Shonen Knife, "Burning Farm"
Last week, I wrote about what I felt when I learned Kurt Cobain had died. But I stopped short of providing the full picture (emphasis added):
A big part of me felt lousy. Lousy first of all about all the time and effort I’d spent slagging off Nirvana over the years. But lousy, too, that this man had been left just standing in a world that was so cold …
So let me tell you now about how the rest of me felt, which was resentful. In the shortest imaginable amount of time after Kurt’s death, commentators were declaring that he was the Voice of a Generation—the Voice of My Generation. With the benefit of hindsight and accumulated wisdom, I can see that I might have cut these pundits a break, in the moment. We say warm things about people when they die. We assign greater significance to their lives. This is a matter of etiquette and good practice. Now consider a case where a genre-defining rock star dies by suicide, and a colorable argument can be made that the shotgun blast wasn’t so much a shock as entirely consistent with the trajectory of his work: i.e., he died as he sang. Hand anyone a microphone in that moment and ask them to comment, and “Voice of a Generation” is naturally the phrase that parks itself on their lips.
Still, I was pissed off. I was—still am—a card-carrying, bird-flipping member of Generation X. By the time Kurt died, our elders and betters were already in third gear taking every available opportunity to bash the deficient work ethic, lack of urgency, and short attention span of the children they’d raised. To some extent we (that is, myself + most everyone my age who would engage with me on these points) wore these critiques as badges of honor: we’re still figuring out our values—we just know they’re not yours. Or as a far better writer than I am would put it (Apple Music, Spotify):
These children that you spit on, as they try to change their world, are immune to your consultations. They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.
But the notion that any one person is the Voice of His Generation ought to be objectionable to every member of That Generation, regardless of what that Voice said and how much you might have agreed with it. More disagreeable still to hear your self-satisfied elders and betters bestow that honorific on a guy whose music opened the door to Stone Temple Pilots and Mad Season, after the culture they (the elders and betters, not Stone Temple Pilots and Mad Season) built and celebrated had hounded him to suicide. Kurt’s last word was that he couldn’t stand to spend one more second in this world. Now here comes a fawning commentariat, waving an arm over America’s youth and declaring: he was speaking for you.
No. Just—no.
We had worked out what we stood against, and we were still working through what we stood for. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t nihilism, or desperation, and we weren’t just going to cede the space to the Generation of Charles Manson (ooh: too tough?) and hope for better in the afterlife. This Voice of a Generation logic turned a man’s death into a statement on our behalf. That’s not any good for him, and it’s not any good for us, either.
And this reductionist nonsense carries on, some thirty years later. Type <voice of a generation cobain> into Google and see all the hits. What’s worse: see all the Gen X writers who have bought in and are carrying this argument forward. My voice doesn’t project well—this post will settle in at 60, maybe 70 hits—but what I like best about it is that it’s mine. I don’t feel especially compelled to eat anyone’s cancer when it turns black, so keep those words out my mouth.
Let’s shift gears now and talk about Shonen Knife.
Shonen Knife had been kicking around for more than ten years by the time I first heard of them, in the early 1990s. MTV aired their video for “Riding on the Rocket” on 120 Minutes. Shonen Knife was then and is now—albeit with some member turnover—a three-piece all-girl cartoon punk band from Osaka. “Riding on the Rocket” is what would happen if the Ramones wrote the theme song for a kids show about space exploration, and a Japanese teenager sang it. I was sold instantly. I took the first opportunity to run up to the Princeton Record Exchange1 and buy their CD, Let’s Knife.
Let’s Knife did not disappoint. A fervid mix of punk rock, surf rock, Chinese reggae (!), slide guitar, and straight-up pop music, the record includes songs about outer space, cats (and more specifically, being a cat), Barbie dolls, beleaguered buffalo, toilet cleaners, and a jelly bean/ cherry drop rivalry. The title of that last track, “Flying Jelly Attack,” is most certainly an homage to the Rezillos, whom I wouldn’t discover for another five more years.
When Let’s Knife was released in August 1992, Pearl Jam’s Ten and Nirvana’s Nevermind ruled the airwaves. Tortured men in flannels pawed at the dirt with their work boots, striking agonistic poses (Come on! Vogue!) and crying out in anguish. You could cut a thick hunk of cheddar on the tendons pulsing out through their necks, and the record industry was very much inclined to do just that. Dreary masculinity was all the rage. All the rage was all the rage.
