Music

Sense of Place: For Shonen Knife, there's no end to the sugar rush in sight

WSHU | By Raina Douris,

Published August 22, 2024 at 8:00 AM EDT

Listening to Shonen Knife is kind of like eating a very sweet jawbreaker.

Their lyrics are about things like candy, snacks and the fun of being a girl, but they're delivered with big, shredding guitar riffs and drums so loud they might hurt your teeth.

That contrast may have been what got Kurt Cobain so into Shonen Knife that he personally requested they join Nirvana on tour in the early '90s. The band from Osaka, Japan, released their debut album, Burning Farm, in 1983, and they never really stopped putting out music.

Last year, they went on their 40th anniversary world tour and released a new album called Our Best Place. As part of our Sense of Place: Japan series, we talked to Naoko Yamano, the leader of Shonen Knife, and the band performed for a live audience at UrBANGUILD in Kyoto.

Set List

"Banana Chips"
"Twist Barbie"
"E.S.P."
"Riding on the Rocket"
"Nice Day"
"Buttercup (I'm a Super Girl)"

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Tags

Music World Cafe

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.

See stories by Raina Douris

Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).

See stories by Kimberly Junod