Linda
Linda Linda
Film
Comment Vol.43 No.4, New York, 2007
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
Only in Japan could key members of 60s instrumental guitar combo The Ventures judge annual Ventures sound-alike competitions. There they must judge tens of bands all competing to 'be the Ventures'. Only in America would such a situation be deemed ridiculous - maybe ripe enough for a smart-arse parody film mocking bad taste in music.
Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005) could not be made in America. On the surface a simple story of 4 Japanese high school girls who form a band to perform a clutch of cover-versions at their annual school arts festival, the film is a distilled Japanese encoding of how one can 'become song' - just like all those bands who wish to 'become' The Ventures. Linda Linda Linda accordingly explores the emotional relationship between the fours girls as they vacate their egos in order to fuse as a unit. In this sense, their song is a mystical meta-text: originally documented by late 80s power-pop-punk Japanese group The Blue Hearts, it now survives as a manual for others to embrace the energy it initially contained.
