Japandemonium!
MANILA, Philippines - Summer Sonic is an annual two-day music festival held simultaneously in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. This year’s edition featured five distinct indoor and outdoor stages showcasing the world’s best rock, pop and dance acts, from Green Day to Garbage, from Rihanna to Ke$ha.
The festival is a veritable melting pot of different (even conflicting!) music genres. Packed into one weekend, Summer Sonic is an audio overload of massive proportions, guaranteeing musical satiety to any reveler regardless of taste and preference.
Supreme contributors Joey Santos and Yasha Barretto report from Summer Sonic, and run down the festival’s new discoveries, disappointments, rock stars and surprises.
New discoveries
Yasha Barretto (YB): Perfume — I was never a J-pop fan, but I was a giddy mess watching the delightful all-girl trio Perfume. After an entire hour of cute robot dancing in matching fuchsia outfits and high pitched giggling onstage, they had the entire stadium under their sugary spell.
Joey Santos (JS): Silent Disco — This was the first time I actually participated in a silent disco. Think about dancing to carefully curated tunes through wireless headphones while being blasted with cool mist sprays and downing vodka Red Bulls. You see everyone going crazy, hands in the air as the strobes come on, but then you take the headphones off and suddenly you’re surrounded by an awkward silence and people fist-pumping and biting their lips to absolutely nothing. A definite must-do!
Ultimate rockstars
YB: Greenday/Garbage — As far as rock star showmanship is concerned, it’s a toss-up between Green Day’s dynamic frontman Billy Joe Armstrong and Garbage’s supervixen Shirley Manson. Billy Joe commanded the 10,000-strong crowd (literally and figuratively) effortlessly with every “Lemme hear you say whoa!” and applauded the audience’s efforts with an “Arigato.” The unsmiling yet positively alluring Shirley Manson also elicited her own pulsating electricity that affected the audience.
JS: Jamiroquai – JK fought a chest infection to bravely perform, albeit in a shortened, one-hour set. This makes Jamiroquai number one in my book. The band took to the Tokyo stage in high spirits: He sounded fantastic and looked every bit as nimble and agile as his Virtual Insanity days, so much so that they didn’t even have to play said tune to make everyone feel that they got their full Jami fill, and then some!
Festival disappointments
YB: The Sophie’s Choice dilemma — The sheer number of must-see acts with overlapping sets and the lengthy distance between stages made it humanly impossible to watch everyone. Having to skip seeing artists like Tears for Fears, Nelly Furtado and Foster the People in favor of other favorites was quite disappointing. Talk about first world problems.
JS: Rihanna — This category goes to Rihanna, hands-down, who lip-synched through a sizable chunk of her near two-hour set and struggled to get her groove on during some parts of the show. The We Found Love encore, complete with fireworks, and our bleachers’ view of a baseball stadium-sized crowd going insane, slightly made up for it, though.
Surprises, surprises
JS: Green Day’s She and Geek Stink Breath — I remember buying a live bootleg cassette tape that had these two seminal Green Day songs at some basement cigarette store in Robinsons Galleria that probably doesn’t exist anymore. I got into punk rock because of early Green Day, and She is still one of my favorite punk songs ever!
Special Mention: Ke$ha — Was really surprised that Ke$ha can drink cans of beer while still sounding the way she sounds on record. Or maybe that’s the reason why.
Nostalgia attacks
JamiroquaiYB: New Order — As far as New Order fans go, I must admit to being late to the party. Though I knew Bizaare Love Triangle as a kid, my New Order love affair officially began when Krafty came out in the mid-2000s. After hearing their discography, I was hooked. Their older fans would agree that seeing them live is quite the emotional experience, and they played the nostalgia angle to a T. Even with Peter Hook’s absence, Bernard Sumner and the rest of the crew gave a riveting synth party, complete with psychedelic background visuals and vintage photos celebrating the band’s (and Joy Division’s) history. They performed everything from their haunting Ceremony to Joy Divisions’ Love Will Tear Us Apart — indeed, a very fitting encore.
JS: The Cardigans — I remember liking The Cardigans immensely when I was in high school, even buying into Nina Persson’s entire A Camp persona, but later tunes like You’re the Storm and You Need Some Fine Wine gave the band a more mature pop credibility that will certainly last them longer than their Romeo + Juliet days. The band was doing a “Gran Turismo” tour (my least favorite album), but thankfully, they explored their more recent catalog of hits and even dug into some old tunes like Rise and Shine!
