ROMANTIQUE begins with a festive title and a remarkably practical roster of labor.
Carnival promises an interval in which the usual rules loosen. Yet somebody has to arrange that interval. Roads require decisions, costumes require stitches, and lights rarely turn themselves on. “CARNAVAL,” which opens Onuki’s 1980 ROMANTIQUE, offers a useful entrance into this contradiction. Freedom does not always arrive after organization disappears. Sometimes meticulous organization allows people to forget organization for a while. The apparent escape has a working day behind it.
Onuki wrote the song; Sakamoto arranged it. The credited personnel include Kenji Omura, Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and computer programmer Hideki Matsutake. A festive title thus acquires a distinctly modern work schedule. The point is not to count celebrated names as though the song were a collector’s display case. The list places instrumental performance beside programming. Different kinds of labor become necessary neighbors in the manufacture of an apparently effortless occasion.
Technology is often assigned the cold part in stories about music: the more precisely something is organized, the more suspect its pleasure becomes. But masks, stages, and costumes are also artificial. We do not demand that a festival be undesigned before admitting that we enjoyed ourselves there. Thinking of this opening as a constructed celebration loosens the opposition between genuine feeling and careful manufacture. The useful question becomes what the construction makes possible for the people inside it.
ROMANTIQUE adds another layer of mediation. We enter not a documented destination but a named mode of imagining. A foreign-language album title and a festival title illuminate one another, promising that ordinary surroundings can be mentally rearranged. They need not correspond item by item to an actual place. Their imaginative force lies partly in the distance between a life and the vocabulary available for describing another way to inhabit it. Desire can travel before its owner does.
“CARNAVAL” consequently suggests a redistribution of control rather than its total abandonment. Writing, arranging, playing, and programming remain present; together, they make release conceivable. The opposite of the working city need not be an uninhabited beach. It can be a shared space that people have built carefully enough to permit temporary reinvention. The celebration ends. The collaboration that supported it is worth remembering, because it comes closer than the fantasy of an endless party to describing freedom’s practical conditions.