hiroki

アンフィル(anfiel) announced at their presents live tonight that their new single "螢の瞳(hotaru no hitomi)" will be released on 2017/08/16.
 
limited edition will include CD+DVD, and regular edition will include CD only
 

アンフィル(anfiel) announced at their presents live tonight that their new single "螢の瞳(hotaru no hitomi)" will be released on 2017/08/16.
 
limited edition will include CD+DVD, and regular edition will include CD only
 

アンフィル(anfiel) announced at their presents live tonight that their new single "螢の瞳(hotaru no hitomi)" will be released on 2017/08/16.
 
limited edition will include CD+DVD, and regular edition will include CD only
 

アンフィル(anfiel) announced at their presents live tonight that their new single "螢の瞳(hotaru no hitomi)" will be released on 2017/08/16.
 
limited edition will include CD+DVD, and regular edition will include CD only
 

I'M IN LOVE
They're so beautiful, omg can't wait to have my copies!!
 
 

</3 my poor baby, i hope he gets better asap  

After several complaints of throat pain and repeated hospital visits, Royz Vo.昴 (Subaru) has been diagnosed with vocal cord polyp. Due to early detection of his condition, Subaru will only go through 2 wks of treatment. As a result, he will temporarily pause activities with the band after their instore event on May 12, and he is scheduled to return at their live at Kagoshima SR HALL on May 27.
 
Royz will still continue their oneman tour, "THE AXIA 47 - RAVENS CALL -" as 3 members in the meantime.
 
http://royz-web.net/news_detail/77335

I actually tried to do this thing 5 years ago, so I have a couple of those with translations, some language remarks and my interpretations (I was very young so I can't really guarantee on the analysis quality): http://whatarevklyrics.blogspot.com

I moved this topic into the Lyrics section to give this part of the board some more love. With more high quality discussion topics like these, this subforum will sprout to life in no time!
 
I'm going to go in a slightly different direction with this conversation to give those who haven't taken Humanities classes something to chew on. Reading these lyrics reminded me of this news story from a few years ago. I will provide the text in case the article disappears in the future, as news articles are wont to do.
 
 
The parts in bold line up with segments of the lyrics too well - mixed with a bit of Chiaki's imagination and artistic freedom of course. I don't believe the main character has hang ups or regrets as much as he gets off on killing and eating men, and now he's found someone that he wants to eat him. I point to the lyric I'll have dinner with "me" and you and I am interpreting "me" as if he is offering himself for dinner.

The second thing I thought of was that this main character must have killed and eaten before and that his constant cannibalism led to development of gastric ulcers. The inclusion of "Gastric Ulcer" in the title was a way of hinting at cannibalism without directly stating it, and possibly was a way to get around Japanese censors. I agree on the interpretation of "Rousseau's Illusion" everyone has given so far. I also think the "you" in the lyrics are ambiguous. When I read the first passage, what comes to mind is a deranged man talking to his carved up lover in a freezer. When it switches into the next paragraph, the "you" is now us. Chiaki is Brandes, we are Meiwes.
 

HOLY CRAP thank you for the responses! You guys are awesome!!
I did not take any philosophy classes so thank you @chemicalpictures and @hiroki for your thorough explanations about Rousseau. Thanks for linking the interview too, hiroki, I shall read the whole thing later.
 
This turned out to be a lot more complex than I thought, but also very interesting! I like the idea of the raw state of human beings, the savage, the love of the self, and self-love. I think it ties well into the 'mirror', or the true state of things. Whatever shows up on the mirror, or whatever is inside the mirror world, is Boy B/self-love, the hidden and raw self. Which is why the lyrics say at the end that the 'near future' is basically the boy already disappearing 'into the mirror'. You can't escape the true/natural state of things despite masking yourself with another side. And yes, I think this is what Chiaki means when disputing Rousseau's philosophy of the good nature of humans, and thus calls it 'Rousseau's Illusion'.
 
@jaymee I can very much agree with the idea of capgras delusion and how his dark side is replaced with an imposter/his love interest. Maybe that's why the 'seemingly' potential love interest is a male and not a female (in conventional terms anyway). That takes away the homosexuality undertones then. The other males in the PV is basically his other self in the form of another man. And if we take it further, that one imposter (the second man) ends up killing the real one instead, rather than the real one killing the imposter, as he did with the previous one. This means that his evil side, the raw self, wins and leads back to the idea of disappearing 'into the mirror' where the true state of things lie.
 
