Career
Its members were Hiroto KÅmoto (vocalist), Masatoshi Mashima (guitarist), Junnosuke Kawaguchi (bassist) and Tetsuya Kajiwara (drummer). Mikio Shirai was not an official member of the band, but often toured with them as their keyboardist. Formed in 1985, the group made its major debut in May 1987, and released its first album, the self-titled The Blue Hearts, and followed that up with seven more albums. Though they started on an independent label, each album sold more copies than the previous one, with their last recording selling in the millions. In 1990, The Blue Hearts had a self-titled EP released in the United States, which they supported with a US tour.
In addition to having popular albums, they also had many popular singles. Two of most well-known are "Train-Train" and "Linda Linda", which can be found on many karaoke machines. A cover version of "Linda Linda" was used in the 2004 dramas Socrates in Love and Gachi Baka, as well as the 2005 film Linda Linda Linda, the plot of which centers on a high school girls' band practicing The Blue Hearts' songs for the finale concert of their school's culture festival. The song also appears in the 2005 Nintendo DS video game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan,. Other songs, including "Train-Train", "Owaranai Uta" and "Hito ni Yasashiku", have been featured in the Konami arcade games Drummania and Guitar Freaks.
They were seen as controversial in Japan, where antics such as using the taboo Japanese word for crazy, and spitting on television cameras got them banned from TV for a year.
Read more about this topic: The Blue Hearts
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)