November 4, 2002:
Importance of their spirituality. Can read too much of your own subjectivity into other people's aesthetic, of course; but theirs has impacted me in an emotional way which feels deeper than mere kinship over kitsch. The subtext to their best songs runs, "Happiness is a choice. It's a method of helping yourself survive the pain of things. The right choice is: take care of yourself, have fun. How? Easy: eat your vegetables, ride the loop di loop, mail your friend a postcard, go see the Kinks. Simple." This is a highly aestheticised morality, but I do think that a morality is what it is.
But there's more of course. Some of the sadness is purely mine, having to do with my life. That I haven't achieved what I've wanted; that I'm not writing music; that I'm not in any way a peer of these artists whose stance is so similar to mine. This becomes a kind of crisis as one of the two writers leaves before I've had a chance to meet her. Pokes me where it hurts: my own lack of achievement.
"It's an aesthetic in radical opposition to the prevailing cool among musicians formed in the punk and post-punk periods. SK touring with Nirvana is certainly one of the odder moments. How to summarize Nirvana's ethic? How's this: 'life owes me a buzz.' Suspect this fundamentally different purpose explains the difficulty many critics have seeing past SK's surface: they say, Shonen Knife sings about jelly beans because they're girls. These critics don't get past the gloss, and the musicians are freed to find SK 'cool' despite the thoroughgoing anti-cool of their ethic." (From an e-mail to George Ojisan.)
Michie San, we hardly knew ye.