Lawrence, Sakamoto looks amazing as a Japanese officer in a Japanese prison camp circa 1942, and Bowie is amazing as a British officer. What was left but to star in a homoerotic period film with David Bowie? Another album, the wonderfully glossy Left-Handed Dream, swings like an expensive stereo system designed to play Roxy Music. Sakamoto followed up his 1978 solo debut, the exotica-industrial Thousand Knives, with the astonishing B-2 Unit in 1980 its innovative rhythms and polyphonic buzz came courtesy of the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, one of the first programmable synths. Meanwhile, Sakamoto performed the song in various configurations over the decades, including a beautiful 2013 rendition with an amateur youth orchestra of survivors of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.įour years later, YMO had released six mostly-excellent albums and broken up. “Behind the Mask” was a huge hit, with lyrics by the British poet Chris Mosdell, but its critique of alienation turned sour when it was covered in 1987 by celebrities including Eric Clapton and Phil Collins, who both had histories of anti-immigrant bigotry, or by Michael Jackson, who in 1982 turned it into a middling love song that went unreleased for almost 30 years. They were a more ironic Kraftwerk, perhaps, yet the politics rarely traveled well. The trio formed the Yellow Magic Orchestra with the idea, Hosono said, “to take these western ideas of the exotic and subvert them.” It worked like gangbusters: YMO began international superstars, fusing Asian kitsch and innovative electronics. By his mid-20s, Sakamoto was already a sought-after session musician in Tokyo when he took up with Haruomi Hosono, previously of the psyche-folk band Happy End and the country-tropical collective Tin Pan Alley, and the glam rocker Yukihiro Takahashi.
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