Listening to any of their albums, it’s easy to think that the entity known as Boredoms might have invented a genre or two, perhaps even some tones unheard by human ears up to that point. This, of course, is mere speculation on a subject that gets resolved on a person to person basis; yet there’s one song that seems universally monumental to this day. That’s “Super Going.”
For eight of it’s 12 minutes and 24 seconds, the song lurches in a motorik rhythm, propelled by various percussion instruments and keyboard chords that bounce in a relaxed manner while Yamatsuka Eye repeats the words “shine on” every once in a while in a plain sing-song voice. If the track consisted of just this, it would be a fantastic ode to Can with a modern twist — a major accomplishment in musicality considering early Boredoms work, which was often a cacophonous mess of hilarity and violence that barely made sense but still felt like true art channeled without commentary. “Super Going” is the band actually playing music instead of wallowing in their own creative juices like savage animals, as satisfying as that was.
Around the song’s 8:30 mark, glitches appear out of nowhere. The track skips with a scream from Yoshimi P-We that yields to music similar to the first part of the song but with faster changing chords, sounding just a little more desperate and frantic. In two words, more alive. Everything just feels vivid and euphoric, a kind of energy that seldom gets captured for posterity in the studio. Like an explosive, prolonged orgasm. It’s a simple change, but it sounds like a fucking earthquake.
Within the vast, often incredible oeuvre by the Boredoms, there are points where things aren’t what they appear to be: guitars get confused with keyboards, post-production sampling mistaken for live tracking, and voices attributed to different people. Somehow, “Super Going” is exactly what it seems: a happy, simple yet heavy musical head rush interpreted by noise terrorists who had just discovered that playing as a unit could be more devastating and empowering than destroying ears with feedback and retching noises.
