Today I will be deviating from the past few weeks of rap and I will be writing about the JPOP that I listen to. Out of all of the artists that are out there, I mostly listen to three: Yorushika, ZUTOMAYO, and YOASOBI. They all fall into a vein of alt-JPOP where they delve into different and more complex topics than what normal JPOP would be accustomed to. This post will focus on the latter two because I want to devote an entire blog to Yorushika. Out of these artists, I would describe them on a spectrum. On one extreme there is music that conveys a feeling or emotion. On the other extreme is music that tells a deep story that makes you feel emotion.

If you aren’t an avid JPOP or KPOP fan, I should let you know that many songs sacrifice lyrical continuity in order to better conform to the beat itself. When you look at the English translation for some of these lyrics make absolutely no sense. ZUTOMAYO is the artist who does this the most. Reading the translations, you find absolute nonsense; the title of one of her songs literally translates to “biting the second hand” (秒針を噛む). Overall, the lyrics of ZUTOMAYO do not tell a story, but convey a feeling. If you were to feel a picture, this is the artist to do it with. The previously mentioned song byoushin wo kamu conveys the desire to stop time, not face consequences resulting from the marching of time, and inability to face reality. The song obenkyou shitoiteyo conveys the desire to transfix someone, to be obsessed over, and a vibe of two estranged lovers, which results in this feeling of mild frustration and overall melancholy. Comparatively, ZUTOMAYO never tells a story but uses rich metaphors and segments a feeling together from what she says.

Conversely, YOASOBI uses more simple speech but gets the point across clearly and concisely. My favorite song of theirs is “ano Yume wo Nazotte“. It’s a fantastic retelling of a competition-winning short story, wherein a prophetic dream of a confession realizes itself but not how you’d expect. YOASOBI seems to have better storytelling ability than the rest of the artists in this alt-vein of JPOP mostly because of the fact that they do retellings of short stories. The best known YOASOBI song is Yoru ni Kakeru. It tells of a young man trying to stop his girlfriend who can see her own grim reaper, Thanatos, trying to kill herself. He eventually joins her in jumping off a bridge together,  where at the end it is shown that she didn’t die; she was his grim reaper all along. This is also from a monogatari competition winner.