So I think about Shonen Knife a lot. Maybe more than can or should fit into a single concert review. But I’ve thought about them even more since then. And I don’t want to take anything away from the people that set up the concert, those were the nerds, the GCC Manga & Anime club. They also led the dancing. They might not know how to start a mosh pit, but there’s usually not really much of one at most SK shows. There’s usually not anyone doing the Worm or any kind of Soul Train inspired set-up either, or anything close to square dancing, or Para Para. It was more like a party than how people usually dance at a show. In another context, I’d even say they were ironic hipster dancing, which would be awful. But I was there, and there was genuine fun being had. But I don’t know any of those people. The rest of their convention doesn’t seem like my thing, but if they do more with music I’m definitely into that. It was really cool of them to book this show since there was no stop in Philly this tour and it was cool of the band and their management to add the date last minute.

I just had to add some more to this because I mentioned the lineup and I also mention Metallica a few posts ago…I don’t mean to compare the two at all, making it seem like the band is crap now. And they don’t have anything like the internal political polarization of the Ramones. (They don’t, right?) No, SK is more like Motorhead. One person has always been most of the band. There’s a leader who picks quality replacements and the band continues more or less the same. (Ignoring the period when the band was a duo, altho that was not a bad period.) But I still have this thing for Michie. It’s not that she was hotter or cuter anything (she wasn’t at all…not everything is about cute). I think that she made the music for the same reason that I like it: it’s cheerful. I don’t think she was like the other members who are naturally cheerful people, she needed to make music to cheer herself. Since she quit and has never done solo stuff, she must’ve found something else that worked better. Probably got one of those “real jobs” I hear about. Or just married. That happens. None of my business.

And it’s not like that one aspect of it really mattered that much to my liking it, but it made it more justified to me. Not that I really gave a fuck at the time. I was full into the thing, I wore the shirts, I sang the songs, blasted the music. I did not care. But at the time, you were a pussy if you didn’t wear a neon pink cartoon cat on your shirt. Dudes were wearing floral print dresses. (“What, are you afraid to wear a dress?” “Well…my girlfriend doesn’t wear them…”) Things changed pretty quick. I’m just saying, every so often you’d think about what the people you were hanging out with only a year or two ago would think. So when you find yourself at a show involving loud guitars and the woman in the plastic yellow dress is about to start a song about a cat that lives in outer space, literally…even though you’ve been listening to that song everyday since you got the record and seeing it live by itself is a great experience, that little look of “am I really singing a song about a cat in outer space?” …is just what you need at that exact moment.%