ギンギラギンにさりげなく

This is music that presents itself with an almost comic confidence, and the swagger is entirely the point. The production is unabashedly big — full band, brass punctuations, a rhythm track that insists you notice it — and Kondo Masahiko's delivery matches it note for note, his voice projecting the studied cool of a young man who has decided that being slightly over the top is preferable to being forgettable. The title's phrase, roughly meaning "flashy yet effortlessly casual," contains its own contradiction, which the song cheerfully embodies: it is trying very hard to appear as though it is not trying at all. This was idol pop at the height of the Johnny's Entertainment machine, when a certain kind of masculine glamour — sharp clothes, a certain louche confidence, the suggestion that rules applied to other people — was being mass-produced and marketed with extraordinary efficiency. What saves the song from mere product-ness is Kondo's genuine charisma, a quality that translates even through the commercial machinery. It belongs to Saturday nights at their most optimistic, to the moment before going out when you want to feel invincible, to anyone who has ever needed music that flatters their best self-image back at them.