Shonen Knife's Happy Hour: Food, Gender, Rock and Roll by Brooke McCorkle Okazaki explores questions of gender, food and sexuality, through the music of all-female pop punk group Shonen Knife. Formed in the early 1980s in Osaka during Japan's bubble economy era, Shonen Knife broke onto the international independent rock scene in the early 1990s and were famously invited by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana to be the opening act on their 1991 UK tour. After more than 40 years, the band continues to actively perform and record music, a feat, according to the author, that is partly due to their ‘potent fusion of two seemingly incongruous components: cute and cool’ (p. 6). Inspired by the name of a pocketknife for children, the band's guitarist and vocalist Yamano Naoko describes the story behind the band's moniker noting that ‘Shonen means boy and is a cute word and knife is a sharp word. I like mixing the two’ (p. 3).
Coolness in Japan (kakkoii) and elsewhere is generally aligned with masculinity while cuteness (kawaii) is typically ascribed to girls or women (as well as babies, animals and other cute objects). As McCorkle Okazaki notes, rock music culture, including punk rock, is often seen as a white, masculine genre. For Shonen Knife then, to perform punk rock while playing their own instruments is not only cool (kakkoii) but this sense of coolness is heightened by being fused with aesthetics of cuteness, the latter of which often centres around food-related ‘cute’ themes, such as sweets. Shonen Knife's music is quirky and charming, and often revels in sonic and lyrical incongruity, according to the author. For example, much of their music, as McCorkle Okazaki describes, is in a peppy sounding major key, which belies the occasionally eerie lyrical content of the music, such as cheerful sounding songs about food poisoning or man-eating fruit (p. 35). Shonen Knife thus reclaims aesthetics of cuteness, as something innocent, sweet and ‘anti-macho’ (p. 11) into something ‘macho’ (i.e. cool) (p. 11).
The author blends interdisciplinary methodologies ranging from ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory and history to offer a novel perspective on the group. McCorkle Okazaki situates the band within the broader punk lineage of DIY (do-it-yourself) musical aesthetics. While their music might not necessarily sound punk, as popularly imagined, it is their ‘defiant’ sense of cuteness and their resistance toward Japanese social norms that leads the author to position them as a punk DIY band. As untrained musicians (itself a key element of DIY musical cultures), the members of Shonen Knife continued to work their day jobs after forming the band in 1981, but later quit to focus full-time on music by the mid-1990s when the band gained international recognition. Further reflecting their DIY status, McCorkle Okazaki writes, is their long history of working outside the pop music idol system in Japan, the longstanding corporate structure through which popular bands are marketed and controlled. The author proposes the term josei rock (translated as ‘women's rock’) as an alternative to the pejorative Japanified English phrase ‘girls bands’, and one that encompasses a broad range of genres from pop to rock to punk. McCorkle Okazaki positions Shonen Knife as part of the first wave of josei rock, which began in the 1980s. As she points out, this wave of female-led rock groups can be distinguished from their predecessors in several ways, most notably in their artistic agency as josei rockers tended to write and record their own music, as well as play rock instruments such as guitar or bass. In the final chapter of the book, McCorkle Okazaki traces Shonen Knife's legacy by focusing on contemporary josei rockers since the 2000s such as Babymetal and Otoboke Beaver, bands who defiantly reclaim notions of cuteness in provocative and powerful ways.
One of the primary arguments of McCorkle Okazaki's Happy Hour is to examine ‘how Shonen Knife's combination of music and food complicates gender and racial stereotypes’ (p. 7). For McCorkle Okazaki, both foodways and musical cultures are ‘transnational commodities that circulate across cultures and are transformed by these exchanges’ (p. 38). As the author argues, the band's constant musical references to food, specifically the desire for food, while often seen as cute and quirky, can be interpreted on a much deeper level in terms of female desire and the pleasures of consumption. As she writes, ‘Food (and not sexual acts) provides sensual pleasure in Shonen Knife's music’ (p. 63). Their music emphasises ‘female desire and pleasure while remaining wholesomely cute and accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds’ (p. 63). Shonen Knife's music overturns gender-based stereotypes as the ‘singing female protagonists are the consumers’ of food rather than serving as ‘producers of food for the family’ (p. 56). Despite the band's musical focus on female desire in relation to the pleasures of consumption, the topic of bodily trauma vis-à-vis food and women is only minimally gestured to in their music. Songs that deal with body image serve primarily as outliers, according to the author, in that they ‘express anxiety rather than joyful abandon about food’ (p. 45).
There is ultimately an unexplored sense of radicality to the band as they tend to eschew songs that express romantic and by extension sexual desire, in favour of desire oriented toward food, and thus, a female-centered sense of desire. One of the strengths of the book is to take the band's aesthetic practices seriously, especially their food-based songs, thereby revealing the gendered politics of food, labour and consumption: ‘Beyond being a product of unpaid female labor, food can also represent liberation, especially when it comes to taking pleasure in consuming delicacies without guilt or worry’ (p. 124). Happy Hour is a welcome contribution to the compact 33 1/3 Japan series, itself a spinoff collection based on the original 33 1/3 popular music book series. Like the band itself, Happy Hour is a playful and accessible book that will appeal to popular music studies scholars and pop music fans alike.
