Make Believe Mailer Classic: F A E S T H E T I C S
The Skeletons In Nostalgia's Closet
Welcome to a special end-of-week edition, revisiting a post from this newsletter’s TinyLetter days. The decision to re-up this post is a simple one…I didn’t have time to finish the 2021 top ten list quite yet, so I decided to dip into the archives for a throwback. Originally published on April 1, 2019, here’s a look at the darker and dumber corners of now-buzzed-about trends. This essay has been cleaned up for grammar, and I’ve added some extra thoughts at the end.
At some point in the past 24 hours, Jim Carey and Benito Mussolini's granddaughter got into a Twitter fight. I don't even know anymore! Alessandra Mussolini is best known for being part of Forza Italia, a right-wing Italian political party (well, I mean, the whole "Mussolini's granddaughter" bit actually gets the most attention). But back in the 1980s, she launched an ultimately doomed entertainment career. Which includes one of the dumbest artifacts of Japan's bubble era -- her very own city pop album.
Released in 1983, Amore finds the granddaughter of the European dictator navigating a mix of disco and AOR-tinged numbers in Italian, English and...wait for it...Japanese. Alfa Records put this out, which makes Mussolini a one-time labelmate of Yellow Magic Orchestra and P-Model.
Though I'm not sure they ever really expected this to be anything more than a curio, which it most certainly is seen as. I first heard about it after buying this book, which is probably the best overall guide to obscure funk, disco and city pop albums published in Japanese. She appears right away in the "a" section, and it didn't take long to find out you can hear it on YouTube. Spoiler alert...it's not good. Still, it's a genuinely weird thing, and such a leftover from a different time that looking at why it exists actually does offer some insights into when it came out.
So, how? Years before becoming a whacked-out politician, Mussolini basically attempted to be a talent. She mimicked the path of her aunt Sophia Loren, a far more successful singer and actor who nonetheless tried to help her niece make headway into the entertainment world. I will not bore you with the details of her adolescent film adventures, but unsurprisingly she did not become a big screen success. So in the 1980s she drifted into a few other areas, such as modeling for the Italian and German editions of Playboy (no links, this is a PG-13 email newsletter!) and eyeing pop stardom. She ditched entertainment after a producer asked her to change her last name, I assume because it's kind of long and hard to say.
Her music career can be summed up by two singles and Amore, an album most record shops peddling rare vinyl note comes from a descendent of Il Duce (attention grabbing!) though some have hilariously failed to mention in the past1. As art, it basically exists somewhere between stuff like Lie: The Love and Terror Cult and George W. Bush's paintings: charitably, there are a few good ideas, but the novelty of a full-length made by a terrible individual ultimately gets all the focus (if a Japanese person with a normal background released this, it would be totally forgotten).
Amore basically offers three types of songs. The first is slinky disco that's not quite city pop and nowhere near top-level Italo-Disco, but rather just kind of walking around the dancefloor, pleasant but aimless. The second are all the songs done in Italian, somehow the worst inclusions here despite this being her native language. Maybe because Mussolini thinks she can actually deliver some lyrical beauty in her mother tongue, these tend to be slower and groggier, like rolling out of bed. Low point "Insieme Insieme" has a harmonica melody only a Foldger's commercial could tolerate.
The third, and the closest moments Amore comes to being worth remembering beyond "Mussolini's granddaughter made a dance-pop album," are the true city pop cuts. In particular, two songs were arranged by Hiroshi Sato — a pillar of the city pop sound and all-around Japanese music heavyweight — with "Love Is Love" standing as the best creation by far. Like all the Japanese contributors here, Sato was under Alfa at the time, so this was probably something he had to bang out before the end of the day while Mussolini was in town (and yep, she recorded this in Japan). So for Sato completists, maybe warrants a dip into YouTube...but you could also just listen to…anything else he did.
Here it is anyway!
