Happy 4th of July, everyone! Here's a little something to keep our American readers engaged.
U.S.A.| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x2 (105) | x3 (159) | x5 (256) | x6 (428) |
Taiko 0 B, Taiko PS4, Taiko Switch, Taiko +
139.6
J-Pop -> Pops/Kids
usaMentioning/celebrating the American Independence day outside of its homegrounds can be quite the weird affair; some might remember it with TV-broadcast movie reruns with aliens and cowboys (and sometimes both), while others let you have stories with characters from American history in select games such as the woodcutter Paul Bunyan (as a little girl with big eyes from a gag webcomic series). Why don't join the bombastic tunes with something of the same likes, then?
What is playable in Taiko gaming under the U.S.A. title, in fact, is nothing but a modern cover of a disco track from the early 90ies, courtesy of Italian disco composer Domenico Ricchini. Mostly known by the art names of Bandanna, Bob Salton and one-time singer for the 1983 studio project Joe Yellow (which was used used to sign U.S.A. with) and starting out as a rock composer in the 70ies with his Delanuà band, Ricchini made the original eurobeat track in 1992 with the aid of the Italian songwriting trio Donatella Cirelli/Severino Lombardoni/shungo and co-composers Claudio Accattino and Anna Maria Gioco. Later on, U.S.A. managed to garner several accolades from the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC), ranking 1st in 2019 for the royality distribution requests in Japan for a foreign work and a JASRAC Foreign Award in 2020.
With the original U.S.A. being Joe Yellow's second-to-last song, Japanese boy band DA PUMP (of Kamen Rider/Viewtiful Joe OST fame, among other things) made their comeback to the modern Japanese music scene in 2018 with a cover of the piece, roughly four years since the act's last original single. This cover was rearranged by the nick-named KAZ and its release was a bit downplayed due to their lack of confidence on the cover being Da Pump's well-desired comeback. With a shopping mall-restricted campaign and its MV including dabs, the general audience's first reaction was also in the lines of "indifference to old-timers", but it eventually won over the hearts of many listeners with hot peaks at Billboard Hot 100 (2nd weekly, 2nd in 2018), Oricon (7th weekly, 9th in 2019) and a couple of awards in form of Best Song (60th Japan Record Award) and 33rd Japan Gold Disc Award. The official upload of Da Pump's U.S.A. on YouTube reached 1 million within the first week, and nowadays that number has risen well over 200 times more!
Taiko no Tatsujin wasn't this song's only music-game rodeo to face; on bemani fields, not only the Da Pump cover was featured in their dance-a-holic arcade DANCERUSH STARDOM, but it was also remixed by bemani artists PHQUASE and TRANDER Jr. in order to make it playable for beatmania IIDX! U.S.A. also could lay around Sega's shores (maimai; CHUNITHM) as well as Taito's Groove Coaster for their first console game's song list (link), for how stingy the series usually is on Pops/Anime licensing! The Taiko notecharts for the song were penned by Taiko Team leader Yuhei Etou, as revealed by the very same author in one episode of TV Asahi's Geki-rare-san o Tsuretekita. (激レアさんを連れてきた。) variety show.
Mono-color clusters as far as the eye can see, with an upbeat tempo and frequesnt note stanza repetition with slight changes... yep, it sure smells like your average 6-star Oni around here!
