[Lyric + PV Analysis] DEZERT - 胃潰瘍とルソーの錯覚 (Ikaiyou to Rousseau no sakkaku)

[plastic_rainbow 2162]

 

Hello all MH users! With the suggestion of @chemicalpictures, I bring you an analytical discussion of a song lyric I've chosen, along with its PV. Seems like this is the first time anyone has done this here so to get things pumping, and hopefully make this a success, I chose to pick a song from the increasingly popular band DEZERT. Being quite well-known for their food-related themes, as you can tell from their song titles and album titles, DEZERT do not only bring a dark and grimy atmosphere, but also present an unpleasant and repulsive feeling to your gut and mouth. If you ever took the time to read their lyrics you may never look at food the same way again. But hey, I love them for this.

 

@Zeus Let me know if there's a better section for this. Since I'm discussing about both lyric and PV I thought I'd put it in the general section instead.

 

Let's get right down to it and take a look at the original Japanese lyrics for the song, 胃潰瘍とルソーの錯覚  from their album タイトルなし(Title Nashi),  which was written by Chiaki, and then the translation, which was done by me.

 

Kanji: 胃潰瘍とルソーの錯覚  -taken from rocklyric

Spoiler

（A）

マイナス３°Cのチルド室

君は真っ二つになり笑う

 

真っ暗な朝は右腕のジュース

苦しいお昼は右足のパスタ

おやつの時間は右目入りゼリー

シロップ代わりに血液も入れて

ほっとする夜は右肩のポワレ

眩しい深夜に右胸のスープ

スパイス代わりに髪の毛も入れて

 

「デキタ。」

 

濁る未来　壊したくて

僕は「僕」と君とディナー

近い未来　映したくて

痛みだした胃に手をやりさする

 

（B）

きっと数日後には貴方は少年Ａ

賞味期限付きの二人の「秘密」

 

初めて会った貴方に願った

できれば優しく殺してほしい

そして骨すらも残さずにこの世界から私を救ってください

あなたは真っ直ぐに私を見つめ

頷きそして優しく笑った

だからわたしも釣られて笑った

 

「できた。」

 

襲う不安　押し殺して

最後の夜　キスをしよう

近い未来　壊したくて

鏡の中　知らぬ君を

 

「殺して。」

 

[Ａ.B]

孤独を愛していた二人はもう夢の中へ

 

濁る未来　壊すように

罪が罪を溶かしてゆく

近い未来　映しだした

二人はもう鏡の中へと

 

「消えた。」

 

English: Gastric Ulcer and Rousseau's Illusion

Spoiler

(A)

In a chilled room at -3 °C

You are split in half and smiling

 

For pitch black mornings, I have right arm juice

For painful afternoons, I have right leg pasta

For mid afternoon snacks, I have gelatin topped with right eyeball

And instead of syrup, I drizzle in blood

For relieving nights, I have butter roasted right shoulder

For dazzling nights, I have right chest soup

And instead of spice, I add in hair strands

 

"Food is ready"

 

I want to destroy the murky future

I'll have dinner with "me" and you

I want to reveal* the near future

I rub my hand over my aching stomach

 

(B)

Surely, you'll be boy A a few days later

Our "secret" with a best-before date

 

I made a wish when I first met you

If possible, I want you to kill me gently

And save me from this world, without leaving any of my bones

You gazed directly at me

And nodded, smiling gently

Being enticed, I smiled as well

 

"It's ready"

 

Squeeze this assailing anxiety to death

Let's kiss on this final night

I want to destroy the near future

And kill the you who I don't know

 

"Inside the mirror."

 

(A.B)

We, who loved solitude, are already inside a dream

 

To destroy the murky future

Sin will melt sin away

Revealing* the near future

We already disappeared

 

"Into the mirror"

 

Notes:

*I translated this from 映す(utsusu), which can translate as 'to reflect' (on the mirror), or 'to project' (a film), but I felt that 'reveal' was more suitable in this context.

