hints of both folk and psych rock, Happy End became a trendsetting act for the decade and Japan as a whole — the band was affectionately called the “Japanese Beatles” — despite the group lasting just three albums between 1970 and 1973.
Ogura’s influence on Mignonne tilted the project away from Onuki’s pioneering fusion sound. Much of her delivery is demure, possibly pointing to her album title, but more likely a reaction to her dissatisfaction with the album’s direction. In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Onuki detailed her unhappiness with the project. “During the recording all sorts of things were changed. I ended up feeling sick of the process. Part of that was because I changed record labels, and they really wanted to sell this album. Before I could do whatever I wanted to do. But with Mignonne, the producer wanted to change things. That was new for me.”
Still, her tame delivery and more focused instrumentals give way to an album that serves as a primer to future funk. The two-song stretch from “
言いだせなくて (Iidasenakute or I can’t tell you)” and “4:00 A.M.” is a field study into the same sound that would be further popularized by Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” a half-decade later.
Unlike “Plastic Love,” which has since been endlessly flipped by future funk producers and city Pop revivalists, “4:00 A.M.” provides less of a direct reference and more of a style for artists to draw from. There’s the inherently bouncy instrumental to catch listeners ears, provided by Sakamoto, Tsunehide Matsuki (guitar), and Haruomi Hosono (bass) among others. Then there’s the swelling prehook with the chorus’s chants of “Lord, give me one more chance,” imbuing the track with some unexpected soul.
Both “言いだせなくて” and “4:00 A.M.” maybe unsurprisingly, were produced and arranged by her Sunshower maestro Sakamoto. The collaboration here jolts a bit more of Onuki’s spirit into an album that marked a two year hiatus from dropping music and an eventual shift towards newer, European influences.
While Sunshower will give you an entirely enjoyable Onuki experience from front to back, Mignonne is emblematic of city pop’s run through the spotlight. The rise of city pop coincides with Japan’s 1980s bubble economy. The sense of excess touched the music industry creatively and financially, with artists playing to requests for songs indicative of the lives they led. Onuki might not have been happy with Mignonne, but the tightly woven sound, anchored by contributions from Sakamoto, proved influential for years to come.
