Perfume give a couple of televised performances of “Spinning World”

There’s little point in even bothering to post any other televised performance of “Spinning World”, after Perfume gave the crème de la crème televised performance of the song for NHK Songs to the full version of “Spinning World”. But “Spinning World” is so damn good, and I cannot get enough of it. So, fuck it. Here are two other televised performances of “Spinning World”; albeit to a shorter edit of the song, on dustier sets and the standard raggedy camera work.

Perfume performing “Spinning World” on Buzz Rhythm 02

Perfume performing “Spinning World” on Ongaku no Hi

As was the case with “1mm” and LEVEL3, “Spinning World” is the fire that swooped in late in the game when some...I repeat, SOME...were slowly losing hope for Perfume’s music and the upcoming album. But “Spinning World” works so much better live. “1mm” is my JAM. But I find live performances of it so boring. Not all of the choreo really captures the energy of the song. The best parts of the choreo are what we see of it in the music video, and it just doesn’t hit the same live on a stage without the screens. “1mm” was (still is) a great song, which was elevated by the music video, but let down by live performances. Where-as “Spinning World” is a great song, which I personally think the music video undersold, but the live performances are selling.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the Plasma tour performance of it. From the looks of things, it looks it got similar staging to what we got for “Perfume no Okite 2016” for the Cosmic Explorer dome performance; with Perfume performing on a circular stage, surrounded by super thin film screens showing projections.

I think things could have gone differently for Perfume had “Spinning World” been released much earlier. I’m talking WAY back instead of “Time Warp”. Thematically, “Time Warp” made sense coming after a song like “Saisei” and drawing a line under P Cubed. But because Perfume still used the song to celebrate a career anniversary, it didn’t feel like it drew a line under anything at all. I think “Spinning World” would have made for a far cleaner break from all of the retrospection of P Cubed and been a very clear sign of a step forward. But I think the problem with “Time Warp” was not only was it underwhelming as a single, but it didn’t make you feel excited about what Perfume would do next, because it was like ‘Oh, we’re getting this cutesy shit again’ which was in the same vein as “Saisei”, “Challenger” and “Nananananairo” - none of which anybody really liked. Where-as “Spinning World” manages to acknowledge a sound Perfume has done before, but also showing some growth from what they’d been releasing over the past 7 years. It would have positioned Perfume with a song which actually sounds cool, that the general public would probably bop their heads to and be curious about, because it’s far less J-poppy than a bunch of the songs that Perfume had put out prior.

But what’s done is done.

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