Homework

Doing the Work

Few songs capture the absurd logic of childhood promises quite like "Homework." On the surface, it is a bubbly two-minute pop song about a child dutifully completing their schoolwork because they have been told, by parents, by teachers, by the implicit social compact of growing up, that good grades are the gateway to any dream they can imagine. Astronaut? Do your homework. Rock star? Do your homework. The song holds this premise with a completely straight face, and therein lies its wit and its tenderness.

Released as a single on July 20, 2013, "Homework" served as one of the first public-facing glimpses of Kero Kero Bonito's world, arriving two months before the full Intro Bonito mixtape appeared on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. At the time, the London trio, vocalist Sarah Midori Perry and producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, was operating well outside mainstream channels, crafting songs on a Casio SA-46 mini-keyboard and posting them online.^[2] The band had formed in 2011 after Lobban and Bulled placed an advertisement on MixB, a community forum for Japanese expatriates in the UK, seeking a bilingual vocalist.^[1] Perry, who had grown up in Otaru, Japan before relocating to the UK, responded despite having no formal singing training.^[1]

"Homework" bears the marks of that origin story. Its sonic palette, toy keyboards, video game bleeps, dancehall rhythms, and the kind of clean-edged electropop that J-pop had refined for decades, reflects the cultural collision at the band's core. And its lyrical territory, schoolwork and parental expectation and childhood ambition, draws directly on Perry's experience navigating the Japanese educational system during her formative years.

The Meritocratic Promise

The song presents a child who accepts, completely, the logic handed down by the adults in their life: dedicated effort in school is the prerequisite for any future success they might desire. The goals conjured are suitably enormous, careers of glamour, heroism, or celebrity, and the prescription for reaching them is always the same mundane, essentially inarguable response from authority figures. The gap between the scale of the dream and the smallness of the prescribed action is where the song finds its comic footing.

What makes this interesting rather than merely cute is what the song understands about that logic. The Japanese educational culture Perry grew up navigating is a documented system of significant pressure. Cram schools, character study, and the relentless optimization of academic performance are realities for millions of children in Japan. The song's Japanese-language sections speak directly to this texture, referencing the daily routines of study, the vocabulary drills, the weight of expectations that become so normalized they feel like common sense.^[1] The bilingual structure is not a stylistic flourish. It maps the divided world the narrator actually inhabits, English for the aspirational surface, Japanese for the texture of lived obligation.

The song is organized around a kind of call-and-response structure, where the child's aspirations are met with the same refrain from the adult world. The repetition is the point. The answer is always identical regardless of the dream, which gives the song a quietly comic edge while also highlighting the tautological quality of the meritocratic promise: do the work, achieve the goal. What goes unexamined is whether the promise is actually true.

Perry sings with a guileless, deliberately childlike quality, inhabiting rather than ironizing the child's perspective. This is not the knowing smirk of an adult looking back. It is something more nuanced: a sincere recreation of a worldview that, taken to its conclusion, places the burden of any future disappointment entirely on the child's shoulders. If the dream does not come true, the implicit message goes, you simply did not work hard enough.

This logic operates with different textures in British and American schools too, not just Japanese ones. The idea that effort plus diligence equals outcome, and that outcomes therefore reflect character rather than circumstance, is a recognizable feature of meritocracy in many forms. "Homework" does not argue against this idea in any explicit way. It simply enacts it, faithfully and warmly, and lets the listener sit with the gap.

The Run-DMC Interruption

Roughly a minute and a half into the track, "Homework" drops in a sample of "Sucker M.C.'s (Krush Groove 1)" by Run-DMC, one of hip-hop's foundational recordings.^[3] The effect is jarring in the best possible way: a burst of old-school rap percussion and attitude landing squarely in the middle of a sunny, Casio-driven J-pop track about finishing your schoolwork. It is a tonal non-sequitur that feels both completely random and, in retrospect, perfectly placed.