For those of us crying out for an answer to the earth-toned cocktail of melodrama and poorly reconstructed classic rock that the industry was selling to us even then (!) as The Sound of Generation X, Shonen Knife—bright, colorful, punky and fun—arrived right on time. To be sure, there was other, terrific, non-grunge music to be found: late-stage dreampop, early-stage shoegaze, R.E.M. for crying out loud. But Naoko, Michie, & Atsuko supplied a very specific antidote to the Seattle-borne pathogen that was consuming MTV and FM radio, like Akira swelling and metastasizing across Neo-Tokyo. Shonen Knife were the antithesis of grunge. They were a force field of fun, walling out and deflecting a lot of other nineties crap.
I remember Saturday mornings in the fall of ’92, ride-riding on my bicycle along the towpath on Lake Carnegie, in an abortive effort to get myself into shape. I did this only a handful of times before I fell back into old habits and slept in through lunch. As a result, nothing about these mornings holds any importance in the Grand Narrative Edit of my life. These are cutting-room floor memories: scraps of sensation, experience, and emotion that could as easily have been shunted into oblivion, never to be revisited, if it weren’t for the several Shonen Knife songs that put me right back on that bike saddle, in the autumn sun, the minute I hear them. I must have had that CD spinning on a particularly pretty Saturday morning.
In my senior year I wrote a paper about Shonen Knife for my English class on Postmodernism. (I wrote my final paper for that course about the Februarys.) A couple days ago I went looking for it in our crawl space: no luck. If I find it, I’ll need to supplement this post.
If you have a young daughter, and you want to get her into rock music early—the better to ward off contemporary pop music as she gets older—Shonen Knife is a good bet. The videos are fun, they did the Power Puff Girls theme song (YouTube), and the hooks are catchy and upbeat. When I was working at MIT, the band stopped by campus for a panel discussion hosted by the Global Languages Department. I brought Lila. She was six years old, but already Lila: she raised her hand and asked them a question. After the talk, they autographed a poster for her and posed for a picture. The Knife played the Middle East later that night. I wish I had gone.
There are 17 songs on Let’s Knife, and relatedly, I can think of at least 17 great options for this post’s title track. Problem is the record isn’t on either of the streamers. I checked Apple Music, I checked Spotify: nothing. For the sake of having an answer here, I’m going with this early and terrific Japanese version of “Burning Farm” (Apple Music, Spotify), a song that the band would re-record in English for Let’s Knife.
This post was supposed to end here. I ranted a little about generational politics, did the point-counterpoint work positioning Shonen Knife as the antithesis of grunge, and pledged my allegiance to the Knife, all day every day. But then I did a bit more online research, and I learned that Shonen Knife toured with Nirvana in 1990 and 1991, and Kurt Cobain loved them. Hm. Time now to reevaluate who exactly is being reductionist here, because it could be me.
Turns out Kurt had this to say about Shonen Knife’s sets opening for Nirvana:
Every show, people were like, almost in tears. I was an emotional sap the whole time. I cried every night.
To recap: every night on their tour together, while Shonen Knife played songs called “Cycling Is Fun,” “Fruit Loop Dreams,” “I Wanna Eat Choco Bars,” and “Twist Barbie,” Kurt Cobain was crying. Weird.
But maybe not? Seems to me that if you’re Kurt Cobain living the grunge life, taking the stage five nights a week to offer up your anger and guilt and pain for crowds of eager teenagers to celebrate—well, maybe Shonen Knife will make you feel a certain way.
These three women chose rock ‘n’ roll, just like you did. Their music is every bit as genuine and emphatic as yours. But where Nirvana’s songs are about everything in the world that is broken and wrong—RAPE ME, and so on—the subtext of every one of the Knife’s songs is wide-eyed wonder. There is innocence and sincerity in Shonen Knife’s music, a chaotic joy that speaks hope to the hopeless. A troubled soul walks into a church, hears the choir singing praise to God, and he falls on his knees, crying. This is an old trope. Viewed in these terms, Kurt crying over Shonen Knife actually makes a hell of a lot of sense.
The Knife’s warmup sets couldn’t save Kurt from his demons any more than Let’s Knife could rescue the nation from grunge. But let’s be fair: this was never their job. Their job was always and only to rock and be awesome, and as far as I can tell, they’re still doing both.
Last week I stopped in on the Record Exchange for the first time in years—and for the first time since Kate bought me the turntable. As often as I’d been there back when I was in college, I had never advanced beyond the CD racks up front. The vinyl section was insane. I spent a half hour there and left with a haul. Can’t imagine the damage I could have done if I’d had more time.