Japanese Breakfast’s New Album
Out bisexual artist presents “Jubilee”
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Japanese Breakfast’s music
video, “Posing in Bondage,”
depicts Michelle Zauner,
the woman behind the
band name, as a vampire covered
in blood and wearing a black dress
while she prowls a nearly abandoned
late-night supermarket. It
uses slow motion to match the reverb
and delay on the song itself.
But more importantly, it queers
dark, horror-adjacent imagery in a
positive direction.
The woman running the cash
register is the only other person
appearing in “Posing in Bondage,”
and while Zauner spends much of
it staring at blinking lights in the
milk and juice aisle, they connect
wordlessly and bond over ramen.
It pushes a potential nightmare towards
dreamy romance. The visual
also gains some resonance as a sequel
to her video for “Savage Good
Boy,” in which she plays a woman
trapped in an underground bunker
with a wealthy character portrayed
by “The Sopranos” actor Michael
Imperioli. He feeds her gumdrops
while he dines on full metals, and
he dresses her in a series of stereotypically
Asian costumes.
Zauner is a bisexual woman
whose late mother was Korean and
father is Jewish. Her recent memoir,
“Crying in H Mart,” helps explain
some of the imagery in this
video. Its fi rst chapter describes a
trip to the titular Korean grocery
with her mom. She has always
seen food as a way of connecting
to her roots and hosted a show on
Vice’s Munchies YouTube channel
about the links between food and
immigration. “Crying in H Mart”
describes a moment on a trip to
Vietnam following her mother’s
death where she and her father fi -
nally admit “We’re foodies.”
Japanese Breakfast’s new album,
“Jubilee,” is expertly crafted
indie pop. She took piano lessons
and classes in music theory before
recording it, and the effort shows.
Her songwriting is matched by
skills of arranging and producing.
Japanese Breakfast’s genre-jumping
Japanese Breakfast’s new album, “Jubilee,” debuts on June 4.
evokes The 1975 at their best.
Like them, she frequently draws on
the ‘80s British genre of sophistipop,
which brought slick production
to a mix of funk, rock and pop.
The comparison also seems true
when the album closes with the
lengthy ballad “Posing for Cars,”
which rhymes with The 1975’s “I Always
Wanna Die (Sometimes).” It
starts off as a spare dirge but adds
more and more elements, closing
with a guitar solo running several
minutes. For an artist who seems
so up to the minute, picking up the
electric guitar to form the emotional
climax of her album is a bit oldfashioned,
but she uses such solos,
as on “Savage Good Boy,” to get out
of formulaic song structures.
The production sometimes drips
endless echo, with her vocals lower
in the mix than synthesizers. “Sit”
uses her voice as an instrument
amidst shoegaze hubbub, with the
actual lyrics almost impossible to
make out. “Slide Tackle” spins out
into wordless vocals. “Kokomo, IN”
blends a string arrangement with
country-inspired lead guitar in a
way that I’ve never heard before,
while “Tactics” also dabbles in orchestral
pop. The production choices
enhance or complicate her lyrics.
“Be Sweet,” which urges a man
who’s left a woman to come back
and treat her better the second
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/DAVID LEE
time around, sounds much more
confi dent delivered with swaggering,
funky rhythm guitar.
She’s gained a great deal more attention
in the four years since her
last album was released, much of it
outside the music world. “Crying In
H Mart” debuted at #2 on the New
York Times non-fi ction best-seller
list. (Its centerpiece is a wrenching
recollection of serving as a caregiver
for her mother as she died of
cancer.) She’s produced a cooking
show through Vice. The fi rst single
from “Jubilee,” “Be Sweet,” is getting
commercial radio airplay, albeit
a very small amount. She used
the phrase “Jimmy Fallon Big” for a
song title on her second album, but
she has now performed “Be Sweet”
on the actual Jimmy Fallon show.
In her memoir, she describes a
period as a teenager where she saw
MUSIC
numerous bands touring Eugene,
Oregon, but Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer
Karen O., who is also half Korean
and half white, was the “fi rst icon of
the music world I worshipped who
looked just like me.” But she also
wondered if the existence of one
Asian-American female rock star
meant that there would be no space
for her in the scene. That time has
passed. Despite soaring racism
against Asian-Americans, visibility
for musicians of Asian descent
in the US and UK has increased
greatly.
While Mitski and mxmtoon have
become stars in the indie scene,
Rina Sawayama seems poised at
the edge of a pop breakthrough.
(All three are queer.) The Filipina
American actor/singer Olivia
Rodrigo has become an overnight
superstar, using her fame from
Disney’s “High School Musical” to
launch a music career that’s already
landed her two number one
singles in 2021 — and Rodrigo’s
“Sour” has sold more than any
other 2021 release in its debut
week. Zauner says that she hopes
to inspire more Asian-Americans
to become musicians.
In this context, the genre-hopping
of “Jubilee” means something
more than mere taste. Drawing on
sounds from the ’80s and ‘90s at a
time when Asian-American women
were excluded from making pop or
rock music is a way of writing them
into that history. Thus, it seems fi tting
that “Jubilee” closes with an
old gesture of rock’n’roll rebellion:
a blast of feedback.
JAPANESE BREAKFAST | “Jubilee”
| Dead Oceans | June 4
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