The notion that poetry is about comprehending is misleading.
Aware that this is an asking us to evaluate the meaning of a poem's words, I then venture to question, what then makes song and music such a uniquely powerful medium of poetic expression? Like any powerful spoken word piece, music is poetry meant to be performed. Music is poetry meant to be felt and experienced as much, if not more, then it is meant to be read and understood for its language. Is it not then possible that, if a song is conveyed to the listener so powerfully, we can understand its emotion and meaning without even beginning to comprehending its lyrics at all? When a poem is able to tug at that hollow sorrow within us all, to convey the heartbreak of its words without the listener understanding a single one of them, it has achieved an emotional poetic resonance that transcends any language barrier that may stand between us and our experience of it.
In a display that can only be described as a heart-wrenching gutting of the soul, I dare you, the reader, to listen to Masayoshi Yamazaki´s 1997 single ¨One More Time, One More Chance¨ and feel absolutely nothing. Unless you speak Japanese you will not understand Yamazaki´s work, but even if you did I would ask you to listen to it as if you did not. Even without understanding the words, through how the song is so intimately and powerfully performed to us, it becomes evident that Yamazaki is revealing the deepest longings of his heart to the listener in its rawest form. Never before have I felt so strongly that a piece of poetry was created to be experienced rather than to be read or understood. It's an emotional display that trying to describe or evaluate simply does not do poetic justice. If you are at all skeptical as to the impact of the song's emotional weight, the revealing of the soul in its deliverance, and how the text on paper is simply not enough to understand this song's meaning, the best-supporting evidence I can provide is simply telling you to go experience it for yourself. Yamazaki's song shows us what it means to suffer, to lose our grip on something we hold dear, to be raw and unrestrained in presenting our emotions.
"One More Time, One More Chance" is a song of longing for lost love (as if the emotional carnage in Yamazaki's voice was not already enough to convey this to you). I now venture to analyze the song for its lyrics, but only out of requirement because I otherwise feel that it is completely unnecessary and beside the point, I am trying to make.
"Summer's memory is revolvingThe sense of longing in Yamazaki´s words, while more evident in the tone and bravo of his presentation of them, is pervasive. The ¨sudden disappearance of heart beat¨ alludes to a love and warmth so quickly lost to him. Memories of summers are nearly personified, circling the speaker, reminding him of what we assume to be a happier time. Using heartbeat" instead of "love" makes his loss feel more human, like he lost something more intimate to him then some short-lived love.
The sudden disappearance of heart beat"
The one wish of the speaker is to be with the one for whom the song is written. The "betting" and "embracing" comes off as a double meaning. The speaker longs for the embrace of the one he loves while struggling to embrace the thought that it may just be impossible. The idea of betting, of putting everything on the line to see the fulfillment of his final longing shows how this person means everything to him, the meaning and motivation to his life.
"If my wish is to be granted, please bring me to you right nowBetting and embracing everything To show you there's nothing else I can do"
"Because the stars in the night sky seems like falling, I can't lie to myselfThis stanza is interesting. The only instances where Yamazaki uses English, like in the song's title itself, is for the phrase "One more time" and "One more chance". In addition, every time he uses one of those phrases in the song, it repeats itself in the next line. There is something heartbreaking in the way Yamazaki speaks these lines in English. The way he carries out the phrase, the way he ends the words "time" and "chance" with the quiver of a suffered man makes his longing for another chance, with the person he sings of seem all the more genuine. The use of English in these instances in contrast to all the Japenese gives the impression that Yamazaki is pleading to some higher power to acknowledge his plea, someone, anyone who can understand his longing for one more chance, one more moment with the one he loves. The stars falling around him in the sky, the quiver in his voice, the use of English to reach absolutely anyone he can with his words suggest the speaker knows his plea is futile. It's heartbreaking yet, how hard he pleads none-the-less.
One more time, please don't' change the season
One more time to the time when we fool around"
Before leaving you, I chose to conclude this post with a rather important piece of context to Yamakazi's song very much intentionally. I strongly recommend that if at this point, you haven't listened to the song yet yourself, you should do so before you continue to fully experience the revelation I am about to disclose.
Yamazaki wrote this song just weeks after losing his longtime girlfriend, his companion since childhood, the love of his life to the Kobe earthquake of 1995. If you listened to the song, I would bet such context doesn't come as much of a surprise to you. In ¨One More Time, One More Chance¨ Yamazaki vets the longing of his soul in a performance that requires you to listen to it to truly understand how powerful it is. Simply trying to describe the song does not do the emotions it conveys justice. The words we don't understand aren't important because the true poetry is in how he presents them. Because of how genuine the sorrow in his voice, how heartbreakingly real the sense of longing, how effervescent the sadness in his performance, it certainly did not surprise me.
Yamazaki wrote this song just weeks after losing his longtime girlfriend, his companion since childhood, the love of his life to the Kobe earthquake of 1995. If you listened to the song, I would bet such context doesn't come as much of a surprise to you. In ¨One More Time, One More Chance¨ Yamazaki vets the longing of his soul in a performance that requires you to listen to it to truly understand how powerful it is. Simply trying to describe the song does not do the emotions it conveys justice. The words we don't understand aren't important because the true poetry is in how he presents them. Because of how genuine the sorrow in his voice, how heartbreakingly real the sense of longing, how effervescent the sadness in his performance, it certainly did not surprise me.
I think you make a really strong point about the direct emotional impact of music, but I don't fully understand what your definition of poetry is? Is it any piece of art that creates an emotional experience? If so, are other non-textual mediums, like visual art and dance, also poetry?
ReplyDeleteWhat an incredible concept that is, that the lyrics are not always meant to be understood in music but heard for their emotional consistency. In a similar vein, the band Soul Coughing plays with word use a lot in their music. I would venture to say that a majority of the time, the lyrics are completely meaningless, but are chosen to fit into the melodic or emotional feeling the song already conveys. While not as emotionally apt as the song you mention, their song "Disseminated" has some lines that go like this; "Call up bop and I'm bunting stomach/Koko mop I chop chunking plummet/Thud on top, I ate the crocodile." While completely meaningless as words, they fit in by virtue of their syllables and in the way that words sound to add to the song while still meaning nothing. Soul Coughing does this in a fun and goofy way, but I think that that is a really powerful concept that, when done well, can have an incredibly moving effect.
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