Tagged: chiptune

Unicorn Kid’s Japunk Revolution

Yeah yeah, I know, the title of this blog post is a bit ‘huh?’ It’ll all become clear.

Oliver Sabin, who I’ve written briefly about once before, has done it again. A humble DJ/producer hailing from Edinburgh, Unicorn Kid is fast becoming a game-changer. Not content with having his finger pressed tightly against the musical pulse of the Tumblr youth, it seems that Sabin is now hoping to directly influence pop culture.

In ‘rebranding’ Dolphin Dance, a track produced in mid-2011, as Pure Space (released earlier this year) Sabin effectively shunned a movement that many considered him to be a pioneer of. Seapunk. If you’re not familiar with seapunk, go hang out on Tumblr for half an hour it’s a weird self-referential subculture that’s one part 90s rave, one part sleeveless denim vests and one part vintage Seaworld t-shirts. And a lot of this kinda thing:

In his latest video, Need U, Sabin has totally bucked both the sound and imagery of seapunk, instead favouring manga and video game style visuals. Lore Oxford recently wrote an fantastic piece for Vice about how Westerners appropriate the shit out of everything (her words, not mine) and it’s worth noting that, although the bindi craze has been pretty hot lately, Orientalism in alt fashion hasn’t gone much further east than India. At least not for a while anyway. Sure, there’s been some adoption of Harajuku influenced stuff but none of that has permeated into the mainstream in the same way, or at the same rate, that seapunk stuff (c.f. all the ying yang symbols, pastel shades and green haired mannequins in Topshop) has.

It seems to me that, subconsciously or not, by saturating his latest video with Tokyo-esque neon and anime graphics Sabin is sending a message. Chiptune? Passé. Seapunk? Yawn. The next big thing in youth cultural fashion will be the mingling of existing symbols of counterculture (piercings, Doc Martens, apathy) with the imagery and iconography of China and Japan. Japunk.

Or whatever, maybe it’s just a music video.

UPDATE: Yeah, don’t mean to brag, but I was totally right:

[P]REVIEW: Unicorn Kid – Pure Space

Firstly, apologies if you have me on Twitter or Facebook because I’ve been going on endlessly about this song. Secondly, I take back that apology because I can’t talk about this song enough. At a conservative estimate, I’ve already listened to it about fifty times this weekend.

With Pure Space, Unicorn Kid not only bucks his already pretty distinctive (tough enough to create as it is – there are only so many video game noises…) take on the chiptune genre by mixing in old school house piano riffs and steel drums. The song is a total chameleon – it comes across completely differently depending on whether you’re listening to it in a club environment, on a summer day at the beach or walking around a city at night. It is by turns cheerful, epic and haunting, and I’m totally at a loss as to how Unicorn Kid has accomplished it.

There is no other word for the video than sublime – it at once recalls the vague meandering style of Kids, The Fifth Element, Lost in Translation and (sigh, yes, I SUPPOSE) Skins, alluding to a a narrative that is never fleshed out. Of course, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The Fader remarks that the video is ‘endlessly screenshotable’, which is completely true – the video encapsulates the nihilism and disenfranchisement of today’s youth better than a thousand Tumblr pages.

Most of all, the video kind of makes me jealous that I’m way too old to have weekends like this anymore. So for that, fuck you Unicorn Kid.