The first track on FOR YOU keeps finding uses that a museum of the eighties cannot quite contain.
Nostalgia can be a museum with unusually efficient attendants. Everything has a date, the lighting is sympathetic, and visitors are discouraged from touching. SPARKLE, the opening track on Tatsuro Yamashita's 1982 album FOR YOU, could easily become one of its prized exhibits. But an opening has a different obligation from an exhibit. It must persuade us that something worth our attention has yet to happen. A date explains where a record belongs; an entrance asks where we might go with it.
In April 2023, Sony announced a new SPARKLE video, produced by the creative studio YAR and featuring the dancers SORAKI and Misa Sugiyama. The decision offers a useful counterargument to preservation as the song's only possible future. A dance cannot be stored in the same sense as a sleeve. It has to be performed again, by a body occupying the present. The video adds a reading of the song, inviting new movement into an established reputation and giving familiarity something fresh to do.
Brightness, however, can obscure its makers. Yamashita sings, composes, and arranges; Minako Yoshida wrote the words. That division complicates the pleasingly compact image of a record proceeding from a single imagination. A recognizable style need not be a solitary achievement. The collaboration matters less as a corrective footnote than as an invitation to hear artistic identity as something capacious: an individual signature capable of making room for another person's invention without dissolving its own.
The track also has a practical job that isolated playback can conceal. MUSIC BOOK follows it; an entire album still needs to unfold. A successful opener does more than monopolize attention. It makes staying seem desirable. Listening in sequence means lending some of our power of selection to the people who arranged the sequence. This is a small, revocable act of trust, but one that a screen full of alternatives can make surprisingly difficult.
SPARKLE need not transport every new listener intact to 1982. Contemporary dancers and unfamiliar ears give it other responsibilities. Treating it chiefly as evidence of a vanished good life would narrow those possibilities. Its more generous offer is permission to enjoy carefully made pleasure without first producing a certificate of period authenticity. An opening can retain its historical address while remaining an opening. The important question is whether anyone still wants to step through.