There must be some sort of serendipity involved in the fact that the week that I looked into Junior Senior for the first time in ages is the exact same week that their second album came out in Australia. It was also the same week that I developed a brief, morbid fascination with that other Danish band, Aqua.
Why it took nigh on two years to make its way to my fair shores, I’m not quite certain. If you recall our friends Junior Senior at all, you probably remember them from “Move Your Feet”, which featured such memorable images as a smiling hotdog and a squirrel spinning in an X-Wing.
This Danish duo is like a singing gay-straight alliance poised to sing songs about parties and dancing but also to reinforce their playful distaste for the others’ proclivities (“Hey gay, get out of my way!” “Hey straight, you’re always too late!”). This was a new idea to me when I bought D-D-Don’t Stop The Beat in 2003, in my first week of work, and it’s a message that has stuck with me since.
I’m not quite sure why I bought the album beyond liking the “Move Your Feet” video, but these were the days when my musical tastes were not defined very far past Roxette, Kylie Minogue, Björk, and anime songs with excessive guitar solos.
In the same week I bought Daft Punk’s Discovery, which probably goes to show that having a disposable income leads to wild musical experimentation. Unfortunately it also leads to the disposing of said income, but that’s a story for another time.
I listened to D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat a lot back in the day, before it was replaced in my heart by Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand (damn them and their self-titled albums). Stumbling across the existence of Hey Hey My My Yo Yo of course led to the discovery of a couple of new music videos.
The first is “Can I Get Get Get”, which is edited together from fan sources and raises a smile for world love:
The idea of people just putting videos of themselves lip-synching on Youtube is still pretty alien to me (hello, “Peach Plum Pear”?), but when people put effort and editing into their fandom then magic happens.
The second is “Take My Time”, which is notable for two things. The first is that Junior drew it himself, and the second is that backing vocals are provided by the female portion of The B-52s. Watch out for the volcanoes, because they’re a kind of magic:
Junior Senior are clearly big in Japan, like several notable acts before them: Queen and Scissor Sisters are the two that strike me the most. There are some others that I can’t recall off the top of my head, but with Junior Senior making it to #2 on the Japanese charts clearly they’ve got something going for them over there. Perhaps the fact that they’re an awesome happy band.
I’ve already got a great fondness for these two songs, and when I checked the track listing I found that there’s a song called “Dance Chance Romance”. One of the key phrases in the City Hunter ED “Super Girl” (and, if you’ve read Anime Pilgrimage at all, you’ll know that City Hunter is among my favourite titles ever) is “Dance Chance Romance”.
This is a sign: a sign that I must go out and buy this album. How could I refuse anything released by a label called “Crunchy Frog”?
Come on in, leave your coats. Grab some chips … they’ve got loads!
Even if they had money they’d still be white trash, yeah!