 

胃潰瘍とルソーの錯覚 is a song about love and the fear of the truth and the future, written in a grotesque manner. Looking at the song title, 'gastric ulcer' ties into the food and cannibalistic theme, and after reviewing the lyrics and PV several times I've concluded that the gastric ulcer represents a kind of punishment for one's sins. A punishment for killing the ones you love and eating them to the bone, obviously. It is there as a reminder of your sins.

 

Another piece of information we get from the title is the name 'Rousseau'. Who could this Rousseau refer to and why did Chiaki choose to use this reference? (Unless the word ルソー means something else?) The first name that comes up on google is a philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Apparently, he advocated freedom politically and made an influence during the French Revolution. I can see how 'freedom' may play a role in this, but am still puzzled as to why Chiaki would reference him specifically. If anyone is willing to dig further into this, please do.

 

Something else worth speculating is the way Chiaki divides the lyric into (A), (B), and (A.B), like a story with chapters. But then why (A.B) at the end? Maybe it's a middle section between A and B? It's possible, but I think A and B might refer to Boy A and Boy B (since he mentions 少年A under the (B) section), where as A.B refers to them both of them together at the end. If you have thoughts otherwise, please comment below~

 

I know there's still a lot to speculate about the lyrics, but let's get to the fun part and explore the peculiar PV. As if the lyrics were crazy enough, here we have additional themes like gender, homosexuality, and the butterfly motif. A young boy puts on lipstick, kills butterflies, and gets together with other males as he grows older......to kill them for their flesh and bones.

 

 

The PV follows well with the lyrics, but what intrigued me the most was the butterfly motif. We see the butterfly appear when the young boy plucks its wings and smiles, and in a few flickering screens of an injured butterfly throughout the PV. Then, at the very end we see it once more in the form of a tattoo on the left arm of the man who kills the boy (see pic below). What an ironic turn of events, seeing a butterfly, which you have mistreated in the past, the moment you die. However, since the butterfly has been depicted as being weak, being robbed of its ability to fly, I think it also serves as a representation of his weakness for not being able to face the truth and the future. In Japan, people also believe that butterflies carry souls to the dead, or represent souls of the dead, therefore adding to the irony of his fateful death.

 

 

I don't want to write too much so I'll leave the rest open for discussion! I'm sure there are deep-thinkers here who have something more interesting to share. Or if not, point out something you find interesting and analyze it, even if it's something little. It could mean something more than you think. For example, you think those wire mannequins in the PV might represent anything? Or maybe it's just a piece of decoration. For those who have knowledge in Japanese, please share thoughts about the original Japanese lyrics and other possible translations too. Have fun! ^^

 

Feel free to leave any critiques as well~

Edited May 10, 2017 by plastic_rainbow

[chemicalpictures 1888]

Oh boy, we are in for a ride!

 

To start, the title immediately got my attention. I think you are right on point when talking about Rousseau, and this brings me years back to my classes on the history of philosophy.

 

There's a philosophycal concept called 'State of Nature', coined by Thomas Hobbes, which in simplifying terms describes that humans living in a natural state, without being under a common acknowledged leader (governments or a king for example) will be in a state of constant every man for himself, and everyone against everyone. You can conclude that the raw state of a human being is someone egoistical, unpredictable, maybe violent and by all means, alone, distrustful.

 

Rousseau disputes that conclusion, and affirms that a Natural Human is neither a good or bad in modern society terms, he is simply a man of sensations, feelings and needs. In other words, that human is not intentional evil, he is simply unaware of such concepts. He will fill his basic desires (food, taking care of himself, reproducing). He is not hostile towards other human beings, he simply lacks the reason for society or rules.

 

If Chiaki is indeed talking about Jean Jacques Rousseau, we could assume that he does think Hobbes is correct, and Rousseau would be naive to think a human is not crude as described by Hobbes. I wanna hear more thoughts on this.

