“We can certainly approve of and understand the player with the flute”

From Eagle and Boys’ World, 5th October 1968.

Eagle‘s slightly suspect enthusiasm for all things Eastern Bloc and totalitarian (holidays in Leningrad, etc.) emerges yet again, this time in an article about North Korean postage stamps that somehow takes in “gosh, how exciting” and “silly foreigners” at the same time. The two subheaders being “Stringed instruments” and “Ironing board” demonstrates this duality quite well.

Eagle also once did a quiz so young boys could find out for themselves how much like Kruschev they were.

I DO NOT APPROVE OF OR UNDERSTAND ANY KIND OF UKELELE.

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.