tl;dr: why don’t you just copy-paste this into a chatbot and ask it to summarize for you?
按：我发现我用中文写作的时候经常写的过快，导致文本时常严重欠考虑；所以试着换成了英文，从而强行拖慢我的写作速度，看看有没有什么变化。
This article is my comments and analysis on a certain band.
About half a year ago, I ran into a Japanese band named 相対性理論 (Soutaiseiriron), while I was haphazardly looking for something to listen to on a drive. The first song I encountered was スマトラ警備隊 (Sumatra Keibitai) from the EP シフォン主義 (Chiffon Capitalism).
I’ve been learning Japanese for a while, so chances are that I can understand - at least part of - the lyrics. But Sumatra Keibitai was something different. The arrangement was thoughtfully calculated and meticulous, while the vocal was intriguing (though hardly provocative, at least in any conventional sense; we’ll jump back to this topic later). But what about the lyrics? Honestly, at first glance, to me, it seemed like complete nonsense, or at least something that lacks even a basic degree of referential plausibility. Thus, it’s hard for me to merely piece things together.
やってきた恐竜 街破壊
迎え撃つわたし サイキック
The beginning was quite perplexing. It seemed to be inspired by plots of some stereotyped anime. But that did not last long:
太平洋 大西洋 ここ一体何平洋よ
盗んだわたしの記憶をかえして
CIA KGB FBIに (CENSORED) の陰謀よ
誰か わたしを逃がして
My first reaction was like wait, what? I initially wondered whether I had misunderstood the lyrics, and looked them up just to make sure. Perhaps I found the reason why the censor-bots are complaining about this song.
What initially resembles the daydream of a sleepy girl suddenly takes a sharp turn and gives way to something closer to some rather radical political proclamation. Give back my stolen memories! Conspiracy! Anybody please set me free!
Yes, it is tempting to dismiss all of this as pure semantic incoherence and leave it at that; but that was perhaps too easy an answer. This interpretation can explain my confusion, but not my real experience. On the contrary, I was actually becoming increasingly aware of the lyrics. The acronyms, the half-rhymes, the abrupt shift in imagery, the strange juxtaposition of political paranoia with rest of the song. The words themselves were not uncomprehensible. I knew what all the individual phrases were; what I could not immediately understand was what these things were doing together in a bigger picture. Calling them total nonsense, then, merely suggest the failure of interpretation. It did not explain why, even before I can make any scrutable sense of them, I had already begun to perceive them as something more than fractured pieces of information. It’s possible that, meaning is not absent. It’s just not the first problem the song asks us to solve.
This distinction reminds me of Hiroki Azuma’s thesis on the so-called
database model after several unsuccessful attempts to assemble
a bigger picture. Azuma proposed that, once upon a time
in a distant galaxy, individual works can be understood
in relation to a deeper narrative or ideological construction that
preceded them. By encountering the elements visible on the surface of
the work, consumers could, in principle, gain access to this
pre-existing larger totality; under the database model, however, what
consumers face might instead be collections of identifiable and
individually consumable fragments that can be extracted, combined,
reorganized or even tweaked without being first confined to a singular
and authoritative narrative, through which they - consumers -
autonomously organize the fragments corresponding to their own
understanding and form a false substitution for the big
narrative (i.e. aforementioned bigger picture). This is,
of course, not saying that the songs of Soutaiseiriron are direct
illustrations of Azuma’s theory, nor that their lyrics somehow
constitutes a literal database or some high-dimensional vector
space. What I’m trying to convey - by introducing an analogous
structure from his arguments - is that, what if, in this case,
individual elements can precede totality. What if, the listener
come across recognizable fragments first, and is then forced into
putting together a graspable whole which remains contingent but perhaps
provisional? Here, the signifier arrives immediately, when I hear it,
recognize it and eventually decode its literal meaning; what arrives
later - if it arrives at all - is a relatively stable account of its
relations with other signifiers around it. That is to say, signification
may unfold asynchronously, and I’ll refer to this temporal mismatch or
asymmetry, somewhat loosely, as deferred semiosis.
上海an (Shanghai An) from the album TOWN AGE offers
a useful variation on explaining this theory. Its opening does not
initially resist comprehension through the same degree of abrupt
semantic discontinuity vis-à-vis Sumatra Keibitai.
