Japanese freestyle
Japanese freestyle - is there a lot of it? I wouldn't know. Just glad that the style, which is pretty much gone from U.S. airwaves, is still strong in Asia.
( h/t arbitrary_greay, of course)
Tomato n' Pine FAB ("Free As A Bird")
The rhythm is simply a hopped-up electrobeat, not freestyle's fast twists and breakneck turns, but the melody, at least in the verse, could have come out of NYC or Union City, 1987. Like this:
Maribell "Roses Are Red"
Also, in the midst of this week's Brave Brothers discussion I discovered a freestyle riff right smack center in the debut days of After School, 2009:
After School "Play Girlz"
*[UPDATE 2018: I didn't know it when I made this post, but the correct term for the rhythm is "Eurobeat" (a term a couple readers use in the comments); but FAB's melody resembles freestyle in a way that most - but not all - Eurobeat doesn't. (I say "not all" given that Italodisco itself was in interplay with freestyle and feeding this into Eurobeat.) The term "Eurobeat" has had several uses over the years, but the one relevant to this post is an Italodisco-derived sound in the early to mid '90s that sold almost exclusively in Japan, though some producers and performers were Italian. The beats move fast at '90s speed, though, unlike vintage Italodisco.]
( h/t arbitrary_greay, of course)
Tomato n' Pine FAB ("Free As A Bird")
Click to viewThe rhythm is simply a hopped-up electrobeat, not freestyle's fast twists and breakneck turns, but the melody, at least in the verse, could have come out of NYC or Union City, 1987. Like this:
Maribell "Roses Are Red"
Also, in the midst of this week's Brave Brothers discussion I discovered a freestyle riff right smack center in the debut days of After School, 2009:
After School "Play Girlz"
*[UPDATE 2018: I didn't know it when I made this post, but the correct term for the rhythm is "Eurobeat" (a term a couple readers use in the comments); but FAB's melody resembles freestyle in a way that most - but not all - Eurobeat doesn't. (I say "not all" given that Italodisco itself was in interplay with freestyle and feeding this into Eurobeat.) The term "Eurobeat" has had several uses over the years, but the one relevant to this post is an Italodisco-derived sound in the early to mid '90s that sold almost exclusively in Japan, though some producers and performers were Italian. The beats move fast at '90s speed, though, unlike vintage Italodisco.]