Описание
The full extent of the world-wide mid-1960s pop explosion engendered by the Beatles can never really be measured. Teenagers in every land, for and wide, were inspired to ditch the insipid pop they'd been stuck with and form raving, long-haired beat and R&B groups.
The term Group Sounds was coined by journalists in early 1967 when, in the wake of the Beatles` visit local combos began to concentrate more on vocals (prior to this period most vocal pop artists were solo acts). In an amazingly brief period of time (roughly 1966-1969), over a hundred new groups were formed. The vast majority of bands released records, and a high proportion of these featured original material, along side covers of popular foreign groups like the Animals, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones.
This pop explosion was ably supported by a wildly enthusiastic teen audience that gave the major GS groups such as the Tigers and the Spiders the kind of popularity reserved for visiting stars such as the Walker Brothers or the Monkees i.e. hit singles, movies, lavishly-packaged albums and mob scenes whenever they played.
More professional outfits worked a considerable network of night-clubs and the US Airforce base circuit. Geographically speaking, the vast urban sprawl of Tokyo was home to the bulk of the top GS combos, but Osaka, Yokohama and Kyoto had thriving GS scenes.
Any open-minded student of pop music can appreciate the high standard of the selections presented here. Well-recorded stereo was the order of the day on both 45rpm single and album; the arrangements and musician ship are generally solid; and indeed, the sheer overall recorded sound on a tune such as, say, the Blue Jeans «One More Please», matches anything emanating from English or American studios of the time. With the same efficiency and skill the country brought to all other aspects of its society, Japan had a literal convey or belt of pop going in the GS era.
But the Japanese language itself, like many other foreign tongues, does not lend itself particularly well to rock'n'roll. When the Japanese attempt to sing or written in English, western ears can have problems with the results (or conversely, find them vastly entertaining). For starters, the Japanese place great import upon the words of their pop music, which is why all records usually come with lyric inserts, and also why the vocals on all Japanese pop records, even up to their present day, tend to be unreasonably high in the mix. There are also time-honored schools of vocalese in Japan that can be excruciating in their mawkishness. The country's obsession with Western pop culture since before the down of the rock'n'roll era had meant that English phrases, words or slogans, however inappropriate, are viewed as lending an authentic air to a Japanese language pop song; but as English is difficult to learn, a phonetic interpretation often has to suffice. The lyric of the Out Cast's «Denwa De Iikara» translates literally as «Just a phone call's OK, so call me», but the group preferred the more emphatic «You Gat (sic) A Call Me». The same combo's unintentional mangling of «Long Tall Sally» has made it a GS classic. Elsewhere, the heavily accented vocal on the Swing West's version of «Fire» actually gives it an additional creepiness absent from the original.
In recent years the high quality of GS has became common knowledge amongst Western aficionados of 1960s rock.
The excitement and quality inherent in GS is abundantly clear, and the growing appreciation for the genre puts a small but Well-aimed dent in the superiority complex the West has traditionally had about rock and pop.
