MAJOR FORCE
Japanese rap from the '80s
Yes, Japan has an answer to the Fat Boys, and it’s as weird as you think. Major Force is an 80s rap group formed in 1988, and the music seems to have been formed for Japanese variety shows of the day. At first I couldn’t tell if it was avant-garde club music, or merely strangely retro, a bunch of middle-aged Japanese men channeling the Sugarhill Gang and two dolled-up young women chanting artsy choruses and hooks off-key. In the end I decided it was avant-shite, or a sort of vanguard of shit, and also a mutant musical project from another era that was very much lost in translation.
The group consists of the two female singers and a four-piece band of guys who look to be in their 50s. The rapping style is pure 80s: “Everybody clap your hands”, “Somebody say ho!” and other raps of similar cadence. The spectacle of this was so perplexing, that it was not wholly unentertaining.
Major Force’s set was more or less the start to Friday’s all-night party at the Cafe de Paris and Inai Inai Bar, and it set the tone for an extremely strange flow. 80s J-rap gave way to 90s acid house and fire dancers (Bryan Burton-Lewis and friends) and then came back to reggae version of Major Force, a reggae band called Chakkas. And then it turned back into a techno party.
