Masayoshi Takanaka puts waking up and getting away within one record.
An alarm clock is an unpromising vacation accessory, yet it appears at the beginning of a record whose title readily suggests waves. Universal’s official description of Masayoshi Takanaka’s 1980 T-WAVE specifically identifies the alarm sound opening EARLY BIRD. That sourced detail is more interesting than a general summer atmosphere. The recording first borrows a sound that calls somebody back to a schedule, while the album’s name sends imagination toward moving water. A day can begin with the obligation to wake up before it offers an opportunity to change direction.
The same official account identifies MY SECRET BEACH as a song used in a Mazda Familia advertisement. A secret beach and a public advertisement make another pairing worth pausing over. Secrecy implies restricted access; advertising requires circulation. One work can nevertheless enter both relationships. This need not become a simple story in which commerce damages music. The more specific question concerns how popular culture packages an imagined private escape in a form many people can recognize, while allowing each to imagine that a little section of coastline belongs particularly to them.
T-WAVE, a guitarist-centered record, lets the relationship between city and leisure be discussed without making lyrics carry the entire argument. Titles, documented uses, and an opening sound already provide footholds. Nor must every listener be imagined as the same sort of automobile consumer. Advertising is one verifiable part of a recording’s circulation, not its only possible purpose. The lives into which later listeners place the work may differ considerably. Specific historical facts and an open account of reception can remain in the picture together without either cancelling the other.
Returning to this album, it is worth retaining both the alarm clock and the beach. Keeping only the latter makes leisure appear permanent, with no ordinary day against which it can be felt; keeping only the former loses the wish to change pace. T-WAVE can be read as movement between two kinds of time rather than a holiday reservation that never expires. Urban music does not always have to describe the city. Sometimes it describes what somebody leaving the city might wish a day to become.