Pleasure Principled

Revealingly Articulate Idol Worship

Looking back now, one must ask: what were SweetS thinking with this debut single? Or rather, what was SweetS’ management and the people at Avex Trax thinking?

To overstate the obvious, the debut single from SweetS is nothing less than a kick in the face of propriety: the title references Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a sexual affair between a man and his teenage stepdaughter. Setting aside the literary reference, “Lolita” is more generally understood to refer to sexually active underage females. Maybe the people behind SweetS were taking a cue from the 2000 European single “Moi… Lolita” by Alizée - if Super Euro Beat works in Japan, why not a Super Pedo Beat? Or maybe they were looking around for an untapped market of music listeners and felt that fans of rorikon - that is, Lolita Complex - were in need of their own anthem.

Whatever the case, the final result is an enchanting, if puzzling, product.

The song itself begins with what I always think of as an angelic aura - a shimmering effect that sounds like something celestial and beautiful is descending to this wretched world. It is, in effect, the sound of redemption.

Then we hear girls’ voices: a chorus chants “Lolita”, followed by a single female voice singing, “Strawberry in Summer”. A piano accompanies them with more shimmery effects, giving this a certain elegance and smoothness. The song continues with this relaxed call-and-response a little longer… Then the piano stops and gives way to another sound of rushing aura and the girls suddenly sound more urgent, more aggressive. The music shifts, with a heavy dance rhythm - the piano’s melody has shifted to strings, an orchestral effect in the service of the beat.

And then there’s that skittish thing going on. I’m not sure how to explain this, but it’s that synth effect that sounds like a telegraph message more than anything else. It’s the musical equivalent of a low-level strobe light, flashing constantly and putting you just a little bit on edge. Clearly, this song is meant to make you at least a little uncomfortable.

Vocally… well, it’s obvious that children are singing this song. But that’s the point, right? I mean, if it was adults singing about Lolita and strawberries in summer, then… what? Really, this song would be much weirder, as one would have to assume the singer was seducing a child, not a child seeking her first love. Imagine Amuro Namie singing this song - it would be weird. Now imagine Hirai Ken singing this song - that’d just be creepy.

So there’s a rationale for this song: it fits the voices, and the voices fit the themes. The chorus is an insistent reminder - there’s a bit of shrillness to how they sing the one-word lines, it feels a bit rushed and artless. But I’ve been listening to this song for half a decade now, so the roughness of the voices has dulled for me. It doesn’t put me off, doesn’t make me question reflexively. If anything, time has made me focus more and more on the skills of certain singers - namely lead vocalist Aya and second lead Haruna. They’re very talented right from the start, especially Aya, who sounds a little more mature than her years. Say, fifteen or sixteen.

And there’s a bridge where Aya and Haruna are singing to a gentle passage of synth orchestration, the insinuating bass rhythm absent at first, and these girls again sound angelic, redemptive. I said that Lolita was the first book I fell in love with, and this part of the song feels like falling in love as well. They’re clearly children’s voices, but there is a talent and power, a sense of control and calm that serves as a stark contrast to the harsh choruses and overpowering beat.

As a whole, “Lolita Strawberry in Summer” is a strangely intoxicating mix of elements that is undeniably beautiful, but also odd when you think about it. The piano and orchestral effects add a certain classic elan, but these instruments are in the service of a sensuous rhythm that’s punctuated by a very deep, elongated bass note. The rushing effect at the beginning is repeated in smaller bites, but however much it soothes, there’s that skittish synth to put us on edge. And this song sounds too sophisticated musically for the children’s voices singing it.

And yet, it works. I think it’s the attitude, the audacity, that pulls it all together. It seems of a piece - it fits together just right, it captures something emotional that’s difficult to express otherwise. So all in all, this is an impressive song…

But we return to the title of the song, the knotty moral problem it poses, and there’s no getting around it. “Lolita”. And of course, the reference to strawberries. The forbidden fruit of underage sexuality? Or should we take a step back from the smut meter and just think the character in the song was picking strawberries with her beau? For some reason, I also think of the Bergman film Wild Strawberries, though that should have to do more with age than youth. But with a theme of Lolita, doesn’t youth and redemption and age and mortality all blend together?

That problematic title is what attracted me to SweetS in the first place, but surely it must have repelled many others. Lyrically, the English parts are scandalous - at least, if one considers that it’s children singing them. After all, it’s always about context. “Knight on, knight on, Hold me my babe”. Okay… That’s not so bad. But “Kiss me, Kiss me, Do you know me?” You can take this a couple of ways, at least. First, there is the idea that the singers are becoming romantically involved with strangers. (Strangers with candy? For SweetS?) That’s bad enough. But there’s also the Biblical use of the word “know” - that is, to have sexual relations with someone. And really, there’s no need to dwell on that.

And then there’s the simple word “Lolita”, chanted repeatedly by these Lolita-esque voices. It’s bad enough the song uses it in the title, but must these children sing it so much? Not only are the implications distasteful, but it carries its own literary seduction in the pronuncation. After all, Nabokov opens up his novel proper with the masterful invocation of the name:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The mere utterance of the word, then, brings thoughts of tongues traveling in mouths. The sheer pleasure of the way the word trips out of one’s mouth is now also a pleasure in hearing it from girls who embody the larger pleasure at work.

As for the Japanese lyrics… Well, in general I don’t have much interest in learning the Japanese lyrics of Jpop songs. Part of it is pure laziness. I’m married to someone fluent in Japanese (who also happens to tutor the language) and we’re going to raise our child to also be fluent - but I’ll get around to learning only when our child does, I think. It’s just not a priority - if I want something translated for me, the wife’s right there, right?

