WHAT?!

Morning Musume ’22 – “Chu Chu Chu Bokura no Mirai”

The title of this post is a short, sharp line from the song at hand, delivered with authority by Mei Yamazaki in the second verse. It’s also the reaction of a solid majority of a particular sub-section of the online H!P fandom to the song and its video. I’m not going to include links to any posts or tweets because my aim isn’t to judge or call anyone out, and opinions about music can change over time, anyway (sometimes very little time.) I’m fascinated, though, that the overseas fanbase’s strong negative reaction to “Chu Chu Chu Bokura no Mirai” does not seem to be shared by Japanese fans, at least not based on the hour of Google-translated J-Twitter I consumed. Oh, there’s a fair bit of clowning on the video, but that’s it. My eyes perked up when the first word of one tweet translated to “TERRIBLE!,” but the rest of the thread was all gushing positivity, and sure enough that word was yabai*. By and large, the Japanese Haro-wota seem to dig this song.

And so do I. A lot, but I get why others are put off by it at the moment. It’s an odd track with shifting time signatures and difficult rhythms. It’s dark — almost haunting — with an unsettling tension throughout, and with no happy musical resolutions anywhere. Despite an overall fresh vibe, we hear a lot of sounds and production techniques we’ve heard over the past eight years or so, and much of it is presented as a frantic aural assault. It’s a challenging listen, and a whole lot of overseas fans are not keen to be challenged by H!P’s flagship. To the contrary, they rather desire a return to fun songs with bouncy rhythms and catchy melodies, similar to what Angerme gave them just a week prior. In short, “Chu Chu Chu Bokura no Mirai” takes a lot of what many Haro-wota are tired of from MM, cranks it up to eleven and rubs their noses in it.

That I love this as much as I do is ironic, given that lot of the things I’ve bitched about for years are present here — the thick, unrelenting vocal harmonies and the resultant lack of solo lines; the overly familiar synth sounds; the pitiless pitch correction — however, what we get that is fresh breaths new life into the familiar. Chief among the fresh sounds is the flute that opens the track and bridges each section, and whose quarter-not triplet motif creates a sort of polyrhythm that keeps things off-balance. As the motif and the song start on the second beat, you’re off balance right from the jump, and it isn’t until the second half of the intro’s vocals that you really get your bearings rhythmically. The music underpinning the motif, while minimal, is extremely angular in its syncopation, which accentuates that rhythmic vertigo. Once we get to the verse, though, we’re onto four-on-the-floor solid ground with a bit of 16-beat action in the percussion, because, Tsunku. The relative stability only lasts for 10 bars, though, because the B-section gets pretty wild, switching to 6/4 for two bars and throwing in a five note quarter-note triplet pattern on the fourth beat of each bar, which leaves just about one note of an eighth-note triplet’s worth of time to hit the downbeat of the next bar. “WHAT?!” indeed. The effect is very unsettling, as it’s no doubt meant to be, and it’s emphasized by the fact that it follows one of the few “pretty” chords in the song. Every time you think you’ve made it through the musical storm into calm seas, Tsunku creates another squall to rock your boat. I can’t classify this as EDM, because while it’s certainly electronic music, good luck dancing to it.

With the rhythmic side being so intense, Tsunku smartly keeps things fairly simple harmonically, and the key changes and modulations that are practically de rigueur for H!P songs get the day off. The melodies do make use of suspended fourths and ninths to accentuate the nervous anxiety, but otherwise stick to the established key. The only exception to this that I can hear is a really odd chromatic bass part on the “Chu Chu Chu” line, although there absolutely might be more than that, because my ears aren’t as good as they used to be and the dense parts are very dense. Some of the sound palette is dated, but even those sounds are used effectively, especially the dirty lead synths during the choruses and the musical interlude.

Somehow, all of this works in the context of a J-idol pop song, because Tsunku is both a craftsman and a little bit crazy in his creativity. He has an alpha-Chad’s confidence to write music that colors way outside the conventional lines for idol groups, then tweet about how yabai it is before it’s released. Some hit and some miss, but you don’t get one without the other and Tsunku’s hits are so worth the misses. For me, “Chu Chu Chu Bokura no Mirai” is a hit in part because it’s so audacious in its rhythmic complexity and dark anxiety, but mostly because it just sounds really fucking cool. As always, your mileage may vary.

This being Chisaki Morito’s graduation single, she’s front and center in the video, and even get’s one of the few solo lines, the others going to Fukumura (of course), Oda (obviously) and Yokoyama (WHAT?!) Chii looks so good fronting the group for the first time that it’s hard not to feel her tenure in MM was in some measure wasted, and I say this as a guy who has been at best ambivalent about Chii during her run. Yeah, her voice has been busted since she joined MM, but she’s always been their best dancer and if the sort of cocky confidence she exudes in this video has been lurking inside of her the whole time, then shame on Up Front for not unleashing it years ago.

Speaking of cocky confidence, Maria Makino has been strutting with a lot of “fuck you” confidence recently, and it’s on full display in this clip. The “cute member” persona always felt a little forced despite her looks, and I wonder if she latched onto that persona because of her looks. Regardless, I’m digging the self-assured grown-up Maria infinitely more than the younger cutsie version. She comes perilously close to upstaging Chii, similar to how she nearly upstaged Masaki Sato at her own grad concert. Had you told me even two years ago that Maria would become one of my favorites in MM, I’d have gotten throat cancer from laughing so hard, and yet, here we are.

The video is a kind of a mish-mash, and only the dance shots feel like they fit the music. Video clips have always been secondary to the music for me, but overall this feels like a missed opportunity to make something special. My main issue is that the video editing scenes which push the narrative feel a bit cheeky and glib given the dramatic nature of the music, as do some of the special effects. The dance shots are superb, though, as are the orange and black outfits which are a nice homage to Chii, who deserves this going-away present, and probably deserved better during her time in Morning Musume.

*I recently learned that yabai does mean “terrible” in proper Japanese, but it has a slang definition of “really good,” as well. Sort of like “bad” or “sick” in English.