I think we've all touched up on some similar concepts here and there. This is a good discussion so far~

MEJIBRAY will go on indefinite hiatus at the end of 2017.
 
 

Probably already an overstated point for some of us, but just in case we get the inevitable "BUT... did the writer/lyricist mean/intend this??" objection (thankfully we haven't) - there's a landmark essay called "The Intentional Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley that has argued quite persuasively that it's immaterial what the author had meant to say. All we have at our disposal is the text, and what matters are the various readings the text opens itself to and makes possible as it circulates across different times, spaces, languages. We're not interested in (and can never be) plumbing the depths of the author's consciousness, so that's not the point of exercises like this  But if we really want to, we can satisfy ourselves with knowing that the band had knowingly alluded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau  
 
As for the song itself: while I generally don’t have much of an intuition for this kind of lyrics (I’m sure most MH people have more meaningful things to say on the lyrics directly), I found a ton of interesting ideas in the previous posts that I feel I can say something about so allow me to briefly chip in with some of my thoughts. More than a detailed reading of the lyrics per se it's kind of a running “commentary” with some indications along the way (hopefully) on why/how these ideas might hook on to the lyrics.
 
I'll limit myself to making one longer comment and a shorter one. My longer point reads more like an extended footnote to @chemicalpictures's post so I'll put it under spoiler tags:
 
 
And the shorter remark: I was going to comment on the ‘doppelganger’ effect in the lyrics (everyone who has said something so far has noticed a kind of echo, repetition, or doubling that takes place in the lyrics) but this post is long enough so I'll keep it to a few words:
 
In Rousseau’s philosophy, he makes a distinction between what he calls amour de soi (love of the self) and amour-propre (self-love). “Love of the self” is a regard for self-preservation independent of what other people might think or feel about me, while “self-love” is a ‘corrupted’ version which arose because we desire other people to see us in a particular way. This is related to the whole "passage from savagery to civilization" narrative that the Enlightenment was obsessed with (for Rousseau, “self-love” only emerged in a “civilized” society where we're compelled to enter into social/political relationships with other people) – but more important for our purposes is how this “self-love” operates on the basis of a kind of split subjectivity. What I mean is that Rousseau’s “self-love” assumes not one but two “I”, one that other people see and we want to make look good, and a more interior/primitive “I” behind the screen that’s making this judgment in advance and dressing up the first "I", as it were. In Chiaki’s lyrics we find a series of echoes: “デキタ。” (in Katakana) becoming “できた。” (Hiragana) – a repetition but in a different script – almost like a different (/same?) person repeating the same words. Also, the line “僕は「僕」と君とディナー” is precisely this doubling of the self that Rousseau’s “self-love” gestures towards: an (authentic) I, and a (spectral) “I” that exists as a second-order construction in language, set typographically here in quotation marks.
 

Probably already an overstated point for some of us, but just in case we get the inevitable "BUT... did the writer/lyricist mean/intend this??" objection (thankfully we haven't) - there's a landmark essay called "The Intentional Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley that has argued quite persuasively that it's immaterial what the author had meant to say. All we have at our disposal is the text, and what matters are the various readings the text opens itself to and makes possible as it circulates across different times, spaces, languages. We're not interested in (and can never be) plumbing the depths of the author's consciousness, so that's not the point of exercises like this  But if we really want to, we can satisfy ourselves with knowing that the band had knowingly alluded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau  
 
As for the song itself: while I generally don’t have much of an intuition for this kind of lyrics (I’m sure most MH people have more meaningful things to say on the lyrics directly), I found a ton of interesting ideas in the previous posts that I feel I can say something about so allow me to briefly chip in with some of my thoughts. More than a detailed reading of the lyrics per se it's kind of a running “commentary” with some indications along the way (hopefully) on why/how these ideas might hook on to the lyrics.
 
