YMMV / Yellow Magic Orchestra

• Accidental Innuendo: With the song's word choice and the band's accents, it can be easy to mis-hear the line "teeny-weeny floppy deck" in "Hi-Tech Hippies" as "Teeny Weenie floppy dick." The fact that the line before it goes "itty-bitty hippie tech" only compounds this.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Despite being major international successes both commercially and critically and despite continuing to be critical favorites in the west to this day, in the decades since their last album, YMO have been heavily overlooked in the western mainstream, despite being a major influence on western Synth-Pop and Hip-Hop artists. Much of this is thanks to a mix of spotty distribution and, in the US, the Disco Sucks movement, though the band's catalog being internationally available on Spotify may help remedy the situation.
• Audience-Alienating Era: While not outright disliked, Service and Technodon are regarded as noticeable steps down in quality. Specifically, the comedy skits on Service are regarded as Album Filler that mesh poorly with the music, while Technodon sees criticism for its hour-long length and shift to ambient techno instead of Genre-Busting Synth-Pop. The non-album tracks YMO put out in the 2000's, meanwhile, are much better-regarded, taking the style of Technodon and reintroducing the earlier eclectic elements.
• Covered Up:
  • An odd case— Most Westerners heard the version of "Behind the Mask" rewritten by Michael Jackson, most famously performed by Eric Clapton (though Jackson first gave his version to Greg Philliganes). In a case of Approval of God, Sakamoto loved this version and recorded it with Bernard Fowler on vocals for his Media Bahn Live album and then studio recorded for a single. Nowadays, the Jackson version is most well-known on account of the heavy publicity surrounding its inclusion in his posthumous 2010 album Michael (Jackson having one of the biggest and most persistent cults of personality in the music world certainly helps).
  • Played Straight with the case of "Firecracker", which got so popular that it rendered the Martin Denny original into complete obscurity beyond the scope of more devoted YMO fans.
  • The band's song "You've Got to Help Yourself" was covered by Keane for their "Night Train" EP.
  • The cover of "Kimi Ni Mune Kyun" used as the ending theme to Maria†Holic is much better-known nowadays than the original version off of Naughty Boys.
• Eclipsed by the Remix: The 1979 US mix of Yellow Magic Orchestra by Al Schmitt is generally much better-known than the original 1978 Japanese mix by Haruomi Hosono. Part of this is due to the Schmitt mix being the only version officially available outside of Japan before 2003, but even in Japan it overtook the Hosono mix in popularity and was even functionally adopted by the band as the canonical version of the album, to the extent where the Hosono mix took until 1992 to see a CD release in its home country (CD releases before then exclusively used the Schmitt version). To this day, the Schmitt mix is the one most heavily prioritized in reissues; on double-CD and double-LP releases that contain both versions, Schmitt's version is consistently placed on disc one.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: In the west, the band manages to be one for the entire first wave of Synth-Pop: while they never achieved the same level of lasting international mainstream prominence as their western counterparts, they're still a huge critical favorite to this day and are widely acclaimed by both music analysts and synth-pop fans for their massive influence on western artists like The Human League, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and many early Hip-Hop acts in addition to their own artistic strengths.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Kenji Sawada's fanbase briefly in the early to mid Eighties due to both of them having a similar sound and aesthetic at the time, although the band actually helped out Julie on his 1983 synthpop album Onnatachiyo, so it's kinda one-sided.
• Friendly Fandoms: There's a sizable overlap between YMO fans and Japan fans, owed to Ryuichi Sakamoto's frequent collaborations with Japan frontman David Sylvian (a relationship which stretches all the way back to Japan's fourth album, Gentlemen Take Polaroids).
• Ho Yay: The back cover to Naughty Boys have the three members intertwine their arms. It becomes more ambiguous by the time Technodon came around, with promotional material showing the three lying in a funeral bed, together!
• Misaimed Fandom: The entire idea behind Naughty Boys was to be a satire on contemporary trends in J-pop by featuring three highly respected and influential grown men performing tongue-in-cheek cheesy bubblegum pop songs; despite this, most covers of the album's Signature Song, "Kimi Ni, Mune Kyun", both by Japanese and foreign artists, play it as a straight-laced pop song. This is especially the case with the cover used as the ending theme in Maria†Holic, which manages to be even more sugary than the original.
• Narm Charm: "Tighten Up (Japanese Gentlemen Stand Up Please!)" is a corny-as-hell cover of a classic funk instrumental with Haruomi Hosono loudly shouting parodies of Japanese stereotypes over it, but it's that same self-aware whackadoo energy that led to the song becoming one of the band's most beloved internationally, to the point where it was one of the pieces they performed on Soul Train, to much applause (which is somewhat impressive given that the track was only released as a non-album single in the US, having been left off the A&M recut of Multiplies).
• Periphery Demographic: Popularity with the "urban" market in the early 1980s got the band onto Soul Train, as well as influencing early Hip-Hop through producer Afrika Bambaataa. YMO returned the favor with "Rap Phenomena", a homage to the rising hip-hop scene.
• Signature Song: Depends on where you look. In Japan, "Rydeen" is the band's most iconic song, to the point where it was a regular inclusion in video games in the 80's and got a chart-topping re-recording from the band in 2007. Outside of Japan, however, the band is best remembered for their cover of Martin Denny's "Firecracker". "Behind the Mask" comes close in the west, but is better remembered for the various cover versions by western artists (most famously Michael Jackson) than for the YMO original.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Cue" was directly inspired by Ultravox's B-side "Passionate Reply" (from the "Vienna" single), and as such shares numerous compositional elements with it (most prominently the arpeggiated synth riff), to the point where Japanese fans accuse it of being a pakuri (パクリ), which is a rude slangy term for "rip-off."

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