Dancer

"Dancer" belongs to the more kinetic end of Yamashita's catalog — a track that moves with the specific energy of music about bodies in motion, about the pleasure of rhythm and the way good music makes standing still feel like a failure of imagination. The production has an uptempo shimmer: percussion that snaps and rattles with energy that can't quite contain itself, bass guitar playing in a register that encourages physical response, and horn accents that arrive like exclamation points in a conversation becoming progressively more enthusiastic. Yamashita's vocal performance shifts accordingly, finding a brightness and forward projection that his more balladic work doesn't require — he is not reaching inward but outward, addressing someone in motion. The subject matter concerns itself with dance as both literal activity and metaphor for a particular kind of aliveness — the abandonment of self-consciousness in service of the present moment. There is something genuinely joyful operating in this track, unironic in the way that 1970s and 1980s Japanese pop allowed itself to be joyful without embarrassment, before the complicated ironic detachment of later decades made straightforward pleasure culturally suspect. This is city pop as pure, unapologetic celebration.