 

As such, I would interpret the PV as a person in its natural state described by Hobbes bounded by the rules of society, rebelling and discovering his raw state as a human:

 

- Using lipstick, which can be seen as an act of transgression/experimentation/reaching his true self and being chastised by his mother, the ruling figure;

- Killing butterflies, which may indicates his further urge as an evil, emotionless being, being again hold back by the figure of authority;

- Killing his partner, the ultimate transgression, and maybe eating his corpse, satisfying his most basic, raw needs as a human;

 

The scene of him puking after killing his partner and reminiscing his mother could indicate confusion between following his urges and the guilt of his despicable acts. And yet, he couln't help but trying to do it again. This sentiment is widely seen in movies or profiles of serial killers and psychopaths, which we could say are indeed "savage" human being, as their disdain for society rules.

 

Regarding the butterfly, I think @plastic_rainboware mostly right!
 

Some thoughts Genius-style:
 

"I want to destroy the murky future / I rub my hand over my aching stomach": I think there's a guilt theme to be explored here. the boy do what he does, he cannot help it, but he is filled with guilty. He wants it to stop, but he can't/won't do it alone. To end his life and erase his existence, commiting the same hideous acts as he did.

 

"I made a wish when I first met you / If possible, I want you to kill me gently / And save me from this world, without leaving any of my bones": The boy wants someone to kill him. He wants to find someone who is able to do it. If not, he will kill that someone and look for another person who is able to do it.

 

"Surely, you'll be boy A a few days later / Our "secret" with a best-before date": I believe this would mean that if the person does no kill him, the "deadline expires", the boy will kill person B and eat him, like he did with boy A.

 

"To destroy the murky future/ Sin will melt sin away": To avoid him keeping doing what he does, someone will kill him. His sins will be stopped by other people's sins;

 

"We, who loved solitude, are already inside a dream / "Into the mirror" / "Inside the mirror."": they, the psychopaths, do not see the world the same way as we do, they are already living in a different world, yet the same. like a mirror.

 

I think there's more to be said, but that gives a general idea. Or we could all be tripping balls, and Chiaki was just being gross for the shock value or something else. who knows...

[jaymee 405]

I think the main “guy” in the song has two versions of himself. One is the cannibal/killer/homosexual, and the other is his “normal” side, Boy A.

 

I think he is in conflict with himself, where he does not want to be the cannibal/killer/homosexual, but can’t help himself. This side of him/conflict with himself is always there, “in the room”, even when he wants to be “normal” with another man/love interest. He wants to tell the man/love interest about this side of him and the impending danger it will put them in. However, eventually his secret will come out (“the best before” date), as he cannot fight off his dark side.

 

I also believe he somehow wants his love interest or their relationship to help fight off/kill this side of him (inside the mirror), and accept his homosexuality so that he will be saved and may live normally without this other self. But it seems like at the end, although he has hope that he can somehow overcome this side of himself, they are both sucked into the mirror (the dark side of him). 

 

In that case, "sin will wash sin away" could be the hope that love could lead to self-acceptance, like the "sin" of homosexuality will wash away his other cannibal/killer sins.

But then eventually "sin will wash sin away" changes to mean that he has washed away his "sin" of homosexuality by killing another homosexual person (a metaphor for killing his dark, homosexual side).

 

I have a feeling that Rousseau’s illusion may refer to Rousseau’s philosophy that everything in love is an illusion.

But I find it interesting that although there isn't set term like "Rousseau's illusion" in Japanese, there is a term called "sojii illusion", which means capgras delusion. In capgras delusion, a person believes someone has been replaced by an identical-looking imposter. Combining both could have been a deliberate play on words.

 

I think Rousseau's illusion fits with the first part of the song, where he believes love will fix everything, but in the end he falls prey to a form of capgras delusion, where he sees the dark side of himself replaced with an imposter/his love interest.

 

(Also just incase it comes across as unclear, I don't personally believe homosexuality is a sin, but it seems like the main guy in the video has been conditioned to believe it is.)

