SHONEN KNIFE
Their first performance in Chicago, in December, also at Metro, hadn’t seemed this way at all. I’d expected a strange little garage band that might or might not be able to keep a steady beat. But what I found was a tight, raw rock outfit cranking out one incisive gem after another, all performed with unself-conscious showmanship. I’d been interested in the cheerfully strange music of Shonen Knife ever since the release of Shonen Knife on Gasatanka records in 1990. This album–a repackaging of early-80s releases from the Kyoto-based Zero Records–comprises 21 chunks of goofy noise that lodge in the brain and obstinately refuse to be pried out. Though it superficially resembles much other indie amateurishness of the time, here the obligatory bashing, stuttering guitars serve primarily as backdrop for some awkwardly catchy tunes sung mostly in Japanese, with occasional phrases in heavily accented high school English. It’s the singing that really makes these recordings happen; always pretty, never less than dignified, it sounds like the voices of supernaturally wise children in some remote mountain village forgotten by time. This dreamlike side comes into focus only after repeated listenings.
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We don’t like him so much, ’cause he’s very ug-ug-ugly
While Shonen Knife’s music certainly owes much to the rowdiest noise of the punk era–the Ramones, the Buzzcocks–they’ve shown a wholly original ability to reconfigure the scream of alienation into something a lot more cheerful, recalling the “girl groups” of the early 60s like the Shirelles and the Chiffons. Which brings us again to the question of the band’s acceptance by an American “alternative” rock audience that seems to prefer its music laced with more cynicism. What’s going on here? Well, the days when a Western band can pull off an “innocent” stance are over. Trying to do so would mean denying certain realities of the social climate, namely the alienation that results from living in a civilization so confused about its goals and ideals. Any American band’s attempt to play Shonen Knife’s brand of joyful noise would come off as either bitter irony or the kind of escapist “happy pop” that sticks to the teeth like too much sugar–as in Every Band Has a Shonen Knife Who Loves Them, a 1989 Gasatanka compilation of well-intentioned but nearly unlistenable Shonen Knife covers by the likes of Redd Kross, Sonic Youth, and Christmas. It’s important to realize that so many Western musicians–guitar rockers as well as rappers–are making angry noise not just because it’s some obligatory act of coolness, but because it most honestly expresses what life in the West feels like. It would be pointless to ask these bands to start playing happier songs; they’d come out sounding phony.
