‘You Do Me’ by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Jill Jones
Ryuichi Sakamoto died at the beginning of this year and I can’t stress enough what an immense loss that is. Because he was a Great Human Being, a Mensch, who commited himself to many great causes like banning landmines and saving the earth. But also because his influence on music is easily as large as David Bowie’s, and too few people are aware of that.
Like Bowie, Sakamoto kept making beautiful music until the very end, and he never dwelt long in the same area, always kept pushing the boundaries, searching for new territories, innovating music like few others. He pioneered in the field of electronic music, redefined film music, reinvented classical music and was an eclectic like Bowie, borrowing from everywhere, combining folk, classical, pop, rock, minimalism and maximalism to something completely new and unheard of.
The song above, You Do Me, is from 1989, a time Sakamoto made three albums on which he mixed pop and rock and all kinds of folk music from all over the world with funk and Okinawan music. You Do Me features American singer Jill Jones (what a lekker wijf, by the way) and is the first song on the version of the album Beauty I have in possession, but it’s not on the version on Spotify, I just discovered.
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