“Paraiso” on my mind

I found this on YouTube as I was looking for Manny Pacquiao’s vids, and that video of Aiba Masaki’s (or was it Ohno??) visit to the Philippines. Mang Johnny’s boys singing Smokey Mountain’s “Paraiso”!!

The song was in perfect ENGRISH! The first boy was particularly Engrish-y. I learned from Japinoy.com that it was Nishikido Ryo. I watched the vid and indeed, it was little Ryo! The second boy wasn’t so bad. What I didn’t like were those yellow-clad boys in the background who were partly “dancing”. They looked strange. Paraiso wasn’t a dance-y song! Anyway, this song became popular in Japan in the early 90’s after the 2nd Smokey Mountain batch won in the Tokyo Pop Music Festival (??). That also earned them a spot in the annual Kouhaku Utagassen. Yeah! So, since I saw that vid, the song was stuck in my head and I just had to look for the original SM version. Tadaaa!!! Smokey Mountain, live!

Kyaaaa!! Zhar and Jason FTW!!! Gaaaaaaaaadddd, I felt like I was transported back to high school. I love the Japanese translation. Though I could not read everything because of the fuzzy Kanji, the translation by Maruyama-san was spot on.

パライソ どうか力を貸して…Whoa, goosebumps, I tell you. Beautiful.

I so missed these guys. I remember I would save up some of my allowance just so I could buy their cassettes. Hehe. Cassette tape! I had the albums of the 2 SM groups. *sigh* Hoho, James Coronel HAWT! Mara can have Tony Lambino. James is mine! Now I feel like dropping by Music21 just to sing “Can This Be Love”…

Anyway, it’s such a shame that the Maestro no longer makes songs like Paraiso, and no longer produces super talents like Smokey Mountain (14k? OK, ibang usapan yun ha…andun yung kaklase ko eh. Toink!). Very sad but we no longer make singers like we used to. Today, all the music biz churns out are “pretenders” without their own singing styles. All we have are copycats of Celine Dion or Josh Groban or Whitney Houston. Our songs are mere covers of popular songs (I am still not over that idiot who did a cover of Julian Lennon’s song.) We are all Multiplex singers!

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