Japanese enka music.

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OK, this is probably another one of my music threads I got no chance in hell of getting replies at, but...screw it.

Anyway, I'm beginning to take a liking to enka music. Here's some enka sang actually by North Korean singers, they're covers and I feel they're quite well done.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQKKiY46lK8[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db5uQx9xGD4[/youtube]

Anyway, longshot, but does anyone know any other enka artists or albums that I should look into?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yyK1ZnzvkE[/youtube]

I can only assume that my introduction to enka wasn't the best I could've hoped for, because it sounded like atonal noise to me at the time. I put it down to cultural differences what with me being brought up on European classical and folk and American jazz and blues.

That said, I don't dislike the songs linked to in this thread; they sound like fairly ordinary pop ballads, just with a distinctive geographical slant (which is interesting in itself). Since mainstream pop ballads in general aren't my thing, maybe I didn't take to enka straightaway for that reason? Anyhow, I tried to understand it a bit better after listening to an early live recording of Nana Mizuki (a successful Jpop artist I'm a fan of who started out as an enka singer before going mainstream) and finding I could at least appreciate the technical virtuosity even when the appeal of the songs themselves are lost on me.

Generally though, I try to give all music a chance and try to appreciate pretty much everything if I can so enka is on the list of "stuff I don't really *get* but will try to appreciate in future".

Yeah, for me it went down that path, too. I think as I get older, I get more...boring. Oh, before I started looking into enka, like, a month ago or less, I was a fan of 80s J-pop, and I like 80s Japanese stuff in general. Is that a weird special interest? f**k if I know. Anyway, going from 80s Japanese pop to enka isn't a crazy transition, you know? My thing with Jpop, my like of Japanese pop from post early 2000s is really not much. I feel like J-pop lost it's Japaneseness at around that time in many aspects, and started sounding much too similar to American pop I don't very much like right now. It basically had too much of an R&B "tinge" to it. My favorite 90s Jpop group has to be MAX, though, followed by Dream. I own an actual MAX CD, haha.

A big example of what I'm talking about, Dream turned into this.

Or this goes with my theory I've turned into James May at the age of 20...

To derail my own thread, I'd like to show you something you've probably never seen before. Japanese people making black people music (or to be a bit more politically correct, funky music made by black people 99% of the time when it's made, though not always by black people)!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAXyCKoZjt8 Hitomi Tohyama - Wanna Kiss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOcP0UEq8KI Masayoshi Takanaka - Teaser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y-Te6HVr5U Toshiki Kadomatsu - I'll Never Touch

And this here, Yellow Magic Orchestra, some people say they were more influential than the Beatles in Japan. They're a bit like a Japanese Kraftwerk, but I think they were leaps and bounds better than Kraftwerk in every way ever, and their music has so much more depth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za7y7xR7j0A Yellow Magic Orchestra - 1000 Knives (yes, my username)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtR3V51YmNU Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor

Anyway, yeah, Japanese music is VERY diverse.

I guess my enka search will have to be like the rest of my music searching, just randomly trudging through youtube.

But uh, my favorite enka song, from Patlabor the Movie II:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwXD_NBQZ90
"Omoide no Baybridge"

i like. i think i have something like this on a couple of old records i can't decipher.
all sorts of Asian music interests me, though so far my favorite is Korean Court Music:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJReX2f8BFI[/youtube]

this is good for looking at pictures of alien landscapes to.