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Rating: The true empress is her, not Terim. I realized I hit the mark when by chance someone came in while I was listening to a song and asked: "in what language is he singing?"... And the misunderstanding that our Japanese, Korean by ethnicity, is an Amanda Lear of the Rising Sun does not exist, not even on that Boy and Girl sung on the film Delinquent Girl Boss (1970) with a motorcycle outfit and a charm both physically and vocally uncommon in Nipponia.
The fact is that Free Soul works great on this compilation that covers decades of success, where I cannot point out to the audience reading the titles of the tracks because they are written in Japanese. It's a plus if the ideograms accentuate our "idiocy." But what do we care if we are then flooded with performances that delight like the glimmer of the sun on the snow of the Sapphoro mountains?
And the pop rock soul beat creates a refined yet immediate Easy Rider for an On the Road Banzai that echoes her adolescent youthful days with her rhythmic escapes from school to sing in Osaka venues and then being caught and taken into the custody of the police who brought her back to her despairingly-resigned family from the little nightingale they had at home. But if she was already 1.63 meters tall at the start of middle school on that island, and then at 17, having definitively abandoned school, she presented herself with a nice one meter seventy-four and that voice, good luck telling her anything...
In short, from cleaning the dojo tatami of her father's gym to stepping on night club dance hall and jazz coffee shop tatami and conquering her recording debut in 1968 at 18, the drive for emancipation is still the same.
In a culture where women have traditionally been discouraged from speaking openly and are expected to be submissive to men, Akko, direct and confident, flaunts a natural nonconformity and independence that can only win us over.
Jotei Forever!
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