The choice of Run-DMC is interesting beyond surface surprise. "Sucker M.C.'s" is a song about swagger, self-determination, standing in your own power. Dropping it into a song about the docility of homework is a kind of joke, but it also plants a seed. The child in "Homework" has not become anything yet. Somewhere in the sonic collision between the obedient student and the Run-DMC interruption, there is the suggestion of a self that might eventually outgrow the prescribed script.

The sample also announces something about Kero Kero Bonito's aesthetic from the start: a cheerful disregard for genre boundaries, a willingness to pull from any corner of musical history if it serves the moment. The band that would eventually make noise-pop and shoegaze records is already, even here, not quite what it appears to be.

Sincerity as a Radical Act

"Homework" arrived at an interesting moment in indie pop's relationship with sincerity. The early 2010s were the years of PC Music, the London collective whose maximalist, hyper-sugared aesthetic shared considerable DNA with KKB's early output. A.G. Cook would later contribute to a KKB single, and the overlap between the two projects' aesthetic sensibilities was frequently noted.^[2] But where PC Music often worked through knowingness, its irony structural, its sweetness weaponized, "Homework" is distinguished by what feels like genuine affect. The song does not distance itself from the child's perspective; it inhabits it.

Sputnikmusic, reviewing the 2023 reissue of Intro Bonito, praised the mixtape's "zestier lyrics" and "wider range of topics" compared to the group's later studio work.^[4] A review from KURE at Iowa State described the album as tackling "issues common in girls whilst capturing a transitional loss of childlike wonder," with homework and sleep and monsters all filtered through a sonic palette that refuses to treat these experiences as small.^[5] These retrospective assessments locate "Homework" within a broader project: a record that takes childhood seriously precisely by not condescending to it.

The 2023 vinyl reissue on Polyvinyl Records, which featured handwritten lyrics by Perry on the inner sleeve,^[7] underscored how durably "Homework" and the rest of Intro Bonito had resonated. With more than 253,000 scrobbles on Last.fm^[6] and steady streaming numbers a decade after its release, the song has found listeners well beyond its original indie internet context.

Other Ways to Hear It

Some listeners have read "Homework" as less about educational pressure specifically and more about the general structure of deferred reward: the way any system, school, workplace, society, promises that the right behaviors today will produce the right outcomes tomorrow. On this reading, the homework is almost incidental. What matters is the logic of the promise, and the question of whether it ever actually cashes out.

There is also a more personal reading available. Perry grew up in Japan and moved to the UK as a child. The experience of navigating two educational cultures, two languages, two sets of expectations, gives the song a quietly autobiographical quality. The bilingual lyrical structure is not just a stylistic choice. It maps the divided world the narrator actually inhabited. The homework that must be done is, among other things, the homework of figuring out who you are when two cultures have handed you two different scripts.

A third reading, which the song neither confirms nor denies, is simply nostalgic. The child in "Homework" believes things. They believe the promises. They believe the future is bright and achievable and directly downstream of today's effort. There is something lost in most adults that this song briefly recovers. The song is so cheerful about the homework partly because, for the child doing it, the cheerfulness makes sense.

The Weight of Two Minutes

"Homework" is a two-minute song that contains a great deal. In its cheerful, dutiful child who believes every promise the adult world has made, there is a portrait of a social logic that most people recognize without ever quite articulating. In its Casio-and-dancehall production, there is the sound of a band figuring out what they are, building their world out of mismatched pieces that somehow fit. In the Run-DMC sample dropped into the middle of an otherwise sparkling J-pop track, there is a flash of something ungovernable, something that no amount of homework will fully contain.

Kero Kero Bonito would go on to make more ambitious music, records that grappled explicitly with grief, change, and the passage of time. But "Homework" captures something those later records could not quite reach back to: the texture of a self still being formed, still willing to accept the world's promises at face value, still doing the work because someone said it would be worth it. There is something genuinely moving in that, even now.