Besides the weirdness that it is almost 60 years later, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are fighting it out on the charts. Or did Paul/Ringo make a deal with Mick and others to do another week for their release, like they did in the old days? Still, being a fan of both bands, I had little interest in hearing the new recordings. I’m so obsessed with finding Jun Togawa albums in Tokyo that I have little time to dwell on my music past. Now and Then is the last Beatles record, and of course, that has to be sad, or at the very least, a moment of reflection, and I’m the king of the past and what it means to live in the present. The unusual aspect is that this song represents the past (the late Lennon and Harrison) with the present (the living Paul and Ringo), and so what we have here is a record that is loaded with meaning. One doesn’t even have to listen to the recording to get that aspect of time going by.
The king of sadness was and will always be John Lennon. He knew how to approach regret and make it into a human fallacy that listeners can identify with, and it makes sense to me that he has become very much part of the Japanese culture. Enka is Japanese blues that borrows from traditional classic Japanese pop but turns it into sentimental ballad music. The feeling of regret rules the genre, and many of Lennon’s songs reflect that aspect of pop. Imagine, Mind Games, Jealous Guy, and so forth are drenched in sadness, and Lennon’s demo/song Now and Then is no different. Even the title reflects the sense of time and the tension between memory and feelings. It’s a beautiful song and totally enka, in its melody and feelings of losing time or love.
beautiful