Waiting for Superman: Some Thoughts on the Escapist Pop in the New Wednesday Campanella Album
As the first quarter of 2017 in music comes to a close, I decided to write at length about my favorite release from the past three months, Wednesday Campanella’s Superman.
If Wednesday Campanella’s “Ikkyu-san” isn’t the first pop song made after the Japanese monk, then it at least ranks as one of the best that do. The group borrows from the monk’s famous legends and tidbits from his bio to create the song’s dance-pop hooks, and they take on a double entendre of his name to loosely set an underlining theme of taking a chilled-out break from reality. “We’ll give it our all starting tomorrow,” Kom_I signs off before the beat breaks down and she twists the titular character’s fabled tiger-hunt story into a dance-floor chant.
Throughout their five years together as Wednesday Campanella, the trio of Dir.F, producer Hidefumi Kenmochi and singer Kom_I has made an entire catalog of songs named after historical figures or mythical icons. A good portion of them follows its own beat, loose and aloof as “Ikkyu-san.” The titles featured in their latest album, Superman, home to “Ikkyu-san,” gives a strong look into a project that feels like a trip out of time and place: “Genghis Khan,” “Sakamoto Ryoma,” “Aladdin,” and the list of names goes on. While some like “Sakamoto” draw a lot from their sources, others unfold like “Khan” with the narrative relying only loosely on its source to instead indulge in other fantastical tangents.
What anchors these freewheeling ideas back to Earth is Kenmochi’s production, propelled by sleek, bouncy beats resembling the middle point of UK and Australian house music from the past couple years. And while the group’s previous album, UMA, acronym for Unidentified Mysterious Animal, rejected concerns for accessibility to further draw out otherworldly textures, Superman finds Wednesday Campanella more willing to meet its audiences halfway. Odd lyrics aside, a solid pop structure frames “Sakamoto Ryoma” and “Ikkyu-san” that make them easier to follow along. Wobbly drops and slick breakdowns drive the more beat-based “Onyanko Pon” and “Audrey.” Whereas UMA might have deliberately steered off course, from the music to lyrics, the group keeps a sense of familiarity as an important compass to navigate the terrain.
That said, Wednesday Campanella still do their best to warp the familiar in Superman. And the fact their oddball creations resemble a more accessible form only makes the experience more excitingly surreal. Though a Japanese speaker myself, I’m completely lost on what Kom_I sings about. Reading the lyric sheet only complicates the matter. But it delights me to hear her present my first language in a different angle so it scans as something new. It’s what rapping, a form her singing style derives from, has always done with language. And it only makes me more eager to memorize and recite what sounds like a secret spell with the group fashioning their own code into strong hooks.
The lyrics of Wednesday Campanella has been a center of attention for its pure absurdity. The group makes it that way to an extent. Kom_I sounds more enthusiastic to expand about the mechanics of the lyrics — how a key phrase sounds or how its physicality works in relation to the rest of the music — than what a certain couplet means. She’s upfront about how their songs are shallow, sometimes to a hilarious degree: “Chaplin” basically has Kom_I reading serving instructions. It comes to no one’s surprise when she plainly shares how meaning plays secondary when writing the group’s music.
“This Heisei age has already had so many different kinds of J-Pop come out, I think we’re overwhelmed with information,” Kom_I told NHK back in 2015. “All these thoughts and lyrics as just overflowing, so I wanted to listened to something more easy and carefree, something more dumb. With what we’re doing, I have this image of us poking holes on an inflated balloon.”
If one theme arises from Superman out of the nonsensical lyrics, it points to this call by the group to tune out the noise and venture to a place more free. They have no limits to their destination. While Kom_I heads to the local cat cafe for a space of healing in “Onyankopon,” she counts sheep and daydreams a grand eatery in “Genghis Khan.” The featured characters in the album also tries to bring about a better place than here. Aladdin looks for a life-enriching genie, Ryoma Sakamoto awakens a new age, and Ikkyu-san tells his wise tales to crack a few laughs.
A piece of dialog by Ikkyu-san loosely provides the mantra to the album, and perhaps the mood of Wednesday Campanella as a whole: “We’ll give it our all starting tomorrow.” Kom_I abides by her word about leisure almost religiously on and off the record of Superman. And her attitude can split down the middle between carefree or careless depending on the angle. She lets me clock out from the present to ride along a fantastic pop escapism — and in my case, an escape from pop — but I know I can’t ignore reality forever to play around in her imagined world. Kom_I named the album Superman because the world lacked such a figure, but she should know nothing gets done if one just waits for his arrival.
Though Kom_I says the group makes deliberately dumb works, the energy behind Superman suggests Wednesday Campanella isn’t a completely ignorant project. Kom_I’s driven by impulse in almost every song of Superman. She wants to give life to something novel, though she never knows exactly what she’s trying to say — but she jots down her first thought anyway. Wednesday Campanella creates for creativity’s sake as they try to make something out of a whole lot of nothing. Meaning, intent, value: all of these might not reveal themselves immediately, but perhaps from another angle, or during another moment, it might become clearer. Relevance is all perspective in a place and time. By assembling heroes from different periods, that might be what Wednesday Campanella tries to communicate in Superman.
