Crazy Ken Band: sleazy coolness
The Crazy Ken Band is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s not cutting edge highbrow funky punky cool, but rather sleazy, like you hear in seedy bars where tacky guys try to hook up worn-down salary-men with their girls.
I associate it not with the trendiest areas of Tokyo, but rather with Asakusa, my favorite district, where common people come to eat and drink and entertain and wheedle each other out of their money. The singer of the Crazy Ken Band looks like a crossing between a yakuza boss and a Cockney gangster, the rest of the band like small-time crooks.
The band mixes Showa-era Enka, the typical sentimental ballads old Japanese people like, with jazz and showband-music and good old crooning and also a little funk and sometimes rock. It’s always upbeat.
I first heard it in a film by Takashi Miike, Like a Dragon, in a scene where a Yakuza gang is beating the shit out of another yakuza gang. A really violent affair as one may expect of Miike, but accompanied by the careless happy-go-lucky tune of The Crazy Ken Band it’s quite hilarious and it made me laugh out loud.
Since then I’ve grown quite fond of the band.
They brought out a new album this year, Hong Kong Taxi. This track, with a beautiful video filmed in Hong Kong, is from it too. I’d like to see them live some time. Should be fun. (PB)
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