While welcoming the coming of a new song into the Taiko household, we're also mourning the future permanent loss in the series, slated for theis month's latter end...
Dancing Hero (Eat You Up) Yoko Oginome
ダンシング・ヒーロー(Eat You Up)／荻野目洋子
| Game | Genre |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC 0 Blue |  | ★3 (81) | ★3 (101) | ★5 (193) | ★7 (434) | - |
| AC Nijiiro (removed) |  |
132
dchero (Dancing Hero)Alongside the Green Version launch track Hikari no destination that was already featured under the SotW mantle about 2 years ago (link), this peppy Pops pick in its un-cover version glory will take its permanent vacation from the Taiko no Tatsujin series once that February 21st day strolls by. It's also one of the more modern pieces to rethread the time-honored tradition of modern Japanese covers of an old song!
The original hi-NRG Eat You Up song was created and performed in 1985 by British pop singer-songwriter Angie Gold as her 8th single, composed by Angelina Kyte and Anthony Baker and featured in the same-year album Applause, her 4th overall release. In the Western landscape, the song garnered its own share of appreciation with a 30th place peak at Billboard's Dance Club Songs chart, but the country where the song absolutely flourished in was Japan (there named as 'Suteki wa Energy Boy, 素敵なハイエナジー・ボーイ'), where it peaked Oricon's foreign artist charts on her release year as well as spawning today's lucky cover which would become its performer's rise-to-fame piece!
Born December 10th, 1968, in Chiba prefecture's Kashiwa, Yoko Oginome (荻野目洋子) from talent agency Rising Production has been the artist of what is arguably Japan's most popular cover of Eat You Up, released in the same year with Koji Makaino (馬飼野康二) as its arranger and Hitoshi Shinohara (篠原仁志) as its lyricist. Prior to this song's release, Yoko Oginome already garnered a multi-talent professional life since her elementary school years, both as a singer in the short-lived, contest-formed unit Milk (ミルク) and as a leading voice actress for several Anime-oriended productions (Miyuki and Ugo Ugo Lhuga, among these).
What really cemented the artist's fame, however, was her Eat You Up cover's release -originally planned under the 'Cinderella Boy' (シンデレラ・ボーイ) title prefix- which was worth a 5th place Oricon peak and 700k sales on release year as well as several idol-related accolades, from the 12th "Best Idol" awards at Nippon Television and All Japan Kayo's Music Festival of that year to the 19th Japan Cable Awards' Wired Music Award, pretty much setting the stage for Oginome to reack instant popularity with all of her subsequent single releases. Her Dancing Hero (Eat You Up) was also subject of song remixes of its own across the years, many of them performed by Oginome herself and later on all grouped into two anthologic releases at the tail end of 2017: the digital-only Dancing Hero: All Eat You Up (which peaked 2nd place at the year's Billboard Japan Hot 100 chart) and its "extended" physical counterpart Dancing Hero: The Archives (ダンシング・ヒーロー ジ・アーカイブス). The Taiko-playable Dancing Hero version comes from the August 2014 album Dear Pop Singer (ディア・ポップシンガー) as its bonus remix track.
Despite the low BPM, Dancing Hero's Oni mode carves for itself a difficulty ratio niche in between fellow genre dwellers Ikenai Taiyou and Memeshikute, taking a bit from both's note stanza refraining and chained cluster repetitions with little to no rest time while offering an easier take to both at the same time.