Part of it is also my music-listening pedigree. If you listen to enough noise rock, you realize that song lyrics are usually the least important aspect of a song - at least in terms of making sense of its meaning in a fixed, narrative fashion. Which isn’t meant to discount the singing - rather, I find myself more intrigued by the vocal performance than what is being vocalized. Even in hip hop, which may be my one exception to the rule, I think the weave of different rapping styles among the members of the Wu-Tang Clan tells me as much as all the references to Shaolin monks and comic books.

And beyond all that, I must admit to a certain snobbery: I firmly believe that pop music lyrics are by and large formulaic to the point of being meaningless. Peddling to the masses means catering to their tastes, and the broader the topic the better. For every exception to the rule - say, pop classics such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” - there’s a dozen more that may have great rhythms and memorable melodies, but ultimately interchangeable lyrics. What the hell, even the English lyrics in “Lolita” would be harmless and generic enough in the mouth of an adult.

Thus it’s no surprise that, going over a translation of the Japanese lyrics for “Lolita”, it is indeed a rehash of familiar pop song ideas about romance and how powerful and immediate it can be. There’s talk about keeping the love secret, which again is pretty typical. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the mention of diving from a tall height. For some reason it makes me think of diving into a body of water - it may not be intended, but it is the most evocative possibly, especially since the title reference to summer calls up beaches and lakesides.

So again, it’s all about context: this is an innocent love song which turns not-so-innocent because of who sings it and what book / slang term they reference. A grown woman singing about secret love? That’s Doris Day. A child - in a song called “Lolita Strawberry in Summer” - singing about a secret love? That’s five to ten years for statutory.

But there’s even more context than that. The implicit water imagery draws a more pronounced lineage to VN’s Lolita as well as one of its obvious inspirations, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”. Nabokov’s narrator Humbert Humbert explains in Chapter 3 about Annabel Leigh, who he fell in love with one summer when he was a child: she was only slightly younger than him, and he experienced his sexual awakening through her on the sands of a European beach… but not its fulfillment. As the memorable closer of the chapter points explains:

I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

Setting aside the sheer hilarity of this single sentence, Humbert Humbert’s coitus interruptus in his youth - and with a love who would soon enough die, thus negating any chance of future consummation - is the reason he claims he developed a taste for nymphets as an adult. He was in search of lost time, so to speak. (And of course, Proust is another influence that permeates the book.)

I think of the Annabel Leigh story as something of a canard, a ruse to gain sympathy, an attempt to exploit Freudian theory for his own benefit. Nabokov strongly detested Freud and psychoanalysis; in Lolita, Humbert jokes famously about the difference between “the rapist” and “therapist” being “a matter of nice spacing”. So whether or not these events did happen to Humbert, they should not be seen as a reasonable explanation for his actions as an adult. Instead, it’s another bit of play, another trick pulled from the narrative sleeve, to create a more romantic view of the novel’s rather monstrous events.

Perhaps, then, that is a clue as well to the song? Perhaps this is a clue that all the fuss and uproar intended by the Lolita Complex theme of the song is itself a canard. Maybe it’s just meant to bring attention to itself because attention is all that matters in the pop world. The pedo playfulness is its own elaborate joke, its own justification for a great pop song. Gypsy Rose Lee sang about how you’ve gotta have a gimmick, and if this gimmick sucks you in - as it did me - then the amoral ends justifies the commercial means. After all, this is the pop idol industry, which is built on marketing the ephemeral, on conjuring pop confections that will soon enough melt in your mouth and be forgotten. Like, say… SweetS.

Ultimately, all these literary invocations - of Annabel Lee and Annabel Leigh and even Dolores Haze herself - are tragic. Poe’s heroine is lost to the sea, Humbert’s first love dies of typhus before they could get it on. (I’m not going to spoil what happens to sweet Lo, except to tell you it happens a lot earlier in the book than most first-time readers think.) Which begs the question: is this supposed to be a tragic song, then? Are we supposed to feel sorrow in the ambivalence? Certainly, the music has a strain of melancholy to it - this is not a cheerful song, but does it also completely lack redemption in the end? There is something desperate about how the song whirls to an end with the chorus growing more insistent, the orchestration more pronounced.

And this leads me back to the question I began with: what were SweetS thinking when they released this song? And by this I do mean the five girls: did they know what they were singing in English? Were they aware of the layers of meaning that Lolita had, or did they just think of Gothic Lolita? Were they aware of the tragic dimensions inherent in calling upon this famous character, or even the more obvious sexual connotations? Or did they simply just sing what they were told to? Was the chanting of “Lolita” an empty tip-tap-tip through their mouths?

It’s highly doubtful that they were in on the elaborate jokes built into the song’s lyrics. That said, I don’t even know if the people who wrote the song were aware of the jokes. Part of me is charmed at the idea of the Bounceback duo flipping through their dogeared copies of Lolita and lit-crit takes on Nabokov - but come on, how likely is that? If anything, they were taking a rather straightforward notion of Lolita syndrome and turning it into as enjoyable - and disturbing - a pop song as possible.

But as I said, even that is a pretty scandalous thing to do. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident, as we’ll see soon enough. After all, it’d be a lot easier to dismiss “Lolita Strawberry in Summer” as something of a weird symbological / quasi-literary fluke if it wasn’t for the singles that followed. And if it wasn’t for the video made for this debut single, either. This wasn’t random semiotic chance - it was, indeed, a slap in the face of propriety. And they took it as far as they could, right from the start.