Capsule - Teleportation writeup for popheads top 100 songs of 2005

1. Teleportation is among the most unique arrangements I've heard in dance-pop music. Regardless of how you feel about the song, I'm sure we can agree on this much. Cool? Because this writeup can go haywire "The curtain is blue" mode anytime. Thank you for reading.

2. Teleportation sounds frantic, but is built on a simple lyrical premise: I'm picking up (telepathic) signals from you, we understand one another ("*tsuyoi* sympathy"), when my (telepathic) signals reach you, I would travel (teleport) beyond the stars. The verses continue this sci-fi romance, with the first one about how the singer has finally found the other by the faint signals they were sending out, and the second about how the singer has found where their self should be, so close (in heart and mind) yet so far away (in location). However, that is not an issue, since the singer happily points out that they can teleport anywhere in the world! This optimistic futurism is central to the song. I've known this song for years but only checked the lyrics in this past week because I was struggling with the writeup, and while you can feel the optimism from the music, it is easier reading into and explaining the language of speech rather than the language of music!

3. Teleportation sounds frantic, and do I LOVE it for that. The melody jumps all over the place very quickly as if stimulating the sense of teleportation. If you have ever played or seen videos of people playing Osu! or listened to popular anime-aesthetic fueled nightcore music, Teleportation might evoke a similar feeling. But there is a pop-as-precision approach to the song and how it hits each beat that makes it beat overbearing ADHD music allegations (or at least be overbearing in all the right ways, instead of auditory fodder overload). The song starts with a vocal lead in of the chorus before unleashing its full beat. The chorus chord progression roughly goes like this: three bars of IV-III-II-II and one bar of IV-III-V-V. Notably absent from the progression is the I chord, which appears once we get to the verse, where a repetitive I-V-I-V is used in the lines I mentioned above where the focus is on finding the other and the self's place in the world, giving those lines a sense of foundation, as well as destination and a feeling from jumping between both. And then the I chord is ignored, as the melody goes from chord-to-chord, but always arriving magically at intended destination (the V chord), as if by, you guessed it! Teleportation. If that is not euphoric genius, I don't know what is.

4. Aside from its locked-behind-a-language-barrier lyrics and locked-behind-the-ability-to-interpret-chords musical meaning, the most striking about Teleportation is the drum and bass beat. I love comparing music to other music whenever I'm handed one of these writeups, so when I got this assignment, initially my central thesis was gonna be showcasing how Teleportation sounds like, well, nothing else. To that end, I first dug for other examples of drum and bass pop fusions. Obviously coming to mind is PinkPantheress and a 2020s wave of d'n'b infused alt-pop she became the face of with [Break It Off](https://youtu.be/6tPTrgGptU0) and others such as [Nia Archives](https://youtu.be/PjCVcVw8f1Y), [NewJeans](https://youtu.be/ArmDp-zijuc) and [I can't believe this hit on the radio is not by PinkPantheress](https://youtu.be/S2TaAcwC_zI) followed. Closely linked is artists like [Rochelle Jordan](https://youtu.be/j0iZaiu_7jA), [Kelela](https://youtu.be/_GT9SmA1vlI) and [FKA twigs](https://youtu.be/wZ2njttY3BA) who tapped into atmospheric D'n'B in their intimate, introspective soundscapes. Going back in time to their influences from the 90s, the original breakout of D'n'B, you mainly find incorporation of it in more downtempo, dramatic ([Hunter](https://youtu.be/WxL1rw6cw-E), [Too Far](https://youtu.be/_Hp9TQByReQ), [Chanel](https://youtu.be/sjRPCWGj4oo)) or ethereal ([Little Star](https://youtu.be/MJKM1Zuvns8), [Must Be Dreaming](https://youtu.be/1BT6_TL67Wk), [Sakura Drops](https://youtu.be/V6PisCGexEU)) tracks, the most notable deviation from this trend being [Bombs Over Baghdad](https://youtu.be/lVehcuJXe6I). Traveling closer to Capsule's scene, there are songs by other early 00s Shibuya-kei acts like [Cymbals](https://youtu.be/4tvZyHxn8-4), [Sonic Coaster Pop](https://youtu.be/Ufl5rw2CnL0) and [Plus-Tech Squeeze Box](https://youtu.be/IvH9Y3djzJM) that take influence from D'n'B and ring closer to Capsule, but none of them are pop songs, per se, leaning moreso towards the indie side of things much like predecessors [Cornelius](https://youtu.be/8x_XUZ3n1xc) and [Stereolab](https://youtu.be/9AB3s8Jk9FM). Exhausted? I was. But I was also convinced that I was correct, that there was no pop song where the D'n'B elements were the primary hook of the song, that it only emerged in the mainstream as an atmospheric backdrop and otherwise remained as a [sound of the underground](https://youtu.be/V9Wv4SCBiTE). Well, Girls Aloud proved me wrong with their 164 BPM surf guitar-D'n'B beat that got them a #1 chart hit in 2002. Nevertheless, the two songs are barely alike in themes or vibe: the "we're the new cool" aura of Girls Aloud is nonexistent in Teleportation. So what exactly is the aura of Teleportation?