 

 

Edited May 10, 2017 by jaymee

[hiroki 5521]

On 2017/5/10 at 1:57 PM, chemicalpictures said:

I think there's more to be said, but that gives a general idea. Or we could all be tripping balls, and Chiaki was just being gross for the shock value or something else. who knows...

 

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:

 

Spoiler

First, the Rousseau reference in the song’s title is important because it haunts the song in numerous ways. @chemicalpictures has nicely summarized the “anti-Enlightenment" impulse of Rousseau in his post, which I’d like to extend a little. As a philosopher, Rousseau had prioritized the passions of the human being over the primacy of his/her reason or rational knowledge. This made Rousseau a notable figure of dissent in the intellectual milieu he lived – the period which historians today call the Enlightenment, or the age when mankind was beginning to think of itself as somehow “superior” to other entities, e.g. non-living things, animals, ‘barbarians’, etc., by virtue of the human’s allegedly exclusive capacity for reason (exemplary of this attitude is the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am”). Hobbes was of course one of the Enlightenment’s most influential expositors. In Rousseau's writings he had famously critiqued the pervasive Enlightenment notion that society (and with it, culture) is an unalloyed civilizing force; on the contrary, he believes, society is the very thing that corrupts the tabula rasa of the human individual. (Tangentially, this also means Rousseau deviates from the Christian doctrine of original sin – a move that would influence many secularization movements subsequently.)

 

Already at this point, we can see how this debate between Rousseau and his contemporaries relates to several aspects of the lyrics: recurring images of cannibalism (from our standpoint, it’s probably difficult to imagine a more explicit form of “savagery” than this), guilt (I’ll follow up on what @chemicalpictures was saying on this point), morality (the ideas of ‘sin’, religion), the associated notions of a ‘crime’ and of ‘law’, etc. These aren’t disparate ideas; if anything they feed off one another and are interweaved into the very texture of the lyrics/PV.

 

It’s possible to propose that the lyrics are simply a rejection of Rousseau’s nostalgic romanticism which affirms the good nature of mankind, in favor of Hobbes’ rather pessimistic view of human nature that human beings who are left to their own devices in the state of nature would end up killing and eating one another. There’s no doubt the lyrics lend themselves to this reading immediately, but let's push it further.

 

One way to think about this whole business about cannibalism and the language of morality with the benefit of historical hindsight would be to say that the way in which cannibalism was conceived underwent a transformation at the precise historical juncture of the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, cannibalism was thought of merely as a means of survival (manuscripts from 'pre-legal' Middle Ages communities support this widespread belief), and indeed this idea of ‘survival’ became exceptionally important for political philosophers writing in the aftermath of post-Restoration Europe (which were extremely messy circumstances even by today’s standards). Hobbes’ Leviathan, of which Rousseau was critical, was in many ways the touchstone of modern conservative thought in the sense that it seeks to justify a strong central political authority founded to protect human beings from the brutalities (again: cannibalism, murder, crime, etc. come to mind) of unregulated anarchy. An important step in Hobbes’ rather complex argument made in the name of the species' "survival" is to frame cannibalism as a crime that every rational human being ought not to commit. Put differently, the Enlightenment thinkers did not suddenly notice a pre-existing crime (e.g. cannibalism) and then belatedly come up with the language of law to “describe” and contain its criminality; they prescriptively MADE cannibalism into a crime through the language of law when it previously wasn't.

 

Reading the lyrics through these lenses means we’re confronted with the huge question of the origin of morality that would occupy many later philosophers. On this point Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) is instructive. Notice that in his description of the "first crime", Freud too wound up trading in the concepts of crime, morals, guilt, etc. But most fascinating of all, the motif of ‘cannibalism’ returns quite forcefully here (so in a sense, we still haven't really left the lyrics....). I quote:

 

Quote

One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. [. . .] Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him [. . .] The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things - or social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion. (203)

 

And on the next page, 'guilt' appears:

 

Quote

After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been - for events took the course we often see them follow in human affairs to this day. (204)

