Deliciousweets

An outlandish girls’ circus is stalking Tokyo. Visitors to last month’s Yasukuni Shrine Festival will have seen it. It has also left the capital on several occasions, venturing as far as the northern wasteland of Hokkaido. I will attempt to describe its main features and suggest the possible implications for today’s youth movement.

Deliciousweets are a musical theatre group of seven women with one Heidi Chaamar as unofficial ringleader. They exist to satirise the housewife model of Japanese femininity and its counterpart, the feminine ideal embodied in Japanese entertainment’s conveyor belt production of anodyne idols and their inevitable sexworker progeny to service men whose own wives’ sexuality has been terminated at marriage. Unsurprisingly, Deliciousweets reject this system in favour of licentious free expression. In order to escape the attention of the authorities, they camouflage their protest in a ’swinging sixties’ aesthetic that makes it appear relatively harmless or even fun, as this piece of propaganda illustrates:

Deliciousweets formed around ten years ago as a fashion and dance group and then gradually added music to their act until they became more like a regular band that does between-song skits lampooning the inane jingles of soap commercials and the frothy eroticism of Japanese light entertainment. In 2006 the band released an album on the excellent Sazanami label. This year saw the formation of the band’s own label and the release of a follow-up entitled Nana-iro Hazamu Makkurai Sekai, or A Pitch-Dark World Cheered Up By Seven Colours, which they describe in the following polemic:

Our second album is a thing of rare beauty, deep meaning and profound human traits! Leaving aside the small things in life, we light up the pitch-dark world with our seven colours, each individually forming the spirit of the whole sky. Things that the eye can’t see are made visible and time passes too merrily. Is it a fairytale or a vision? No, it’s definitely for real.

Get ready to be bewildered! In our paralysing musical performances, our wild singing voices go straight for the heart and our high-pitched shriek goes dashing about the place! This incredible wonder will cause a sensitive person like yourself to surrender! A most unconventional collection of songs is now on sale!

Deliciousweets adhere strictly to a musical style known as natsumero or ‘nostalgic melodies’ that stir up memories of the golden Showa era, itself a historic fiction maintained by immersing the eyes and ears in Terayama Shuji movies and Group Sounds. Natsumero’s retro keening would be pretty tiresome were it not enlivened here by another core Deliciousweets concept: that of harenchi, meaning infamous or wanton and usually applied mock-disparagingly to the fallen heroines of Showa-era exploitation movies. ‘Harenchi Cabaret’ is one way of describing a typical Deliciousweets performance. The band itself prefers ‘Coquette Show’:

Deliciousweets don’t just scour Terayama movies for fashion tips: the band is thoroughly versed in the core ’60s/’70s doctrines of Feminism, Marxism and Situationism – values that finally arrived in music ten years later than in most other artforms with the ’spontaneous’ coming of punk. But since faithful adherence to pre-punk aesthetic values prohibits them from playing their own music, the women of Deliciousweets have taken into their employ a harem of four male musicians who labour under the separate name of Girls Alley Paralysed Hips.

It is the ‘Hips’ sacred duty to generate the psychedelic fuzz and organ licks that let loose the Deliciousweets’ harenchi-ness onstage, where the gender dynamic is clearly one of role-reversal. As punishment for their rock forefathers’ collective misdeeds, the men are confined to fixed positions at the rear of the stage like an electrified gospel choir. Teasing the guys about their over-consumption of shochu and subsequent incapacitation forms part of the girls’ act for the ‘Hips secondary function is to be witless dupes of the girls’ emasculating prowess, as their name makes clear. Confronted by a ‘girls alley’ (vagina), their ‘hips’ (asses) become ‘paralysed’ (paralysed) leaving them incapable of performing the thrusting maneuvers historically enjoyed by male rock musicians. That promiscuity will henceforth be an exclusively female privilege is at the forefront of Deliciousweets’ revolutionary agenda.

What do Deliciousweets mean for the confused limbo of today’s youth movement? Are they a comment upon or a symptom of the current pathetic state of resistance that forces nonconformists to retreat to the past in search of challengeable values and the means to attack them? Let’s listen to some music in search of answers. From the recent album, the hauntingly onchi slow number Imo Koro Musume, a Kafkaesque parable of a girl forced to endure life as a potato, with the humble vegetable possibly serving as metaphor for a dreary fate as a Japanese mother-wife:

Deliciousweets – Imo Koro Musume

A rare early number included on the first Wild Sazanami Beat compilation, My First Date sets out a girl’s itinerary of expectations for a first romantic encounter. Note how the song’s mood of quaint upbeat innocence is delivered tongue-in cheek. Tea and a movie she will go for, but a guerrilla-filmed tryst in a manga cafe in exchange for twenty thousand yen is not on this girl’s agenda. Or is it?

Deliciousweets – My First Date

We round off with a curio: Harenchi Gakuen No Tēma (Theme from ‘School of Infamy’, the spin-off movie of a popular erotic manga series) is a rollicking ’60s sexploitation number by a little-known beat singer called Kajiki Sō and features probably the first use of the H-word in Japanese pops.

Kajiki Sō – Harenchi Gakuen No Tēma

Deliciousweets are touring Japan this month.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• What we’re watching: Top six DVDs for family night
• Hilary And Haylie’s New Film