Black, Pink, Gold

Takeshita Street in Harajuku runs on a specific frequency—narrow, intensely colored, dense with people wearing outfits that require genuine daily commitment—and it’s one of the few places on earth where you could film a music video about the color pink and have the location feel completely proportionate to the subject. Blumio understood this. He’s been splitting his life between Düsseldorf and Tokyo for years, and when he wanted to make a video for P.I.N.K., he went to exactly the right street.

Blumio is a rapper who has spent most of his career making music against things—Nazis, casual cruelty, the grey consensus that certain colors are for certain kinds of people—using the particular weapon of genuine good humor. He raps through P.I.N.K. in English, German, and Japanese, switching between all three with the fluency of someone who actually inhabits those intersections rather than visiting them for the aesthetic. It could feel like a stunt. It doesn’t.

The lyrics cycle through the whole mythology of the color. The pink mohawk as sex symbol, whether in bed, in the bathroom, or the betting shop. The kindergarten years, wearing pink and getting questioned about it, fighting the kids who had strong opinions about boys and colors. Strawberry milk drinking sessions, raspberry soda snorted straight into the nose, psychopathy in the sweet shop. We were addicted to the pink stuff. The punchline lands on the German flag reimagined: not black, red, and gold but black, pink, and gold. It’s an improvement.

If you don’t like Blumio, you have problems. Large ones, probably structural.