Shonen Knife's Naoko appears on stage holding one of the band's merch towels at Red 7 on August 16, 2012.

I’m falling. There’s no stopping it though my brain throttles through options that would keep me upright. There are none. Not now.

I’m not ancient, but compared to most of the other moshing maniacs in the pit, I’m well beyond my prime for this sort of thing. They bounce like spawning salmon and plant elbow blows into each other to see how far they can propel a human being. They grab and pull and shove for the unbridled joy of it; naively believing all the while that they’re going to live forever. I know that I’ve left those years behind me and if I forget, the sheer speed at which I get winded is there to remind me.

So what the hell am I doing hurtling toward some very flat concrete? Answering the siren call of three rockin’ chicks bringing down Austin’s Red 7 music venue with an ear-melting track about a Barbie doll. The band is Shonen Knife, a pop-punk band out of Osaka who have spent the last three decades blending the better parts of The Beatles, The Ramones, Red Kross and The Buzzcocks into infectious tracks about everything from feeding deer to riding on a rocket. And for those of us old enough to have followed the Knife’s career from the early stages, listening to them engages the caffeine-addled teenager we used to be.
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