There is, at the beginning, at least seemingly, a relatively
concrete and mentally stable narrator, a certain place and a
sequence of events that do possess chronological integrity:
上海について20分
一体ここはどこだろう？
荷物も見当たらないし
切符もどこだかわからない
万歳させられてるけど
一体どういうことだろう？
一つも見に覚えがないし
にっちもさっちもいかなくて
Apparently, this is much easier to follow. If you’ve ever arrived at
an airport, it won’t be tough to gain a sense of intimacy. The narrator
cannot find their luggage, has lost track of their ticket, and appears
to have become entangled in some ritual they do not understand;
everything is in a total mess. I found it quite easy to project my own
experiences arriving in Europe this summer onto the scene. And the most
interesting part (from my perspective, which I highlighted in bold), the
narrator is somehow requested to perform something described as
banzai, which a listener with average knowlege of Japanese
culture and modern history won’t be unaquainted with - to
raise their arms while shouting the phrase banzai, and perhaps
some other gesture that the lyric itself leaves unspecified. For reasons
I cannot fully reconstruct, this reminds me, however vaguely, the
tedious airport security procedures here. Perhaps that’s what the lyrics
are trying to convey; or perhaps it’s not, and this is just my
overreading. The crucial point, however, is that the lyrics themself
do not settle the question for me with a plain answer. It does
not explicitly identify the situation I’ve constructed, nor does it
coerce me into accepting any particular explanation.
But neither does this mean that the text permits any possible interpretation; its fragments impose certain constraints while failing to determine a definitive account of what has taken place. The listener does not invent meanings out of void; instead, the song exhibits an arranged and curated collection of intelligible elements whose underlying relationships still remain at least partially undetermined, and the listener’s task - perhaps even a compulsion - is to glue them, orchestrate them, make them cohere, and thereby constructing a provisional totality. Still, it would be doubious and misleading to conclude that Sumatra Keibitai and Shanghai An arrive at interpretive instability via mutually exclusive routes; Shanghai An itself soon becomes increasingly difficult to stabilize, when its apparently coherent narrative at the beginning is interrupted by stuff like repeated phrases, wordplay, unexplained figures and progressively uncertain relations between events. The distinction, then, is not that one lyric is fragmented while the other is not; no such sharp contradiction lies here. Rather, they spread stability and instability across their respective structures.
Under this explanation, Sumatra Keibitai makes the instability of its fragments perceptible almost immediately; Shanghai An, on the other hand, initially offers the listener a narrative foothold, before gradually revealing that this foothold is insufficient to organize things that follows.
At this point, another set of organizing principles begins to emerge alongside the narrative one.
いちにの サンハイ
This phrase can either be heard as 1, 2, 3, go!, yet サンハイ simutaneously overlaps with 上海. Until this point, Shanghai has primarily served as the signifier of a certain place where the narrator has supposedly arrive and remain unable to properly locate themselves; here, however, it briefly ceases to function only as a geographical name and becomes available as a sequence of smaller phonetic units that can be segmented differently. Therefore, this line, by allowing two different semantic paths to occupy an identical phonetic space, introduced explanatory ambiguity, leaving more capacity for listener interpretation, also inserting a pun into an otherwise stable narrative.
The following repetitions intensify this shift in narrative as well:
お命ちょうだいしましょうか？ 水先案内しましょうか？ x2
Read in isolation, these lines invite radically different interpretation depending on the provisional situation the listener has constructed. To me, this can sound almost ritualistic, even cult-like; with a different frame, however, the same exaggrated language may appear theatrical, absurdist, and even - as mentioned by a few critic reviews I’ve read or watched before - somehow romantic. But still, none of these readings is directly guaranteed by the lyric itself, as explained in the previous analysis.
Semantically, these propositions have few reason to be placed together; nevertheless, their juxtaposition places them within the same recurring grammar frame:
～しましょうか？
The same pattern returns near the end of the song:
お命ちょうだいしましょうか？ 水先案内しましょうか？ x2
美味しい話をしましょうか？ もう一つオマケしましょうか？ x2
Again, the propositions themselves are only loosely related to some extent. What establishes continuity between them is therefore merely the repetition of a common syntactic form, rather than presence of a concrete - or at least predictable - narrative progression to some degree, as we typically see in numerous popular songs. This repetitive form allows the phrases with semantic differences coexist in a formal structure that repeatedly treats them as variations of the same pattern, and perceived by the listener as a bundled whole. Thus, Shanghai An demonstrates additional principles of organization by using phonetic or syntactic techniques that coexists with, and eventually destabilize and disrupts, the narrative foothold offered at its beginning.
夏の黄金比 (Natsu no Ougonhi), from Chiffon Capitalism, pushes this tendency even further, providing particularly revealing examples for these newly introduced principles, when repetition begins to dominate the lyric arragement and draws more attention to the material existence of language itself.
コントレックス箱買い
コントレックス はこはこはこ買い
コントレックス箱買い
コントレックス
At the beginning, コントレックス箱買い can be processed as an ordinary proposition, at least a fragment of one. But repetition (in bold) quickly alters its internal equilibrium. 箱, or はこ does not cease to mean a box; yet, through repetition, it becomes perceptually available as something more than its basic lexical meaning, with its recurrance also highlighting its phonetic texture.