So...why does this exist? Many of the people involved with this have died or are really old now, so getting tales about Amore are unlikely (and, like, is anyone actually going to interview Mussolini about her disco-pop album??). But context from the time offers some insight. This came out during the bubble era, a period when Italian products were enjoying a boom in popularity thanks to the idea of them being higher in value, especially Italian food, dubbed "Itameshi" in Japanese. So Mussolini's nationality carried trendiness with it.2
It's also not farfetched to compare this to other bubble-era splurging found during those days, ranging from luxury vacations to buying up foreign landmarks. What's more extravagant than commissioning an album by a relative of a dictator? Or maybe this is all just because Japanese people love Sophia Loren. She had been a star in Japan since the 1950s, and appeared on TV shows and in scooter commercials after. She was on SMAP X SMAP for god's sakes.
Whatever the reason, Amore exists, but isn't something you need to listen to, though its existence is interesting in its own way. But to cleanse your palette after all that...you can always check out Jackie Chan's city pop songs instead.3
2022 Update Time
Revisiting Amore, my mind turns to the Olympics. Specifically, it brings back memories of the controversy over last year’s Opening Ceremony and Keigo Oyamada’s involvement in them. Part of the fallout was a reassessment of the ‘90s “kichiku boom,” or “bad taste boom.” The cutting-edge, sub-culture humor of a few decades ago now looked grotesque in the 2020s.
The proliferation of the provocative was not unique to the ‘90s, and you can find examples stretching back throughout Japanese media history (such as, magazines rummaging through idols trash and sharing the contents). Amore feels like an idea from this line of “could we get away with it…” thinking. Coupled with an interest in all things Italian, releasing a pop album by a dictator’s relative strikes me as the sort of near-prank this generation of creatives would go for.
Current Yahoo! Auctions For “Amore” And Other Mussolini musical offerings (around $164, $50 and $200 respectively).
Unsurprisingly, Amore has received more attention in the years since I wrote the initial post4, largely owing to continued interest in digging into the nooks of city pop and also thanks to a crowd aligning perfectly with that “bad taste” mentioned above. YouTube videos exploring the “most controversial Japanese album of all time?5” and mentioning it as part of deep dives into her goof-ass political career. Then you creep into the comments and find folks who are totally onboard with everything Mussolini stands for, using this city pop obscurity as a way to wallow in fascist-adjacent politics. It doesn’t take too many clicks on YouTube to come across a “fashwave” tribute to Amore, even if all that really means is Photoshopping her grandfather above a purple grid.
Those folks, though, are either outright trash or the social-media-age equivalent of those hungry magazine writers digging in dumpsters to find something salacious about a celebrity. All trends come back again, you know.
I’m more surprised by how anyone claims this album is…good? Like, I thought this renowned interest in city pop was leading to people hearing Tatsuro Yamashita or Taeko Onuki…who make actual good songs…and would perhaps show new listeners that, hey, not everything released in Japan in the 1980s was a gem waiting to be polished. Sometimes, you get a jumble of continent-hopping dance-pop where nothing stands out and, at best, it kind of just sounds tired. Indulge in neon-tinted nostalgia, but be aware your false memories might lead you to some crap. Doesn’t even matter whose name is attached to it.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Follow the Best of 2022 Spotify Playlist Here!
More recent one credits this to the daughter of Romano Mussolini, a pianist. I mean, hey, almost there.
Italian dining actually carries way further back in the history of Japanese music then I knew when I wrote this. In the past six months, I learned that many of the artists and music industry types who would go on to shape Japanese music as we know it today — including folks involved with Alfa Records — met and mingled at a famous Italian restaurant in Nishi-Azabu, in Tokyo.
Or Carl Lewis’ dance-pop album, for that matter.
The reason I wrote the original post is the same reason I think a bunch of Reddit posts and blog updates on Amore emerged in the months after I published it — everyone saw the Jim Carey interaction, and went deep from there. Shout out this video from five years ago about it though, uhhhh assuming the “trash” in the title is about the album.
No