赤痢

Also known as Sekiri. Hissing and crawling out of Kyoto in 1985, these four girls were a minor scandal in Japan during the late 1980s. Their name meant dysentery for a start. Song titles were less about vegetables than about sex: Yumemiru Omanko (The Dreaming Vagina) and FUCK Shiyou (Let’s Fuck) being prime examples. Their songs also extended to filthy updates on old classics by the likes of the Finger Five and Pink Lady. Style and attitude are present in abundance, but you still wouldn’t hold out much hope for Sekiri’s music. That would be a mistake, though, because Sekiri were quite something. Their music really needs to be listened to in the context of the time it was made, when it would have sounded like a radical roar in Japan. Sekiri songs tended to be one or two minute squalls of brutalist sludge (see: Nirvana or The Melvins) with sudden shifts in tempo that suggest the violent mood swings of a pouty sukeban teenage girl delinquent. On the cover of Sekiri No Monogatari, or Story of Sekiri, a best-of compilation released in 1989,The band somehow managed to pull off the Ramones grime-meets-Ronettes sass look to perfection, despite the photographer’s unusual decision to put them in a horsedrawn carriage. Isn’t that New York in the background? Surely there must have been a needle-strewn alley just yards from where this shot was taken… A youtube clip of Sekiri on a Japanese Music show can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttsXnNbpXlA A full discography in Japanese can be read here: http://otoko-tama-ce.hp.infoseek.co.jp/onna/seki-ri.htm Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.