Children, stupefied by cider

(Title refers to this post, BTW.)

Some inadvertent cross-cultural comedy thanks to Japan’s Tempura Kidz– seen previously in The Rite of Spring (Onions)– who are the terrifyingly talented group who started out as the child backing dancers for autotuned über-kawaii lunatic Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

Yes, I am obsessed with J-pop. Thanks for asking. I’m so square that genuinely enjoying Japanese pop is what passes for a secret vice in my case.

Seriously, all joking and Japan-you-so-weird aside, the choreography by the surnameless Maiko for the group is great and the way the kids themselves snap through the moves is truly brilliant. You need to be really talented and work bloody hard to dance this well and still have it look like fun. Incidentally the dancer seen front and centre through most of the video below is P→★ (try pronouncing that, English speakers); he’s a boy, he definitely knows how to rock a wig and tutu, and let’s all hope he always stays that way. The girls are called (or at least go by the names of) Karin, NaNaHo, Yu-Ka and Ao.

This song is called Cider Cider and, as you could probably guess, it’s about how nice it is to have a wee drink of cider now and then. Which is true. Unfortunately cider to a British person like me is also probably best known as the illegal alcoholic drink of choice for adolescents about thirteen or fourteen years old, i.e. like the Tempura Kidz. Cider is also infamously favoured by Britain’s most abject alcoholics because super-strong, cheap ciders are easily available in large containers from supermarkets here. In Asia the beverage they call cider is an innocent soft drink that has nothing to do with sitting on the swings in the park and boozing until you’re suddenly, explosively sick on your own shoes. Nor does it conjure up to a Japanese person images of a man with hollow eyes and something you’d rather not identify stuck in his beard asking you if you’ve got 50 pence towards his so-called “bus fare”. If you’ve got as much time on your hands as some Wikipedians evidently have, you can read an extensive explanation of international differences between the various drinks that are labelled as cider.

So while you watch, please remember that the children in this video may be covered in fluorescent paint and they may be wearing the disembowelled remnants of stuffed toys like they’re in a depraved mashup of Monsters Inc and Mad Max 2, but they are not totally crunk.

Note also the total abandonment of any pretence that it matters what their voices sound like, or indeed whether they appear on the recording at all. It could be a totally synthetic vocal, like Hatsune Miku. Or a 45 year old man. Who knows?

Spending all my time… forever… and ever… and EVER

Another experiment in re-soundtracking J-pop videos with highbrow Modernist composers: see also The Rite of Spring (Onions). By the way, I’m officially staking my claim as the originator of the J-pop video/Modernist orchestral soundtrack mashup genre, OK? Not that I imagine many other people would want to lay claim to it.

Anyway, this time it’s Perfume’s Spending All My Time (directed by Tanaka Yuusuke), in which the scarily wholesome autotuned J-pop robo-idoru appear to have been locked in a room where they amuse themselves with OCD hand rituals and by complacently shattering ornaments with telekinesis, like chirpy Harajuku versions of Sadako from the Ringu series, versus György Ligeti’s Lontano, best known from the immensely effective and creepy soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s film of The Shining.

Instructions:

1. Mute the audio of Spending All My Time.

2. Press play on Lontano. I suggest starting about two minutes in.

3. Press play on Spending All My Time.

4. In seven days you will die.

5. Not really. You may have screaming nightmares about the young ladies from Perfume exploding your head like an egg in a microwave, though.

PS: On Youtube there are re-enactments of this video by three overweight Mexicans and by a man with three copies of himself. Because, you know, of course.

Perhaps a bit TOO happy happy

I watched this on a loop until I went insane. Or I was insane, so I watched this on a loop. I still didn’t want to eat a Japanese custard pudding thing.

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, where you from and what you on?

Bonus Japanese advertising campaign that probably counts as a form of torture or psychological warfare under the Geneva convention

I’ve been to Nara (at about 01.15) and the sacred deer as featured in the CM are bastards.

Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s. Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s. Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s. Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s. Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s. (Hai!) Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s. Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s. Lotte no Fit’s FIT’s.  Still not as bad as the USA’s contribution to the genre, the unfortunately unforgettable: HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD. HEAD ON, APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD.

See also: Nihon brainwash, including the aforementioned Head On video (apply directly to the forehead.)

The ne plus ultra of J-Pop

… is チョコレイト・ディスコ (CHOKORETO DISUKO/Chocolate Disco) by Perfume. Between the video and the song itself, it has everything J-Pop: grown women pretending they’re still in high school, abrasive banality, squelched low-res bassline, autotune helium voices, outfits and environments reminiscent of a charity shop-cum-strip club in Teletubbyland, lasers, a silly but eminently imitable dance… I particularly enjoy the telescope-to-the-eye move. The whole package is likely to make many people want to jam a screwdriver up to the hilt into both of their ear canals. I love it.