We can see similar occurences of this technique in 四角革命 (Shikaku Kakumei) from the album ハイファイ新書 (Hi-fi Anatomia).
四角カクカク革命 前夜の
長いあいあい間の ロマンス
近いカイカイ開戦 前夜に
やってくるくる車 の行列
The alignment is primarily there to make the recurring phonetic structure visible. I also happen to think it looks nicer this way.
Here, the progression of lyrics is organized just as strongly by phonetic recurrence as by semantic continuity. Sound therfore begins to operate as a principle capable of connecting and grouping otherwise distinct words together.
Here, despite not being completely cancelled, simply the semantic function of the word no longer exhausts things that the listeners are able to perceive. A peculiar doubling therefore arises, where the word still serves its purpose of signification, while simultaneously becoming a flexible and manipulable piece of acoustic material which can be disassembled, modified, resegmented, reiterated, or reorganized, in a way almost analogous to audio samples.
This distinction of semantic function of text and its materiality is not exclusive to music. It reminds me of a comparable relationship in a very different medium: the textual interludes frequently appeared in animation works directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, particularly in 物語 (Monogatari Series) and さよなら絶望先生 (Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei Series). In Monogatari, for instance, Shinbo introduced numerous interludes consisting of a monochromatic background and some text which varies in length - sometimes merely a few characters like a concise description of character or events that just occurred; sometimes lengthy, like a excerpt from the original novel or the anime script. This takes a step further in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, where not only the interludes but also the background art consists of random text about some trending memes, celebrities or political sarcasm in Japan. Such technique might originate from the Japanese comic strips, or manga, and is futher developed alongside the increasingly experiments on typography, still-images and other non-animated materials, by collected efforts of the staff from SHAFT, including director Shinbo and animator Oishi Tatsuya, at the crossroad of the traditional and computer-assisted animation production in 2000s. There are still a lot of things to discuss about Shinbo’s styles, but as the topic of this blog is not anime case study, its better to prevent more prolixities on this subject. The crucial part is, the interludes, unlike these in conventional movies or animations, often appears too briefly which only allows a quick browsing under ordinary viewing conditions (e.g. watching the anime airing on TV). This does not render the text in these interludes completely meaningless; on the contrary, the viewers are actually acutely aware that they are reading some meaningful text even without sufficient time to decode it completely. However, its the the perception of typography, typesetting, the visual contrast and the sudden interruption from moving image that arrives before the semantic decoding of the text. In such moments, the visual property of text or character (expecially the CJK characters) as some graphic material, seems to coexist, or even precede its semantic functions. Drawing this back to our original analysis, Natsu no Ougonhi suggests an acoustic analogue - the phonetic properties of the word, previously concluded as a sample, might become perceptually salient before its purpose to signify a certain meaning.
This raises another interesting question. If the lyrics are not only semantic propositions but also phonetic material, what is the major factor that determines in which form this material will reach the listener? Apparently, it is the voice. As for lyrics of Soutaiseiriron, they arrive through Yakushimaru Etsuko’s voice.
Her vocal might be described as flat, deadpan and indifferent in the first place. Indeed, compared with many popular vocalists whose performances rely on conspicuous changes in intensity, pharsing, vocal color, etc. that guide the listener toward a relatively recognizable emotional response, Yakushimaru often seems to withhold such guidance. However, such comments, despite not completely unsubstantiated, are ultimately insufficient. They risk reducing a remarkably variable vocal performance to the absence of something that, in fact, often exists. 救心 (Kyu-Shin), for instance, is lively, playful, and almost exuberant. A more useful description is that her vocal delivery does not necessarily arrange affect into a familiar trajectory of accumulation, climax, and release, thus partially redistributes the burden of emotional interpretation to the listener. Namely, instead of determining in advance how particular pharses ought to be felt, her delivery frequently leaves a considerable distance between what is being said and how it is eventually felt. The stablization of meaning might not be the only thing that can arrive asynchronously; sentimental effects, too, may also remain temporarily unresolved.
Previously, I mentioned something called big narrative or bigger picture, and I failed in the pursuit for it. From the above analysis, we can say that this bigger picture does not always precede perception. In some cases it emerges only through perception itself. This does not mean that every interpretation is equally valid, nor that the listener invent random meanings out of nothing. The fragments still impose constraints. The lyrics, sound, vocal delivery and cultural references all delimit what can plausibly be heard. The listener, then, is neither a passive receiver nor an entirely free author. They occupy a position somewhere in between assembling relations between fragments, revising provisional interpretations, and bringing their own experiences to bear on what they hear. Without the listener’s participation, at least some of these relations may remain temporarily unsettled.
So where, after all this, are my actual comments on the band? Well, perhaps I would prefer to leave that conclusion temporarily unsettled, too.
以上。