TOKIO

"TOKIO" is Kenji Sawada — "Julie," Japan's original glam-rock provocateur — at the apex of his theatrical excess. Released in 1980, the song is pure New Wave spectacle: a driving, synth-spiked rock pulse, dramatic orchestral stabs, and a melody that struts rather than walks. Sawada delivers it with operatic flamboyance, his voice swooping from croon to declamation, treating the city itself as a lover and a stage. The lyric paints Tokyo as a glittering, electric organism — neon, speed, nocturnal glamour — naming the metropolis with the breathless reverence usually reserved for a person. But the song is inseparable from its legendary performance: Sawada appeared singing it with a parachute strapped to his back and a glittering bodysuit, a piece of pop surrealism that branded the image onto a generation's memory. It captures the swagger of Japan's bubble-era ascent, a nation intoxicated by its own modern dazzle, channeled through one of its most charismatic showmen. Sawada had already led The Tigers through Group Sounds stardom; here he reinvents himself as a solo glam icon owing equal debt to Bowie and to Japanese kabuki flamboyance. It's music made to be performed under spotlights, all artifice and conviction at once. Heard today it carries a delicious retro-futurist charge — the sound of a city, and a star, certain they were the center of the world.