I'll limit myself to making one longer comment and a shorter one. My longer point reads more like an extended footnote to @chemicalpictures's post so I'll put it under spoiler tags:
 
 
And the shorter remark: I was going to comment on the ‘doppelganger’ effect in the lyrics (everyone who has said something so far has noticed a kind of echo, repetition, or doubling that takes place in the lyrics) but this post is long enough so I'll keep it to a few words:
 
In Rousseau’s philosophy, he makes a distinction between what he calls amour de soi (love of the self) and amour-propre (self-love). “Love of the self” is a regard for self-preservation independent of what other people might think or feel about me, while “self-love” is a ‘corrupted’ version which arose because we desire other people to see us in a particular way. This is related to the whole "passage from savagery to civilization" narrative that the Enlightenment was obsessed with (for Rousseau, “self-love” only emerged in a “civilized” society where we're compelled to enter into social/political relationships with other people) – but more important for our purposes is how this “self-love” operates on the basis of a kind of split subjectivity. What I mean is that Rousseau’s “self-love” assumes not one but two “I”, one that other people see and we want to make look good, and a more interior/primitive “I” behind the screen that’s making this judgment in advance and dressing up the first "I", as it were. In Chiaki’s lyrics we find a series of echoes: “デキタ。” (in Katakana) becoming “できた。” (Hiragana) – a repetition but in a different script – almost like a different (/same?) person repeating the same words. Also, the line “僕は「僕」と君とディナー” is precisely this doubling of the self that Rousseau’s “self-love” gestures towards: an (authentic) I, and a (spectral) “I” that exists as a second-order construction in language, set typographically here in quotation marks.
 

MEJIBRAY will go on indefinite hiatus at the end of 2017.
 
 

MEJIBRAY will go on indefinite hiatus at the end of 2017.
 
 

MEJIBRAY will go on indefinite hiatus at the end of 2017.
 
 

MEJIBRAY will go on indefinite hiatus at the end of 2017.
 
 

MEJIBRAY will go on indefinite hiatus at the end of 2017.
 
 

Axkey new single トゥエンティーフォーセブン("Twenty four seven") will be released on 2017/07/24.
 
A type (limited edition)
01. 24/7
02.ロストワン
03.D.I.D
 
B type
01.  24/7
02. ジャパニィズ・マジョリテイ
 

 

 
They will hold their one-man live at Ikebukuro Ruido K3 on 2017/08/08 and at Osaka Ruido on 2017/08/23.
 

Probably already an overstated point for some of us, but just in case we get the inevitable "BUT... did the writer/lyricist mean/intend this??" objection (thankfully we haven't) - there's a landmark essay called "The Intentional Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley that has argued quite persuasively that it's immaterial what the author had meant to say. All we have at our disposal is the text, and what matters are the various readings the text opens itself to and makes possible as it circulates across different times, spaces, languages. We're not interested in (and can never be) plumbing the depths of the author's consciousness, so that's not the point of exercises like this  But if we really want to, we can satisfy ourselves with knowing that the band had knowingly alluded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau  
 
As for the song itself: while I generally don’t have much of an intuition for this kind of lyrics (I’m sure most MH people have more meaningful things to say on the lyrics directly), I found a ton of interesting ideas in the previous posts that I feel I can say something about so allow me to briefly chip in with some of my thoughts. More than a detailed reading of the lyrics per se it's kind of a running “commentary” with some indications along the way (hopefully) on why/how these ideas might hook on to the lyrics.
 
I'll limit myself to making one longer comment and a shorter one. My longer point reads more like an extended footnote to @chemicalpictures's post so I'll put it under spoiler tags:
 
 
And the shorter remark: I was going to comment on the ‘doppelganger’ effect in the lyrics (everyone who has said something so far has noticed a kind of echo, repetition, or doubling that takes place in the lyrics) but this post is long enough so I'll keep it to a few words:
 
In Rousseau’s philosophy, he makes a distinction between what he calls amour de soi (love of the self) and amour-propre (self-love). “Love of the self” is a regard for self-preservation independent of what other people might think or feel about me, while “self-love” is a ‘corrupted’ version which arose because we desire other people to see us in a particular way. This is related to the whole "passage from savagery to civilization" narrative that the Enlightenment was obsessed with (for Rousseau, “self-love” only emerged in a “civilized” society where we're compelled to enter into social/political relationships with other people) – but more important for our purposes is how this “self-love” operates on the basis of a kind of split subjectivity. What I mean is that Rousseau’s “self-love” assumes not one but two “I”, one that other people see and we want to make look good, and a more interior/primitive “I” behind the screen that’s making this judgment in advance and dressing up the first "I", as it were. In Chiaki’s lyrics we find a series of echoes: “デキタ。” (in Katakana) becoming “できた。” (Hiragana) – a repetition but in a different script – almost like a different (/same?) person repeating the same words. Also, the line “僕は「僕」と君とディナー” is precisely this doubling of the self that Rousseau’s “self-love” gestures towards: an (authentic) I, and a (spectral) “I” that exists as a second-order construction in language, set typographically here in quotation marks.
 