 

In an uncanny way, the lyrics suddenly seem a lot like a twisted, condensed version of human history. I quote Freud only to quickly defer to Jacques Derrida’s reading of these important passages in his essay “Before the Law.” In his usual provocative manner, he tells us that:

 

Quote

 

The murder fails because the dead father holds even more power […] Thus morality arises from a useless crime which in fact kills nobody, which comes too soon or too late and does not put an end to any power; in fact, it inaugurates nothing since repentance and morality had to be possible before the crime. (198, author's emphasis)

 

 

In other words—and this is the crucial point—if Freud’s murder of the primal father had inaugurated the idea of crime together with the associated notions of “morality” and “religion,” and that there was no such thing as a ‘crime’ before this point in history, why did his sons even feel guilty in the first place? Where did this guilt come from? At this point we find ourselves at an impasse where we’re forced to either accept that morality has no definitive origin (or more severely, doesn’t ‘exist’) save for its articulation in the language of law (this is problematic for people who want some definitive grounding to ideas of ‘good’, ‘evil’, etc. or legal theorists that want to affirm some kind of 'natural rights'), or that  morality is not only primordial but is always in excess of language, of any narrative, of any history (which is equally problematic for any moral philosophy or concept of law that makes any claim to ‘capture’ morality perfectly).

 

More can be said, which I won’t, except to say that these shocking ideas (and really, what’s more shocking than to destabilize our conventional view of morality so radically?) open the lyrics up in many interesting ways. For instance, one can read the line 罪が罪を溶かしてゆく as envisioning a very different kind of morality from the kind of legal arrangement today where we rely on institutions to neutralize crimes via the force of law (let's not forget that the law is capable of this only through asserting its own 'violence'). Also, the whole 'playfulness' or even capriciousness in the lyrics mirrors Freud's carnivalesque 'totem meal', the earliest festival that commemorated the first crime (see quotation above). On all these points, the lyrics invite us to interrogate ideas we feel strongly about on this long detour.

 

Again, regardless if Chiaki had intended it or not (pretty sure he hasn't read Freud or Derrida!), I submit that the lyrics here share many implicit concerns with the trajectory of ideas laid out above.

 

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.

 

Edited May 11, 2017 by hiroki

[plastic_rainbow 2162]

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~

Edited May 10, 2017 by plastic_rainbow

[Zeus 7997]

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.

 

Quote

Cannibal filmed himself killing and eating his 'willing victim'

By Kate Connolly in Kassel

12:00AM GMT 04 Dec 2003

 

A German court was introduced to the secret and sordid world of cannibalism yesterday when a computer technician went on trial for murdering a man he claims willingly offered himself up for slaughter.
 

Arnim Meiwes, 42, a self-confessed cannibal, videotaped the killing, dissection and subsequent consumption of 43-year-old Berlin engineer Bernd Jürgen Brandes over a single evening in March 2001.
 

Meiwes told the court in Kassel, western Germany, that the two men met on an internet chatroom for cannibals and meticulously planned the rituals leading up to and beyond Brandes' death, including the cooking and eating of his penis.
 

"I didn't do anything against his will," Meiwes, who was dressed in a smart black suit, told a stunned courtroom.

He added: "He knew that he could have turned back at any moment but he chose not to."
 

During the hearing some members of the public, who had queued from 4am to secure seats in the wood-panelled courtroom which was crammed with journalists, gasped and decided to leave when the most horrific details of the killing were revealed.
 

The case is set to make legal history as cannibalism is not prohibited in Germany, leaving the prosecution and defence teams with an open legal playing field.

While the defence is arguing that Brandes had a death wish and that Meiwes was merely assisting him in his desire to die, the prosecution are pushing for a murder conviction based on the premise that Meiwes always intended to kill the engineer, and did it for his own sexual satisfaction.
 

Legal experts have said Meiwes is most likely to be convicted of "killing on demand", which carries a maximum five-year sentence.
 

