You drop your guard for a minute and look up to discover that popular music is suddenly overrun with positivity. Is it a compensating reaction to widespread pain and despair or simply another fad? If we take the orchestral pop trio Fun. as the vanguard act in this movement it would seem to be the latter, though there’s no escaping the feeling that lead singer Nate Ruess is sincere on every level. Even the Auto-Tune that dominates much of the group’s Grammy-winning album seems totally redundant in trying to brighten up Ruess’s emo-inflected effusions, because by this point we don’t need convincing. The copious Queen analogies that have followed the band since their debut were proferred because of the aggressive vocal harmonies, but Ruess mainly honors Freddie Mercury by constantly staying on top of the dense, hyperactive arrangements, some of which can be credited to his busy colleagues, guitarist Jack Antonoff and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dost. For that reason, a lot of people hear hip-hop here, but I don’t. Fun. realizes their self-appointed purpose best on grandly imagined rock songs like “Why Am I the One,” which sticks to a normal verse-chorus structure that allows them to wield their most potent weapon: a flair for the climactic melodic hook, like Bread with a taste for bombast. They play nothing but anthems.

That sort of thing is catnip to Japanese pop fans, and the Green Stage is exactly the sort of place where “grand” works. During the band’s 50-minute set in the middle of Friday afternoon, Ruess was insistent on making sure everyone knew that Japan has “the best fans in the world,” and with the sea of humanity stretching out in the midday sun, jumping and gesticulating with Ruess in perfect uniosn, you get his point. He’s a singer who not only knows how to work a note, he’s a performer who knows how to milk a gesture. Whenever he dropped out of a verse he would prompt the audience and they would fill it in–and in tune. They even finished the show-stopping “We Are Young” with what I perceived as perfect diction. These people have been practicing. (See, karaoke is good for something.)

The weird thing is, Ruess’s songs are about struggle, about trying to make it as an artist, I imagine (that line about his friends doing drugs in the other room while he despairs of his future is something every parent should encourage their teenager to listen to), but everyone understands a song like “It Gets Better,” and when you sing it you just naturally feel better. During that song, the couple in front of me kept hugging each other, which Japanese couples rarely do in public. It’s nice to see a pop song give people happiness and hope, though the majority just took the band’s name at face value. Happiness ain’t cheap, and fun is hard to come by, so you grab it when you can. -Phil