The celebrated guest list on FLAPPER leads back to Minako Yoshida.
The credits of FLAPPER can make it surprisingly easy to forget the name above them: Minako Yoshida. Released in March 1976 and produced by Kunihiko Murai, the album includes writers Akiko Yano, Haruomi Hosono, Eiichi Ohtaki, and Tatsuro Yamashita. Such a company can turn a record description into a sequence of introductions. It resembles arriving at a party, recognizing everybody, and neglecting to ask whose house one has entered. The more interesting question is how a singer remains the center when so many distinctive creative identities have arrived.
“Yume de Aetara” offers one entrance, but the program also contains titles as differently disposed as “Keppeki Niisan” and “Ramu wa Osuki?” A meeting in dreams, a form of address, a question involving a drink: these do not insist on one dignified expression. Yoshida's name allows different addresses to fit on the same envelope. A singer's authorship need not be measured exclusively by the number of compositions she wrote. Receiving different songs, and making them belong to the same presented work, also shapes what that work can be.
This does not reduce the collaborators to scenery. Precisely because each name leads to a body of other work, the album behaves like a junction rather than an isolated monument. Following Yano, Hosono, Ohtaki, or Yamashita produces different onward routes. Yet their meeting within FLAPPER should not require the record to be divided into celebrity territories. Collaboration becomes especially interesting when the parts retain their origins while the whole acquires a shape that cannot be sliced according to a percentage of contribution.
FLAPPER therefore merits a more patient compliment than a luxurious lineup. Luxury is information on the invitation; the record must make the invitations enter into a relationship. Dreams, jokes, questions, and recollections share a program that accommodates more than one expression. For anyone mapping city pop's connections, the album offers a useful caution. Counting lines tells us who was present, but cannot decide who makes a room a room. Yoshida's name remains on the door. The longer the guest list grows, the more worthwhile it becomes to look back at it.