Meiwes, a former soldier with a string of failed relationships with both men and women, told the court that his cannibalism stemmed from an acute sense of loneliness between the ages of eight and 12 after his father abandoned the family, his brother left home and his grandmother died.
 

He said his fantasies of killing his male school friends intensified over the years, influenced by horror films and the experience of seeing his neighbours slaughtering animals.
 

It reached a peak, he told the court, when his overbearing mother died in 1999.
 

His desperate need for a brother led him to want to kill and consume a male so that he would be "bound to me forever," he told the bemused courtroom.

He said killing also satisfied a sexual desire and that his ideal victim was "slim and blonde - like (the character) Sandy from the Flipper films".
 

The court heard how Meiwes and Brandes had first made contact in February 2001 via the Gay Cannibals internet chatroom which was run by Meiwes under the alias Franky.

In response to one of Meiwes's many requests such as: "If you are between 18 and 25 years old you are my boy. (Signed) Franky from Germany," and "Come to me and I eat (sic) your horny flesh", Brandes replied: "I offer myself to you."
 

After apparently settling his affairs in Berlin, Brandes took a train from Berlin to Kassel on March 9, 2001, and insisted that Meiwes kill him that very night.

Asked by Judge Volker Mütze what sort of psychological condition he had thought Brandes to be in when they met, Meiwes replied: "Of course, the fact that someone wants to be slaughtered is not normal, that's clear. . . but apart from that he was very intelligent and a sympathetic character."
 

After Brandes had consumed a heavy cocktail of sedatives and alcohol, the killing began in the early evening with the dismembering of certain parts of his body, the court heard.
 

By 4am, having lain in a hot bath so that he would bleed more easily, Brandes went to bed, where he lost consciousness. Meiwes then stabbed him in the throat.

He cut up his body, freezing around 66lb of it in labelled blue plastic bags and hurriedly burying other parts and bones in the garden after friends announced that they would visit.
 

Meiwes kept Brandes's feet with a view to preserving them, "knowing that there's quite a demand for such things amongst foot fetishists".
 

He said the human flesh had provided him with "quite a few" meals. The meat tasted "like pork, but a little bit spicier". Meiwes told the court that he believed that Brandes lives on inside him. He also claimed that he now speaks much better English than he used to - a result of eating Brandes, whose English was better than his cannibal killer.

Meiwes was arrested a year ago after a student from Innsbruck alerted police to the German's internet boasts that he had killed and consumed a man.
 

In an interview published this week Meiwes said he regretted his involvement in the killing and urged those with "cannibalistic tendencies" to seek help.

But yesterday he presented his deed as a mercy killing in which Brandes was a willing party.
 

The court also heard how Meiwes had been contacted via the internet by a cook, a teacher, a hotel worker and a pensioner.
 

One of the would-be victims is believed to have been living in London at the time.
 

The case continues.

 

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.
 

[plastic_rainbow 2162]

@Zeus

In the PV there's also a scene when the main guy stares at his phone screen before meeting his partner, to which what looks like a chat board of some sort (since there are more than two names on display).

 

There's mention from one person (who goes by Mr. Nameless) about wanting to die and wanting someone to kill him; the biggest text here, pictured below, saying 'please kill me'. This person is offering himself for slaughter and someone else on the board (most likely the main character) must've read this and decided to grant his wish. It's still a little ambiguous who is who in the chat board, but this is another alignment with the article and seems almost like more than a coincidence to me. You could very well be right!

Edited May 11, 2017 by plastic_rainbow

[chemicalpictures 1888]

The article thing makes a lot of sense. When it all happened, it was quite a big news, worldwide. I was already familiar with this story, it was even featured on the television news here in Brazil, if I'm not mistaken. Chiaki being influenced by it wouldn't surprise me at all

[saiko 429]

Holy shiiiit, I LOVE this smart-ass forum!

[091012 52]

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Edited May 7, 2020 by lei0418

[091012 52]

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Edited May 7, 2020 by lei0418