Probably already an overstated point for some of us, but just in case we get the inevitable "BUT... did the writer/lyricist mean/intend this??" objection (thankfully we haven't) - there's a landmark essay called "The Intentional Fallacy" by Wimsatt and Beardsley that has argued quite persuasively that it's immaterial what the author had meant to say. All we have at our disposal is the text, and what matters are the various readings the text opens itself to and makes possible as it circulates across different times, spaces, languages. We're not interested in (and can never be) plumbing the depths of the author's consciousness, so that's not the point of exercises like this  But if we really want to, we can satisfy ourselves with knowing that the band had knowingly alluded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau  
 
As for the song itself: while I generally don’t have much of an intuition for this kind of lyrics (I’m sure most MH people have more meaningful things to say on the lyrics directly), I found a ton of interesting ideas in the previous posts that I feel I can say something about so allow me to briefly chip in with some of my thoughts. More than a detailed reading of the lyrics per se it's kind of a running “commentary” with some indications along the way (hopefully) on why/how these ideas might hook on to the lyrics.
 
I'll limit myself to making one longer comment and a shorter one. My longer point reads more like an extended footnote to @chemicalpictures's post so I'll put it under spoiler tags:
 
 
And the shorter remark: I was going to comment on the ‘doppelganger’ effect in the lyrics (everyone who has said something so far has noticed a kind of echo, repetition, or doubling that takes place in the lyrics) but this post is long enough so I'll keep it to a few words:
 
In Rousseau’s philosophy, he makes a distinction between what he calls amour de soi (love of the self) and amour-propre (self-love). “Love of the self” is a regard for self-preservation independent of what other people might think or feel about me, while “self-love” is a ‘corrupted’ version which arose because we desire other people to see us in a particular way. This is related to the whole "passage from savagery to civilization" narrative that the Enlightenment was obsessed with (for Rousseau, “self-love” only emerged in a “civilized” society where we're compelled to enter into social/political relationships with other people) – but more important for our purposes is how this “self-love” operates on the basis of a kind of split subjectivity. What I mean is that Rousseau’s “self-love” assumes not one but two “I”, one that other people see and we want to make look good, and a more interior/primitive “I” behind the screen that’s making this judgment in advance and dressing up the first "I", as it were. In Chiaki’s lyrics we find a series of echoes: “デキタ。” (in Katakana) becoming “できた。” (Hiragana) – a repetition but in a different script – almost like a different (/same?) person repeating the same words. Also, the line “僕は「僕」と君とディナー” is precisely this doubling of the self that Rousseau’s “self-love” gestures towards: an (authentic) I, and a (spectral) “I” that exists as a second-order construction in language, set typographically here in quotation marks.
 

Axkey new single トゥエンティーフォーセブン("Twenty four seven") will be released on 2017/07/24.
 
A type (limited edition)
01. 24/7
02.ロストワン
03.D.I.D
 
B type
01.  24/7
02. ジャパニィズ・マジョリテイ
 

 

 
They will hold their one-man live at Ikebukuro Ruido K3 on 2017/08/08 and at Osaka Ruido on 2017/08/23.
 

Axkey new single トゥエンティーフォーセブン("Twenty four seven") will be released on 2017/07/24.
 
A type (limited edition)
01. 24/7
02.ロストワン
03.D.I.D
 
B type
01.  24/7
02. ジャパニィズ・マジョリテイ
 

 

 
They will hold their one-man live at Ikebukuro Ruido K3 on 2017/08/08 and at Osaka Ruido on 2017/08/23.
 

Axkey new single トゥエンティーフォーセブン("Twenty four seven") will be released on 2017/07/24.
 
A type (limited edition)
01. 24/7
02.ロストワン
03.D.I.D
 
B type
01.  24/7
02. ジャパニィズ・マジョリテイ
 

 

 
They will hold their one-man live at Ikebukuro Ruido K3 on 2017/08/08 and at Osaka Ruido on 2017/08/23.