Number Girl
Shibuya Rocktransformed Joutai

Do you know the treatment that the Yakuza reserves for its traitors? Neither do I. But I can imagine it by listening to Number Girl.

Some things make me seriously mad, like certain DeBaser users who are the embodiment of real-life users who understand nothing and whom I'd like to castrate with chopsticks in the best Kitano tradition. There are things instead that make me mad in a good way, like these four Japanese students who within a year (back in 1999) released their debut on an independent label, were hired by EMI for their second, and produced a third live album.

"Shibuya ROCKTRANSFORMED Joutai" is the result of that period of artistic exploitation. Shutoku Mukai is the singer. You know the classic high school nerd? Bowl cut, glasses, skinny, you wouldn't even give him a Macao patch. Instead, he works hard to ravage his own vocal cords. But he doesn’t sing in a grandiose growling manner as some metalhead troll might hope. Nah, he simply yells as if defending himself from Galeazzi hungry on a mid-August day when even the food distributors are closed. He doesn't care about his throat, he doesn't care about our eardrums; he doesn't mind if he looks like the boy next door, he gets on stage and turns into an almond-eyed beast.

Fast guitar rock, a bit disconnected, subtly melodic. Not distinctly oriental given their explicit love, which becomes evident when you listen to them, for the creations of Francis Black and associates. If I could return to the ancestral dimension of a spermatozoon, I'd like to be expelled from the small scrotal pouch of a Fukuoka-born Japanese to be able to admire, at a young age, the exploits of four ordinary guys who became rock stars by chance. Lacerating guitars, hoarse bass, powerful and hysterical drums, screams in abundance; nothing else is needed to alleviate post-adolescent neuroses. And the recipe works. Whether it’s the resentment towards average Caucasian genital sizes or the whales ending up in the oceans, these Japanese, when it comes to letting off steam, have no equals.

I close my eyes and put on the headphones, just like I used to do a few years ago in the bus going to school in the morning. I had to wake up at 6:15, of course, I was mad. Of course, I saw myself there in the audience, a repressed Japanese teenager too, shouting improbable mixes of guttural and dental consonants while hopefully groping an innocent student's buttock in the crowd. The first thing I hear are my pimply peers, a bit drunk, tossing their greasy hair, starting to propagate sweat mixed with growth hormones. A guitar mumbles, whistles, the bass has a playful edge, the drums create random chaos. Then it starts, the images blur into the frenzy, it’s only them now with their musical pandemonium, the damned Number Girl. I jump, I yell, I elbow, I get spat on, hair gets pulled, dentures fly, fillings, toupees. "Iggy Pop Fun Club" begins, and whoever can pulls out their katana. A bit of a reset with the mantra of "Sakura No Dansu" but right after there's "Samurai" where several Hiroshi and Satoshi have heart failures and are trampled on without concern by the remaining survivors. "YOUNG GIRL 17TEEN SEXUALLY KNOWING" breaks down the last defenses of young virgins who frantically engage in copulation with the first biological form at hand. Then they play my favorite: "Toumei Shoujo". By now I've lost several teeth and my hair has turned white but it doesn't matter, tonight the fury of primitive violence makes me overcome the suffering, it becomes nourishment for my frustrated soul. "Nichijou ni Ikiru Shoujo", another dilated-rear-end apotheosis. "Super Young" and its vicious riff seem never-ending, yet I know, the end is near, but not before a final shard of destructive energy: "Omoide In My Head" perhaps the symbolic piece of these young lunatics’ little madness, to which no, you cannot remain indifferent and to which no, you cannot survive. It’s just me, a dozen Kazuhiko, and a couple of Akiko left. More than six minutes of unprecedented chaos, I can’t take it, I can’t handle it, exhausted, I feel myself disintegrating, transforming into a mephitic sub-organic mush.

The concert ends, maybe, because none of us survived to tell the tale… “Hey”… “Hey... boy... wake up... the bus has arrived, you have to get off”