Rock Man's Sexual Cycle, or, Leave Me To My Polish Curses
April 22, 2021
Words expressing sentiments which may otherwise seem trite can appear deep and profound when accompanied by the harmonious sounds of music. Song lyrics, when divorced from their musical context, often appear quite simple, and occasionally even stupid, but when we are immersed in their musical soundscape, they can hit us like a bag of bricks on a Sunday evening. This is helped, of course, by the fact that they tend to rhyme.
Words in a foreign language have a similar effect. Many phrases are described as "untranslatable," when the reality is that to translate them would simply ruin their mystique and render them commonplace, thereby deadening the effect that a foreign language will always have on an unfamiliar listener.
An egregious example: A man comments on a Youtube video, noting a Polish slang phrase that appears in the video. He congratulates the video creator (an English speaker) on their successful brandishing of this phrase, and its effectiveness as a gag. Then, he goes on to apologize to the English speakers viewing his comment, as, he says, "It can not be translated," and therefore they may never partake in the joy that such a phrase gives him. Underneath, a few commenters reply, all providing an effective translation of the phrase, which means "Fuck off."
When it comes to music in a foreign language, it is easy to attribute some beautiful sentiment to a series of vocalizations that sound appealing, despite the fact that you have no sense of their true meaning. For many people, including me, the reason we began to listen to international music in the first place is because we found song lyrics in English to be empty and full of cliché. We came to the conclusion that if song lyrics are going to be meaningless, they may as well be utterly meaningless.
However, a problem arises when our love of this music leads us to learn the language in question. At first, this seems self-defeating, but you’ll find that something interesting happens. We recognize our internal English translations of the lyrics as not containing the reality of the lyrics, but only a reflection. And so, no matter how they appear to us In English, we will forgive any and all defects, because the Ideal Version of the lyrics constructed in our mind still exists unseen in their native language. The True Lyrics, the True Nuance, which we, as non-native speakers, are able to view only as one views a beautiful room through a doorway from across the corridor, remains untouched and therefore beautiful.
Thus, the trouble of translating song lyrics is obvious. It takes a deft hand to adequately succeed at such a task — I say, as I prepare to take a go at it using a sledgehammer.
KURIKAESARERU SHOGYOU MUJOU
Zazen Boys are a Japanese rock band led by Shutoku Mukai, formerly the lead singer/songwriter of the popular hardcore noise rock band, Number Girl. Zazen Boys is a difficult band to classify — they treat genre the same was as many great bands: they leave it to the Wikipedia editors.
Mukai takes an interesting approach when writing lyrics for Zazen Boys songs. He has developed a set of key words or phrases, and he deploys them semi-haphazardly across many songs. There are whole stanzas that are replicated wholesale in multiple tracks, of which each line is made of key phrases that can appear individually anywhere else.
It almost begs the question: why write new lyrics for each song, if you've already said what you want to say? One could quote Neil Young:
Seems like that guy singin' this song
Has been doin' it for a long time.
Is there anything he knows
That he ain't said?1
Shutoku Mukai seems to have internalized this sentiment. It's not that all of his songs are about the same thing. This is not the case at all. However, there are certain motifs that appear repeatedly. And if you are bringing up the same motif, why come up with a new line, when the old one works just as well? In fact, the old one, in a certain way, works better; each repetition only gives it more power. This of course only works if the original lines are good.
This tendency is most prominent in the album, Zazen Boys II, which starts with a short track that serves as an introduction to all the key phrases that will appear in the album.
I will preface the following segment by saying that while I understand Japanese, I don't understand it well. I understand it in the way of someone who learned it primarily by myself, and primarily very far away from its home country.
However, this is my website, and you're here with me, not anybody else. So perhaps I should not insist on apologizing so often for simply being myself.
Thus, I present to you now, an analysis of two lines that often appear together in Zazen Boys songs:
繰り返される諸行無常 Kurikaesareru shogyou mujou
よみがえる性的衝動 Yomigaeru seiteki shoudou
These lines struck me the very first time I heard them. There is a rhythm to them, a rhythm only heightened by Mukai's jagged, stilted hip-hop-esque delivery. Try saying them to yourself a few times. See how you feel. Better yet, here are some clips:
What do they mean? What is their meaning? Which is to say, how do we make sense of them using the English language?
Let's look first at the beginning of each line. My reason for starting in this way is that this is how I initially perceived these lyrics: the first word of each line were the only ones I understood on my first listen.
Kurikaesareru means to be repeated, or to be recurring. Yomigaeru means to be resurrected, revived, or perhaps, reinvigorated. Thus, we are immediately presented with a vague, yet profound picture. We are talking of recurrence and rebirth — concepts which point toward the realm of the spiritual or metaphysical. We are already, in a sense, elevated; we are not dealing here with an everyday world, at least not in its basic sense.
