Southern All Stars, My Favorite Japanese Band, to Semi-Retire

Some of my all-time favorite music is created by a five-man pop-rock band from a beach town near Tokyo. They're called the Southern All Stars, and their music kicks ass across multiple generations the way the Rolling Stones do in the Western music world. They debuted in 1978, and on Saturday, they kicked off a concert series spanning two weekends that precedes a long indefinite break.

Keisuke Kuwata is the band's 52-year old lead singer, and you can see him here singing Ellie, My Love, a 1979 hit single that Ray Charles covered a decade later. His wife, Yuko Hara, is also in the band, and the guitarist is my friend Hayato's uncle. I've always, always wanted to see these guys live, but sadly it looks like I might never get to. My dad once bought me a concert DVD and I watched it all the time. Check out a video of one of his more provocative songs after the jump.

In one of his livelier performances that proves he is just as adept at rocking out as he is at serenading the crowd with his world-famous ballads, Kuwata jumps around stage singing Manpee no G-Spot, a song about—yep, you guessed it, the g-spot. Manpee is a variation of manko, slang for vagina, with the "pee" serving as a censoring beep. This song debuted in 1995.

Comments

[Risachan]

I love Southern All Stars! My mom has been listening to them since I was a little kid but she never listens to them anymore, she listens to some band called Tube, who are not nearly as awesome as SAS.

And I love Ellie, My Love...such a good song.