The gap of what’s not said

I first heard of Pizzicato Five about twenty-some years ago during my Science Fiction and Fantasy class (I know, it was weird and awesome); but I didn’t know they were part of a movement known as Shibuya Kei until very recently when I’ve started to explore more about Japanese 90’s pop because it’s one of those things you just do, that’s one of the reasons why the internet was invented.

Shibuya Kei is an hyper-stylized, hyper-glamorous, hyper-aesthetic and ultra-chic movement inspired in 60’s and 70’s French Pop and bossa nova. Downtown Tokyo kids seeking refuge in the happy and cheerful tones of Rio and Paris. From what? The thing about cultural expressions is that sometimes it’s not about what’s being yelled at you, but about the massive, echoing gap left by what isn’t being said.

Like every cultural movement Shibuya Kei is a product of its place and time. That whole scene peaked exactly when the Japanese economic bubble burst. The “Lost Decade” was starting, lifetime employment was dying, and instead of screaming about it, young people chose this radical superficiality. They built a beautiful, sun-drenched, cinematic fantasy world inside Shibuya record shops. It was a total refusal to participate in a broken corporate monoculture.

Unfortunately you can only do that for so long. In the late 90s, when it was obvious things weren’t going to get better any time soon, you get the raw, anxious guitars of Number Girl, and then later, an act like Midori. Midori is just wild, a frantic avant-garde jazz piano mixed with blistering hardcore punk, fronted by a woman screaming in a torn school uniform. They’re like that annoying piece of food stuck in your teeth. It’s just there, and even after you remove it, the sensation remains for far longer.

You rebel against the machine, and then you either implode or become part of it.

We romanticize the rebels and that’s a feeling that’s often weaponized against us. Look at the Sex Pistols. They weren’t walking some noble tightrope between teenage rebellion and corporate interests; they were essentially a manufactured boy band engineered by Malcolm McLaren to sell clothes to kids ever more willing to pay to express their frustrations. Or look at Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the massive BBC ban over “Relax” because of its explicit queer themes. The establishment had a moral meltdown, banned it, and immediately triggered the Streisand effect. It shot to Number 1, and the label turned the censorship into a massive t-shirt marketing campaign.

Which of course made me thing about how the Catholic Church tried to silence Galileo and his heliocentric view of the universe.

When the Roman Inquisition forced Galileo to kneel in 1633 and sign a humiliating recantation of heliocentrism, they thought they won. They silenced the messenger. We have this romantic myth that he whispered “And yet it moves” as he walked away, but he didn’t. He was a sick old man who didn’t want to get burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno. He signed the lie and went on to live his last days in peace. Frankly, I would’ve done the same: “sure, whatever makes you happy. The moon is made of cheese, you say? Yeah, whatever. Can I go home now?”

But by then the spark his ideas had started had already caught. And that’s the catastrophic flaw of the censor. You can ban a song, you can burn a record, and you can kill a heretic. But you cannot hide elemental truths.

The universe is a permanent backup copy. The stars kept moving in their precise, mathematical orbits every single night regardless of what the Pope forced Galileo to sign. The fire was already growing in the Protestant North where the Vatican couldn’t reach, passing from Kepler to Newton. By trying to freeze the truth, the southern establishment didn’t stop the science. You can’t negotiate with the laws of physics.

It’s exactly what makes the anime Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (and its manga) such a spectacular piece of work. The show relentlessly kills off its main characters because it understands the ultimate optimistic truth of reality: the individual links in the chain are fragile and anonymous, but the message is completely decentralized. If you haven’t watched it go right now.

In the end, whether it’s a filthy synth bassline dominating the charts despite a BBC ban, a punk singer calling out a protected institutional predator into a live microphone, or a broken astronomer staring at the sky under house arrest, it’s all the same friction. The establishment will always try to organize reality into neat, profitable, compliant little boxes. And they will always fail, because the sky isn’t going anywhere.