However, this is only an outline: the true potatoes is yet to come.
Now, we delve into the true potatoes.
Shogyou Mujou is a Buddhist saying. It means, "All worldly things are impermanent." When we combine this with our kurikaesareru, we come to the phrase, "The recurring, impermanent material world," or, "All is temporary, and prone to repetition." The gist being that what we recognize sensorily is illusory and impermanent — it is not the True, Eternal nature of things. The sub-gist being that the progress of time is part of this illusion. If it is recurring, it is a cycle. If it is a cycle, there is no progress.
So far, so good. We have reached some recognizable philosophical tenet. We are floating in the air; the next line serves to take us back to Earth.
Remember that yomigaeru refers to a resurrection. So, what is being resurrected, revived, or reinvigorated? Our seiteki shoudou, of course. Our sex drive. Our libido. If you are like me, you see this and say, "dang it, are we talking about sex again?" Well, the answer is unfortunately yes, we are.
What does this reinvigorated sex drive have to do with the impermanence of the worldly world? Does this impermanence, perhaps, turn us on? Is it sexy?
No. It is not sexy. However, our sex drive is a vital part of the recurrence mentioned previously. It is the force that propels this cycle of living and dying. All things must pass; we, as humans, must die. However, we are not lost in death, for later we are reborn via a sexual act. And we, in turn, bring about new birth with our own sexual acts. All worldly things are impermanent; yet, our sexual drive makes us, in a sense, eternal.
But don't be confused: being eternal in this sense is certainly not a good thing, at least if we are following orthodox Buddhist doctrine. The material world is a fundamentally bad place to be, and it is our sex drive that serves to keep us stuck within its agonizing cycle. if we could remove this sex drive, we could be free. But it is constantly reborn, resurrected. Over and over, trapping us in this false, impermanent world.
It makes sense that a band named Zazen would feel compelled to repeat such lines.
But let's remember that these lines appealed to me before I knew what they meant. They appealed to me as sounds. And the only reason I have chosen to analyze them to such an extent is because of this initial stereophonic enjoyment. If someone had simply approached me on the street and said in a monotone, "All worldly things are impermanent, and also, by the way, my sex drive is reborn," it probably wouldn't have interested-
Okay, that absolutely would have interested me. But not in the same way. You know what I mean: if someone had written that, perhaps in an essay on Substack, I would have groaned. In fact, I worry that by introducing you to these lines via an online essay, I am destroying a lot of their power. Then again, most of you were not going to listen to Zazen Boys anyways.
I'm fumbling for a conclusion here, but you understand what I'm saying, right? It is the presentation that matters. The presentation is what gets you to consider the idea. I could tell you the most amazing things, but if I don't say them well, you won't care. If my writing has no rhythm, you'll look away. I need you to look here, or I die; so, I need to write in such a way that captures your attention. If the sentences don't flow well, the ideas I'm presenting will not seem worthy of analysis.
But I also need a mystique; there needs to be something that I know that you don't. This is accomplished via the obscure band and the foreign language. Those aren't mandatory; many writers simply use convoluted language, or hide information. This isn't (only) for fun — if I simply give you information, you will not consider it worthwhile. If you the reader have to work to figure out what I'm talking about, you are going to consider the information worthwhile, if only in the retrospective sense: at the time, you considered it "worth" your "while" to put in the time to figure it out.
We call this art, by the way. All this that I'm talking about. You don't need to argue online anymore; we all know what art is now. It’s short for “artifice.” It's a trick for getting people to listen to you.
Shutoku Mukai's trick worked on me. It worked because the sounds created by his band build off of sounds I have been hearing my whole life. Zazen Boys would not work without rock and roll: they would sound ludicrous. They also would not work without hip-hop: I wouldn't understand why he is talking and not singing. It also works because we, as people, like drums, and we like rhythm, and we like each other's voices.
But would it work without language? I liked the sound of the words before I liked their meaning. In fact, it's probable that I liked their meaning primarily because I liked their sounds. Language is a much more recent artifice than music, especially the kind of syntactically complex language we choose to use nowadays. I barely understand what Mukai is saying most of the time, but I believe in him, because the presentation is all there. His voice, his facial expressions, his gestures — they appeal to me on a base level. He is cool. I want what he is saying to be cool. I need what he is saying to be cool.
At a subconscious level, this is what I am aspiring to when I write. I need you to believe in me, before you can believe me. This essay could be half this long. It could be a third. It could even be twice this long. It's exactly as long as it is because I needed exactly this amount of time to convince you that I have something to say. And now I've gone and said it.
1. "Falling From Above" — Greendale (2003)