Tommy Heavenly6
Lollipop Candy BAD Girl

There is this country in the world where every possible form in which human creativity has been expressed and is expressed is carefully observed, studied, and preserved, and in particular, musical creativity is "lovingly kept alive" (cit. Il testimone by Pif) by continuing not only to play it but above all to use it, and this country is Japan. The stereotype of the Japanese taking photos is the surface beneath which one must see to understand what they are really doing: they are documenting to learn and reuse what they have learned to then be able to apply it for their own purposes. And that's how it has been possible for a country that until the end of the 19th century was still living in a medieval era completely isolated from the rest of the world, and which even suffered a nuclear bombing, to become one of the world's major powers in just a few decades. The spirit of observing to learn to apply is used at all levels, even the most popular ones: for example, Japanese pop and rock music is perfectly parallel to that of the rest of the world, and many Westerners, when they listen to it, hear echoes of the original sources; yes, it's true, perhaps the Japanese invent less, but they know how to apply very well what others invent (it's the nerd and geek theory). Let's take a clear example: Tomoko Kawase, aka the vocalist of the brilliant green, aka one of the best incarnations of Brit-pop on Japanese soil. The beautiful Tomoko also has a solo career, but it's dual: when she records pop stuff she goes by Tommy february6, when she delves into rock, she is called Tommy heavenly6, and in this guise, she has been repeatedly called "the Japanese Avril Lavigne." Now, I challenge Avril Lavigne to ever produce, in her entire career, a track of quality even slightly comparable to that of Lollipop Candy♥BAD♥girl.

Written on commission by the liquor company Jose Cuervo (the one of the Especial tequila) for the 2006 Halloween party, Lollipop Candy♥BAD♥girl is one of the strangest musical creatures ever begotten in the realm of pop-rock: it is a ten and a half minute-long track composed of a curious hybrid between a military march, a nursery rhyme-like waltz, and a pop-punk refrain. The tripartition of the track is quite clear with the three parts not blending into each other but instead ending with a whole note of silence and then the next part begins; the lyrics, on the other hand, are continuous and very simple, with her organizing the Halloween night where she dreams of meeting Prince Charming and rambles about Lollipop Candy Land (long live tequila). The result is disconcerting: the arrangement varies from the initial drums to the middle organ to the concluding guitars, the lyrics are all mixed with half-English and half-Japanese sentences, little choruses and ridiculous effects pop out, and the song opens and closes with thunder and lightning to make it all more Halloween-like. A crazy thing. Reinforcing even more the impression that it is something produced under the heavy influence of tequila is the artwork of the single, made with (artfully) out-of-focus and color-calibrated photos, (artfully) poorly cut in Photoshop and juxtaposed (artfully) as best (or worst) as possible, but above all, the videoclip: it's so bad it's wonderful, a masterpiece. Obviously bad on purpose, huh, with Z-series computer graphics that not even in 1979, a green screen that my grandmother could do better, shot cuts inconsistent with the audio, extras with costumes bought at Lidl, static frames, terrible details like the moon made with a scoop of ice cream on which tequila drips, sets cobbled together I don't want to know where, and other oddities that make it all a total cult. Only Tommy's costumes seem minimally cared for, and they are obviously three: witch, Cinderella, and princess (?). All produced and realized by Tomoko with her own hands, artwork and the videoclip included.

Snare drum from the march coming straight out of an American high school, a refrain that sounds like four simple chords but they are well juxtaposed and work as if they came out of a Californian garage, lyrics annoyingly catchy: perhaps a novel mix, probably one of the tracks with the most skewed simplicity/effect ratio, certainly something rather heterogeneous and far from our Western standards, despite deriving its individual parts (but the sum is greater). Could Avril Lavigne do the same? Well, unlikely, and for a number of reasons ranging from her own talent to the constraints of Western record companies that for a few years now prefer to bet only on the safe without daring to experiment with some oddity, or if they do, it's only because even the oddity is betting on the safe (read: Lady Gaga who everything she does wears sings has already been done worn sung by others before her). If the method of copy-to-remake-the-same is just a dismal Chinese factory technique, the method of copy-to-learn, instead, works and not just here in pop rock, nor only in music, but in every humanistic and scientific discipline. Bruno Munari would say that there is something to be learned in all this.