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March 28, 2024, 05:39:42 PM

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Berryz Kobo - Natsu Matsuri (The highpoint of music)

Started by Sheffield Wednesday, March 08, 2020, 10:35:10 PM

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Sheffield Wednesday

On August 29th 1990, Japanese pop-rock group Jitterin' Jinn released Natsu Matsuri, a wistful tale of teenage heartache channeled into a life-affirming surge of bittersweet longing. It tells the story of a boy who takes a girl to the summer festival celebrations and as they sit and watch the fireworks, chatting about nothing and playing with sparklers, he somehow can't bring himself to tell her how he feels, and the budding romance fades away before it begins. The song is from the perspective of the boy, now grown up and forever regretful. As the chorus puts it:

Kimi ga ita natsu wa tooi yume no naka
Sora ni kieteita uchiage hanabi...


The memory of a summer with you is in a distant dream
The fireworks that had disappeared into the dark night sky...

A modest success, the song was covered ten years later on by Whiteberry, a girl group in their mid-teens, and it reached a much wider audience. The arrangement is poppier, the vocals not quite as yearning and full of longing as the original but more unrestrained and celebratory as well as charmingly off-key! It's bursting with character. It feels like Crash by The Primitives as covered by Shonen Knife in a very playful mood. It's fucking brilliant. The best pop song I'd heard in years.

And then I stumbled upon the live cover by Berryz Kobo from one of their last ever concerts, at a fan-club-only performance. They opened with Natsu Matsuri, a song they'd never performed before, and took the roof off. At this point, they knew that they were in the twilight of their time as idols, that this was to be one of their final shows in a career which they'd started in childhood, frankly. The song perfectly encapsulates the triumphant but fatalistic and bittersweet moment they were all living at that moment.

Kimi ga ita natsu wa tooi yume no naka
Sora ni kieteita uchiage hanabi...


There is as much art, nuance and commitment to their craft and to their roles as in almost any live performance I have seen. It's wholesome, joyful, sincere, so incredibly professional and yet completely playful. They are showing all of their experience and intuition, they're not lost to their emotions, they just fucking nail it and it seems as much for themselves as for the audience. There's a moment at 2:44 where Sugaya Risako, wearing red, swings her ponytail and twirls because she's just having fun and it feels completely spontaneous, the joyous expression of music and performance captured in one motion. I'm very happily married but I literally felt lovesick the moment I saw it. It's theatre, it's storytelling, it's artifice but what it makes you feel is real. I'm so happy and lucky to be alive to experience this.

And now so are you:

https://youtu.be/VvSD1mC7tlE

chveik


Sheffield Wednesday


Sheffield Wednesday

Some bonus versions mentioned above:

Jitterin' Jinn original 1990 recording: https://youtu.be/BFvdvIFsvPg

Jitterin' Jinn live version 2000: https://youtu.be/b84QiAh7Oq8

Whiteberry 2000 cover version: https://youtu.be/2a0qy3unssQ




bgmnts

Shame it was live, would love to hear that recorded in the studio.

Sheffield Wednesday

There are umpteen studio recordings of the song, including two I posted directly above yours. One thing which makes this particularly special is that it is a live performance on a farewell tour.


Sheffield Wednesday

Thanks, and glad you enjoyed it. I really love that version, too. Even without understanding the lyrics, it makes me feel this happy longing and nostalgia and a mono-no-aware that the moment has passed for me to ever feel young love or teenage heartache again, but also there's a kind of akogare that I could never be as talented or charming in the way these people are. That's not 'lil ol me' self-deprecation because I have my own abilities, it's just a recognition of their very particular character, seeming effortlessness and their ability to make an audience feel deeply happy.


Abnormal Palm

As I celebrate the tremendous success of getting a Perfect Full Combo on Taiko no Tatsujin with this song, I've spent the afternoon alone at the office dancing round to various versions:

A slightly breathless, almost out-of-tune, naif version by Aoi chan:

https://youtu.be/H6sAxQi8OM0


It reminds me of the girl singing Country Roads in Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart.

Also linked below:

https://youtu.be/ispeh2bW1AQ


I still listen to the Berryz Kobo version in the OP almost every day. There's so much in there. The vocals cut through me. As someone said in the YT comments for a different cover:

"It make me nostalgic of something I never experienced."

That's exactly it. It makes me feel heartache of a kind which I just don't have any more, and a teenage excitement for new love which I will never feel again. And yet, as bittersweet as that longing is, it also makes me burst with happiness. I was laughing dancing round, the feeling just speaks to me like little else. It's so good to feel something so rich and bright and full and new from a song, I rarely have that from music these days. I love music and still listen a lot more than most people, but I tend to listen to things I love but haven't heard in a while rather than something which makes me feel renewed.