Musical momentum can carry a doubt about the future it appears to promise.
Treating Law of Nature as a landscape postcard would miss the resistance inside it. In Real Sound’s SUNSHOWER retrospective, critic Hitoshi Kurimoto emphasizes the song’s momentum and its inspiration in Todd Rundgren. Its lyric, meanwhile, takes a skeptical view of progress and the pressure development places on life. Together these directions make a sharper proposition than simply praising nature: forward motion can be exciting while the future offered in its name remains open to question.
The 1977 recording, written by Taeko Onuki and arranged by Ryuichi Sakamoto, employs thoroughly organized modern resources. Kazumi Watanabe is credited with the guitar solo, Sakamoto with electric piano and synthesizer; Tsugutoshi Goto and Chris Parker occupy the rhythm section. Technology, training, and divided responsibilities make the work possible. Its doubts consequently need not arrive from an imaginary place outside production. A criticism of progress can be made from within the materials of its own time.
Movement in popular music can easily be mistaken for assent. If the body is willing to follow, perhaps the destination must be desirable; if the music is beautifully organized, perhaps the surrounding world must be well ordered too. Law of Nature makes the gap between those propositions worth considering. A work can mobilize energy while leaving its purpose unsettled. Enjoyment need not mean agreement with everything nearby. Pleasure can sometimes secure a hearing for a difficult judgment.
Nature, in this relationship, exceeds its role as a rest area beyond the city. It introduces a scale that does not automatically obey a human plan. Faster, bigger, and newer are convenient measurements; a habitable life and durable relationships are harder to accumulate in those units. The question becomes less whether there should be a future than who calculates its costs. What a grand account labels incidental loss may be precisely what makes somebody’s particular life livable.
The recording’s interest lies in keeping the contradiction active. Propulsive music can contain misgivings about advancement; modern instruments can question modern confidence. A listener need not cancel pleasure to take the problem seriously. More attentive listening allows the work to carry us while retaining judgment about direction. From its 1977 setting, the song opens an enduring cultural question: once we learn to keep accelerating, have we also learned which parts of life should not be carried away by speed?