逆生して見せよ 終焉の浸透
Take me under, take me down with you
断ち切った想いを そうね just take me under
Why don’t you take me down with you

Man with a Mission – Take Me Under

My Japanese mastery is a collection of three and a half years in high school, an anime phase that I regularly revisit, and a handful of assorted phrases that helped me stall long enough on a trip to Tokyo to pull out Google Translate. And yet every time I listen to the song Take Me Under, I feel something deep and tortured, reaching up for a glimmer of hope. Some of it is the music video and English language segments, but some indescribable part is just the nature of music itself. From my anime days I still sing along with the Cruel Angel’s Thesis and know the purely Japanese lyrics through sheer repetition and translation efforts, and Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku has a special way of getting my heart pumping if I’m gearing up for an important meeting or email. I barely speak any Japanese, but I love some good songs in a language I only have a passing acquaintance with, and so my mind started to churn on why this is.

So let’s hop into the wayback machine, to my kindergarten class. For a school event centering around latino cultures, it may have even been a Cinco de Mayo celebration for all I remember, my class learned a traditional song to perform entitled De Colores. My mom had a cassette of it on repeat that played while I slept so I could actually learn the lyrics of a song in a language I didn’t speak at all. But there was something so beautiful and simple that to this day I can still hear my memories echo with those sweet and slow lyrics.

Why is it that, even when we don’t understand the words, we can still love and connect with songs in other languages. What is it about music that so often makes a melody transcend the language barrier? Obviously not all music has lyrics and yet it still evokes that emotional response, but foreign language songs convey their own special sentiment to me. It takes me to another culture, and through inflection I can slowly start to absorb the meaning even if the words themselves are not one to one in my English speaking brain.

I’ve always had my own interpretation of songs – even when they do not fit what the author intended. I create entire multi-hour playlists for my tabletop roleplaying game characters, yes that means Dungeons & Dragons, full of songs that connect to them in some way inside my own head, no matter whether anyone else would ever connect that song and character. Foreign language music gives me even more freedom on this front, I may understand more of a base emotion without getting caught up on the specific lyrical implications because my brain doesn’t know the exact words! My fantasy-Slavic gun-bunny character has the traditional Russian song Kalinka on her list, and in my mind I hear her grandfather singing to her as they tended the horses together in her childhood. While the song is about a little red berry when you look up the translation, the meaning to me is a warm, paternal energy full of laughter, and a bit of silliness.

That liberty is something I treasure, a way to connect to these pieces that is less literal while still connecting to the voice and tone of the singer. So give me my J-Rock, K-Pop, and traditional tunes, no matter how bad I am in the source language. Music is something that connects over the mere barriers of literal words, bringing us something bigger and better into our shared cultures, especially as the internet brings our world closer together in the modern era.