5. In November 2009, Gintama aired its fan-favorite Popularity Poll Arc, where Perfume are the center of a running joke where the girl characters unite their rankings by forming a girl group and ["electro-ing on"](https://youtu.be/7sRTms0ri0Y) to the melody of Polyrhythm, the 2007 hit that broke Perfume to the mainstream, at the same time mocking [the recycling ad the song was used in](https://youtu.be/9QOfE5NNzCQ). In February 2010, American Dad aired an episode where a cyborg Stan from the future takes his wife on a date. He puts on Monochrome Effect, a 2004 Perfume song, and says ["It's Japanese funk. Give it a chance, everybody loves it in the future."](https://youtu.be/2ExzMqVCHXE). While Gintama pokes fun at the humans behind the robotic performance, American Dad (possibly in a satirical way) champions the music's futurism (and the fetishization angle is not lost on me here). This duality between the human element and technologic sheen is not unique to Perfume, but rarely is it presented this compatibly than in the work of Nakata Yasutaka, who only enjoyed widespread recognition after his work with Perfume. As such, it's hard to figure out the reception Teleportation received in Japan when it came out in 2005 as part of Capsule's 6th album, *Lounge Designers Killer*. And you can imagine that it is even harder to find any Western music critics who engaged with this stuff then, or even now. The fact that Teleportation even made it to this list is mostly from people retroactively finding the Capsule catalogue through websites like RYM and seeing this song as one of their best. For all we know, outside of the people who bought the album CD, no one else might've heard this song in 2005! As such, placing this song in the zeitgeist of its year feels impossible, amplified by the fact that the song itself does not sound like it came out in 2005. But it does need to fit somewhere, right?

6. Teleportation is futuristic, and it is a love song. Using these as the lowest common denominators, I wanna trace a line to two songs that came before it: Kraftwerk's Computer Love and Daft Punk's Digital Love. Computer Love is futuristic in a different sense: it is a song about finding a date by going on the computer. Truly ahead of its time for 1981, and so pure in its optimism about technological possibilities that it is hard to not love the song, but the future it imagined has long since been a reality (which makes the song only more remarkable). Digital Love, on the other hand, works in its retro-futurist artificiality by reassembling yesterday's futures into a cohesive piece in the now. The song lyrically has very little to do with futurism, but it is the assembly of the sounds that opens up new futures in itself (plus its presentation as sci-fi anime). Both these songs are featured in *Futuromania*, a book by renowned music critic Simon Reynolds, and a sequel of sorts to his earlier book *Retromania*. I so wish I could have his take on Teleportation here, but there is none as far as I could find. *Retromania* does entertain a chapter on Shibuya-kei, a broad genre of 90s retro-kitsch Japanese music drawing from Latin pop, bossa nova, French New Wave, Andy Warhol and more in an "all-inclusive bricolage thrown together under a rubric of sixties retro-future Internationalism" where curation itself becomes the mode of creation. One year before Teleportation, Capsule released [Retro Memory](https://youtu.be/-CEiR2CVYEY) where you can see the Shibuya-kei influence and the very on the nose retroisms. The title of *Lounge Designers Killer* comes from Nakata's own volition to drop all the retro baggage of Shibuya-kei, and Teleportation is caught right in the middle of this transition. It does not have a particular tendency to glorify the past in the way Digital Love does, but it also does not draw its futurism from new tech the way Computer Love does. Kraftwerk engage with the idea of *using* the computer, but no one finds love in the song, just the need for love: "I need a rendezvous." Teleportation tells a wholly separate story where communication is in the air waves, movement is instant and love is destiny. In the 20 years since it has come out, we're no closer to this reality, except in one department.

7. In the hellhole of critical theory there exists this concept of "accelerationism" which mainly conceptualizes around a guy named Nick Land in the 1990s. While it draws academic background from French post-Marxists like Deleuze & Guattari, accelerationism in the Land sense is moreso a crazy combo of nihilism, Marxism, complexity theory, jungle music, and cyberpunk culture. What accelerationism mainly argues for is unbridled capitalist growth (a hyper-capitalism, if you will) that undermines the capitalist system itself by pushing its limits and destabilizing it. Scary. And yes, jungle music is a part of it! The developments in drum'n'bass were seen as the urban centers (the jungle) being propelled with inhuman speed (or something like that). While I'm no expert on jungle or drum'n'bass, there is a certain dystopian feeling to it in the tension of jungle or the decay of d'n'b. Cyberpunk d'n'b also gave us the [best anime OP ever made](https://youtu.be/QxkMzn4et2U), so that is something.

8. While jungle music didn't quite end up bringing socialism (yet), accelerationism's role in music doesn't end there. A trend of hyper-polished and commodified pop sound started to emerge in the early 2010s: the PC Music crew, as well as the deconstructed club music of artists like Sophie and Arca. In its disruptiveness of toying with the pop formula while staying authentic to its pop characteristics, a new, accelerationist pop movement began. Nakata's influence on artists ranging from Passion Pit to Zedd, Porter Robinson to A.G. Cook is known. But I'm going to take it one step further and argue that it was here with Teleportation, with the fusion of drum'n'bass and J-pop, that accelerationist pop starts.

9. If atmospheric d'n'b pop fusions of the late 90s gave us songs that feel ethereal, Teleportation's fusion of d'n'b and bubblegum pop results in a song that feels hyperreal. Removed from the retroisms of Shibuya-kei by looking towards 90s accelerationism, yet avoiding the dystopian dread of accelerationism by letting in the bubblegum, Teleportation is, and remains, truly futuromanic, with emphasis on the mania. What's scary about Teleportation is that it has none of the context of PC Music being (at least to some extent) satire, or the identity politics of deconstructed club. It feels disconnected from that whole ordeal because it exerts no destabilizing intent. For all purposes, it feels composed with the only endgoal of *getting it right*. It is *production désirante*.

10. Computer Love explicitly mentions computer usage in its futurism. Digital Love explicitly aestheticizes digitalism in its craft. Teleportation doesn't need to, because it is itself digital native. Communication is in the air, distance is nullified. It speaks to me in a way few songs have ever done, and few songs ever will.

I'm currently writing this from Izmir, a city on the west coast of Turkey, about a Japanese song from 2005, to a majorly American audience. If my telepathy reaches you, I can teleport beyond the stars. Isn't that beautiful?

P.S.: I should reach out and touch grass.