'Kiki Kaikai'

A Trip To Kunlun

There was an arcade game way back when by the name of Kiki Kaikai.
Kiki Kaikai is a Japanese expression meaning "Stranger-than-strange world". It's set in a kind of medieval Japan and involves a bunch of adventures trying to save the Daimyo (lord).

For about 3 weeks, our nascent band really go into it and we were throwing our coins into it like there was no tomorrow. The imagery was kind of absurd and the handicap of getting monkey on the back of your actor was indeed stranger than strange. It even seemed counter to vjedeo Christian beliefs that the protagonist had to try and save 'the Lord'.

Around that time I was reading a book about Kunlun, which is the basis of Shangri-La and also the place where Iron Fist goes as a child to learn his amazing Kung Fu. A legendary place that supposedly does not exist where everything is wonderful and hey, that's worth fighting for even with monkey on your back. Somehow the mysticism inherent in the Kunlun story made its way into the bridge of this song.

Our drummer then was Al, who was really in to the idea of "East Meets West", and thusly he was very motivated to go travelling in Asia. I think it might've been him that wanted a syncretic pan-Asian lyric as part of a conceptual unity for this song. I found it a stretch but when you're young, you're sort of scratching around for ideas to stitch together so you do it. Arcade game Medieval Japan with ghosts, monsters and monkeys, and Holy Lands in Chinese mysticism, all in the one song with no particular relationship to one another.

There's really not much more to it than that. Sometimes a song is a song is a song, just like Gertrude Stein's rose.



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