Yellow Magic Orchestra – Naughty Boys (Album Review)

Album: Naughty Boy

Artist: Yellow Magic Orchestra

Release Date: May 24, 1983

Label: Alfa Records

There’s a particular kind of realization that hits you when you return to Yellow Magic Orchestra after spending years swimming in modern electronic music. You start to recognize just how much of what we consider contemporary was already sitting there, fully formed, in the early 1980s. I came back to Naughty Boys after ignoring it for YEARS and thanks to an off-handed mention of this album by my friend SPINES, I thought to myself, “I should probably actually listen to this album.” Thank goodness for that interaction.

You hear it immediately in the opening tracks – pure joy. The drum programming and synth melodies move with this … strange confidence – oh wait, that’s authenticity. While there’s a lightness to the melodies and they appear playful on the surface, you can tell they’re absolutely locked in underneath it all with real discipline. Somewhere around the second or third track I completely lost my own timeline. I started doing tasks around my room and caught myself assuming this was something contemporary – some clean, well-produced electronic record that had slipped through the cracks of my usual listening habits.

That’s the strange power of this album. You fall into it, and the usual markers that tell you where you are in music history just stop working. I’ve had that experience a few times, where an album pulls you so completely into its own logic (SEE: Coil – Time Machines) that you forget everything outside of it, and Naughty Boys does that for me in its own synthpop’y way.

I remember stumbling onto Ryuichi Sakamoto back in 2008, convinced I had found this obscure ambient figure hiding in the margins of music history. Then the realization crept in (slow at first and a little embarrassing later on) that Sakamoto wasn’t hidden at all – he was everywhere, threaded through entire movements of music I hadn’t fully mapped yet. Even now, I still get that same feeling when I hear some his studio albums or other works of YMO – it’s like I’m catching some wave that’s been cresting the whole time, and I’m just lucky enough to go along for the ride.

Great album. Thanks again, SPINES.