It’s also probably the ne plus ultra of almost entirely innocent but nonetheless profound camp. On the other hand, if Chocolate Disco isn’t already (and completely un-innocently) the name of a gay club night then I shall be very disappointed in the world.

They’re singing about Valentine’s Day, which in Japan for some unknown reason (NB many things happen in Japan for unknown reasons) means that girls have to give boys chocolate. Hence the title, unless of course it really is some kind of incredibly smutty innuendo about kids in high school negotiating how and when they’re going to take it up the wrong ‘un.

Anyway, here’s my partial and idiomatic English translation of it to help you all appreciate this masterpiece. Prepare yourselves, it’s profound.

Chocolate Disco, etc…

Girls are planning something,

Boys are expecting something.

Girls are flustered about something,

Boys pretend not to care about anything.

Valentine’s Day (“BARAINTAIN”) is coming,

The department store (DEPAATO, where girls buy chocolates for BARAINTAIN) starts shaking.

(The bridge section is them saying please, let my feelings reach him, with all my heart I hope they will, etc. Near the end they say that the classroom has turned into a dance floor. Of course it has.)

I did a karaoke version of this song in Tokyo a few years ago, thinking that a middle-aged man with a beard singing a song in the persona of a lovestruck teenage girl would automatically be funny to my Japanese companions. They sort of did find it funny and weird, but mainly they were rather disappointingly blown away by the revelation that I could sing a Japanese song at all. They seemed oblivious to camp, kitsch or incongruity as general concepts. You would probably think it impossible, for example, to have a non-camp conversation about the film Showgirls. I did. My Japanese companions were mainly off-duty pole dancers, though, so this might be regarded as a variety of talking shop and not representative. One of them gamely tackled (like a rugby player tackles) Wuthering Heights as a kind of cross-cultural quid pro quo. You haven’t truly experienced that song until you’ve heard it as a mangled Japlish karaoke version. The first line is “Out on the wiley, windy moor we’d roll and fall in green” which even when you have the words on a screen involves a nightmarish number of Ls and Rs for a Japanese person. “Heathcliff” is also fairly unpronounceable.

How I came to be out clubbing in Shinjuku with off-duty pole dancers is another long but surprisingly chaste and un-sordid story, so I’ll leave the rest to your imagination because I’m sure it’s more interesting and lurid than what actually happened.

The Rite of Spring (Onions)

ベジタリズム , Beijitarizumu (= something like “Vegeta-rhythm”) is a video from– of course– Japan and it extols the virtue of eating vegetables through the medium of J-pop, dancing and Japlish word play. I can’t stop watching it, so you could interpret this post as some kind of cry for help. The cuteness of the children, the infanto-trad-pop music and the demented earnestness of an enthusiasm for vegetables that comes across even if you don’t understand a word they’re saying: the combination of all these things in one video is, I warn you, likely to result in the audiovisual equivalent of a pure white sugar diabetic coma. I’d love to know how they kept those hats on, and how painful a procedure it was.

On the positive side, I’ve seen this video so many times now that if you want I could probably do the dance for you. Oh, you’d like me to wear the white unitard, the wig, and the tutu as well? You’re very kinky, but we may be able to work something out.

Once (or if) you’ve recovered from your first viewing, I suggest that you mute the sound on Beijitarizumu, play it again and simultaneously play the video below it, which is- appropriately- the NHK Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. (original video disappeared: replaced  with Pina Bausch choreography that’s nearly as good, ha ha. Try starting at about 4:40). You will note that this combination completely works and highlights precisely how amazing, insane and weirdly primal the choreography is. It’s fierce in both the true sense of the word and in the played-out, annoying, drag-queeny usage of the word. It really could be some archaic pagan rite, not least because it wouldn’t be at all the same if the dancers weren’t children.

Anyone want to collaborate on my new J-pop/Wicker Man interpretation of The Rite of Spring with a cast of children? I’m aiming for an audience riot like the one that happened at the first performance.

PS: A further warning that the related videos feature on Youtube is likely to send you down the dayglo kawaii rabbit hole where Kyary Pamyu Pamyu lives. Go,  because her first video in particular is a lowbrow masterpiece I’d be exceedingly proud to have directed myself… but remember to come back again.

WAY WAY PONPONPON, WAY WAY PON PON WAYWAYWAY.

PPS: Unsettling Youtube revelation of the day: Apparently girls “cutely” firing candy-toned AK47s or similar heavy-duty firearms is a definite thing in J-pop and K-pop PVs now.