Jul 6, 2017
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu Steps into Adulthood
A look into “Furisodation” and “Yume no Hajime Ring Ring,” her anthems to celebrate two different rites of passage
There’s a slight sadness in Kyary Pamyu Pamyu acknowledging the processing of aging. Coming from a personality who’s so determined to stay young as long as she possibly can, it reminds that not even in her fantasy land is she impervious to the passage of time. While she acts like a child, spending her free time playing dress up and cracking jokes like one, she experiences two big milestones. Both commemorate her last days before entering adulthood, and each celebration hits home in its own way.
“Furisodation,” the first, seems to find Kyary rather excited to finally turn 20, the age of adulthood in Japan. She throws a fancy dinner with her monster friends for the occasion, and because she can legally drink now (in Japan at least), she pours herself some fresh alcohol. But she’ll be the first to clear up that she’s an adult in age only. For one, to liken the bittersweet bits of life, she literally reaches for bitter ends of chocolates and strawberry shortcakes as appropriate metaphors. The title of the song, itself a made-up word playing on the Japanese term for “pretend,” comes with a wink that, hey, she’s basically a child walking in the world of grown-ups while wearing a fake mustache.
Nanda Collection, the album home to “Furisodation,” centers on the premise of Kyary as a perpetual kid. She pretends to be a ninja in one song, an alien overlord in another; She wants to get revenge on the culprit who took her last ice cream saved in the freezer. And when she’s confronted by the reality of growing up, it’s met with full resistance: “Fashion Monster” might be a rebellion anthem for those fed up with rules and standards, but its relative shallowness also rings like a temper tantrum. Though she claims to understand a bit of what it means to an adult in the album’s closer “Otona na Kodomo” (an adult-like kid), it’s hard to take that to heart after a dozen songs that might suggest otherwise.
Immature, maybe, but the length at which she goes to slow the aging process makes Nanda Collection-era Kyary relatable. She rejects the grim effects of reality by escaping into her safe space of a universe inspired heavily by her own favorite corner of pop culture as well as personal nostalgia — the side effect of the latter regresses her and her worldview into a younger time of her life. It’s an impulse based on fear, a common behavior, I’d even argue. Hearing Kyary tell it in “Furisodation,” adulthood seems crushingly dull especially against her vibrant, colorful world. When her inevitable future creeps into the song, it bums out the fun: “If I became an adult, I’d be exhausted; if I became an adult, I’d be sad,” she goes.
Kyary eventually accepts she needs to grow up, and maturity unfolds quite literally in the video of “Yume no Hajime Ring Ring,” her second rite of passage, this time graduation. A bittersweet gesture of fan service, she slowly grows up throughout the clip with an older era of Kyary greeting a new phase; the unicycle-riding “PONPONPON” character passes it on to the Halloween-themed girl from “Fashion Monster,” and so on. After they wave goodbye, a single tear rolls down from each of the past phases. It’s one sincere clip coming from the once-prankster of “Furisodation” who laughed at this very process of growing up.
The crooked smile behind “Yume no Hajime Ring Ring” reminds me of an older song about youth in transition from Kyary’s producer Yasutaka Nakata: Perfume’s “One Room Disco.” Both Kyary and 20-year-old Perfume transition into adulthood with mixed results. Neither narratives find what’s romantic about independence and adult life. The commonality between both of their experiences is looming loneliness. They both conclude with more of a shrug, each doing their best to muster the strength to get through another day.
Though “Yume no Hajime Ring Ring” casts like a rather gloomy lone cloud over Kyary’s otherwise sunshine-filled world, the single’s home album, Pika Pika Fantajin, could’ve used more of it. Now that she’s few years older, her trip back to fantasy in the record, like “Mottai Night Land” or “Kira Kira Killer,” brings diminishing returns. Her pop sound still glows with life, her universe far from flat. The issues comes from how escapism tends to be less effective when one is conscious of the very slip. A hint of self-awareness is all it takes to mess with the purity of the dream.
But who can blame Kyary, the icon of youth, for running back to her familiar cartoon-like world instead of facing adulthood head on? Though ghosts and monsters roam throughout her dream land, no beast will come close to inducing as much fear as the anxiety hidden in her daily life. Unlike her fantasy creations, she has no control once she comes back to reality. Her youth-obsessed music, then, becomes a look into that struggle for control as well as an exploration of how one copes during times when everything seems out of their hands.
