Sweet Pain and Departures: How Globe Defined the Mood of Komuro’s City Pop
Globe explore the overarching, ambient melancholy surrounding the narrative of Komuro's city songs
Hi! Welcome to Tetsuya Komuro Week at This Side of Japan, a newsletter about Japanese music, new and old. We are dedicating this week on a series of essays discussing the producer’s essential acts and singles. You can return to the Intro page of the series here. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
By the time Tetsuya Komuro found a solo star in Namie Amuro who he can project his musical ideas and narratives, he had already assembled his own band Globe to fully realize his creative interests. The producer continued to look at Europop and dance music for inspiration similar to how he did with TRF a few years prior. The singer chosen for the group, Keiko aimed high with her voice during the music’s peak like a diva singer of a deep-house anthem. Marc Panther also got on as the MC to toast and maintain the song’s mood in between.
The trio’s rave-inspired structure of singer, rapper and dance beats didn’t differ too much from TRF in the beginning. The trio’s debut single, “Feel Like Dance,” brought exactly what the title promised. Marc Panther introduces the glorious rave-house piano lines, and Komuro updates the arena-sized synth-rock of his old band T.M. Network for the dance-hungry ’90s. Not to be outsized, Keiko lets out a heartfelt vocal performance that lives up to the scale of Komuro’s stadium music. While TRF’s “Survival Dance ~no no cry more~” suggested that the producer’s rave-pop began to outgrow the clubs, “Feel Like Dance” went ahead and built the new environment in which they can thrive.
Through their series of singles, though, Globe gradually began to define their identity by homing in on the unique, melancholic emotions that sprung forth from Komuro’s songs about the city. And “Departures,” Globe’s fourth single and what is now their most popular hit, signaled the next evolution of Komuro’s rave-pop. The song took a sharp left turn from the previous run of feel-good dance anthems as a bummed-out piano riff set the scene for a deep indulgence of heartbreak. Keiko expounds on the lingering melancholy and ultimately provides a form of release through the huge chorus. And instead of merely describing the energy of the music, Marc Panther attaches to the beats a narrative about a lonely, sleepless soul wandering around during the dead of winter.
Despite the upbeat feeling flowing in their early jams, sadness had lingered in Globe’s music from the get go. “Feel like dance / A dream I’ve almost given up some time ago / like a revolving door / chances keep passing by,” Keiko sings in the chorus of “Feel Like Dance.” Her voice may sound cheerful and energetic, but underneath the bright smiles reveals a rather pessimistic view of her current situation, likening the repetitious nature of house music to life full of recurring disappointment. “Sweet Pain,” their third single, foreshadows “Departures” with the bright new wave tune softening a tale of two lovers supporting each other through a turbulent time.
“Departures” draws out to the forefront the sadness that had previously lived more in the background. Like Komuro’s hits for other famed artists like Namie Amuro, “Departures” paints the present as a miserable place to exist in. That said, he offers no hope or company as a lifeline and instead gives full space for the song’s protagonist to wallow in her loneliness. From the picture stand with a photo of her ex-lover to the seemingly endless season of winter, the details further bring out a concrete vividness of her emotional pain. “Whenever I get to making new memories, I want it to be with you,” Keiko sings in the chorus, struggling to move forward from the comfort of her past.
The personal and the physical dissolves more into the abstract in “Departures” as the pangs of heartbreak takes a lot more stock in the song than actual tangible events. While Marc Panther’s telling of two people throwing themselves into love in hopes to find escape ties with the many narratives of future Komuro hits to come, the music’s connection to the city as the story’s central stage is made less literal. The narrative unfolds instead more at a subconscious level as Keiko spends a lot of time exploring a bygone memory. The deep-house pianos and the dance-floor pulse, too, linger as faint reminders of the band’s club-sourced music, like the ghost of their predecessors TRF.
Globe’s insistence to zero in more on the feeling than the personality in “Departures” is by design. As strong and distinguished as Keiko is as a vocalist, her own personal identity and history are obscured when the music is propped by an ambiguous, mononymous name of Globe—like how the vocalist represents only one piece of a larger picture in a techno group. While Namie Amuro in “Body Feels Exit” focused on the individual in their story of the city, Globe aims to cover an overarching, ambient mood surrounding the narrative.
Through the anonymous nature of Globe, Komuro’s city stories have become adaptable to suit anybody from an actual city-dweller or a singer who wish to be the next narrator of his stories. All they need to claim the song as theirs is connect to this specific mood of hopelessness and a punishing loneliness — the doomed views that define the essence of an early Komuro hit. While Globe climbs to even bigger success, Komuro hands out more and more hits to outside artists based on the refinement of sounds and perspectives through his work with Keiko and Marc Panther. He gets down a formula for better or worse, though the hit-maker soon manages to break out of the mold.
Up next, Part 4: I’m Proud: How Tomomi Kahara Found Freedom from the City
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You can return to the Intro page to the series here. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
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