Gate of Living

I watched the Gate of Living video three times straight, which is what I do when something isn’t done affecting me yet. The visual style—dark, sparse, carefully composed—threads back through her earlier work, these themes she keeps circling in God, Nor Buddha and The Narrow Way and work that goes back further still. Watch them in sequence and you see it’s all one thing.

Ringo Shiina has spent two decades refusing to be what she was. Started as raw punk and somehow kept getting deeper instead of cycling through the same moves. The albums chart this: Muzai Moratorium, Shōso Strip, Karuki Samen Kuri no Hana, Sanmon Gossip. Each one takes her further from what pop music is supposed to do and toward something stranger, colder, more precise. It’s not a style shift—it’s someone pursuing something real.

The Gate of Living video is the fullest version of that yet. It doesn’t do what music videos are supposed to do. There’s no performance moment, no narrative arc, just this sustained mood that sits with the song like they came from the same place. And that’s probably the whole point. Most people making things are still working within habits, still following the template of what their work is supposed to be. She stopped doing that years ago.

I wouldn’t call it beautiful, exactly. Compelling, yeah. There’s something genuinely unsettling about it, the way it doesn’t ask you to like it or feel good watching it. But I think that’s what matters more than beauty. Anyone can make something pretty. This is someone who decided prettiness isn’t interesting anymore and just kept going.