Sekiri
Ah, the dependable world of Japanese girl punk, where girls never become women and half of all songs expound on the subject of food. Sure, there’s a ray of pop excellence running from Shonen Knife’s three-chord dayglo rumpus to Ni-Hao!’s three-girl math rock chops but, for the most part, Japanese girl punk can never escape from its counterpart: the Western male fan for whom the non-threatening disposition of the music fits his image of the non-threatening disposition of the Japanese female. Let’s rake over these brightly painted Pebbles once and for all and see what scurries out from underneath:
Meet Sekiri. Hissing and crawling out of Kyoto in 1985, these four girls were a minor scandal in Japan during the late 1980s. Their name meant dysentery for a start. Song titles were less about vegetables than about sex: Yumemiru Omanko (The Dreaming Vagina) and FUCK Shiyou (Let’s Fuck) being prime examples. Their songs also extended to filthy updates on old classics by the likes of the Finger Five and Pink Lady.
Pictured here on the cover of Sekiri No Monogatari, or Story of Sekiri, a best-of compilation released in 1989, the band somehow manage to pull off the Ramones grime-meets-Ronettes sass look to perfection, despite the photographer’s unusual decision to put them in a horsedrawn carriage. Isn’t that New York in the background? Surely there must have been a needle-strewn alley just yards from where this shot was taken…
Style and attitude are present in abundance, but you still wouldn’t hold out much hope for Sekiri’s music. That would be a mistake, though, because Sekiri were quite something. Their music really needs to be listened to in the context of the time it was made, when it would have sounded like a radical roar in Japan. Sekiri songs tended to be one or two minute squalls of brutalist sludge with sudden shifts in tempo that suggest the violent mood swings of a pouty sukeban teenage girl delinquent. Headgirl Miyu’s singing, meanwhile, could be better described as sarcastic ranting:
Sekiri - Dynamite Kid
Included on a CD giveaway with an old copy of Indies Issue, Dynamite Kid is minimal proto-grunge circa 1986: the aural equivalent of having nunchucks tightened around your throat by a chain-smoking all teen girl biker gang behind the pachinko parlour. Now that’s not what people come to Japan for, is it?
There’s a full Sekiri discography in Japanese here while YouTube, of course, never fails to turn up at least one clip of interest:
Things to love about this TV appearance from May ‘89 include: how monumentally disinterested Sekiri seem in being on this show; how the presenters appear to have trouble believing Sekiri are Japanese; the sublime ridiculousness of the ’80s in general; Sekiri’s live performance and the obligatory post-song analysis by the panel in which the Visual-kei goth dude wearing black eye make-up and lipstick comments that “It wasn’t bad at all but I still thought it was a little dark.”
