Rock Your Graduation – Takahashi Yuu and Sotsugyou
Takahashi Yuu has been a very unique figure and one of the artists that I pay extra attention to when browsing through a list of new releases. Sotsugyou (Graduation) was released in January and has touched me personally. The theme of this song, of course, is about graduation. “Some vivid thoughts flow out in this repeated scenery, some lost landscapes are awakened and then fade away in sadness. On the day of graduation, there no longer is the enemy of past before us, because we have a brand new ‘today’.” For some complicated and personal reasons, I never managed to actually graduate from middle school. It wasn’t long before I started to wish I had spent a day of graduation with my beloved friends. Sotsugyou does carry out this feeling very well, if not an exceptionally creative piece of music.
There’s a reason why Takahashi Yuu is such a unique artist in my long list besides the fact that his name literally translates to “high bridge, good.” Sotsugyou is only the second single I have from him, yet his powerful, honest and outright style of music making impresses me and makes me glad for the mere existence of this type of music and artists. I read this article titled How Important Are Lyrics and can’t agree more on the first part. Just how mundane and nonsense can pop music lyrics get? The answer is very much, to a degree that you start to realize that all pop song lyrics seem to be automatically generated from a lyric machine by pressing one of those vendor machine buttons. *Bonk* your pre-canned song is ready.
Takahashi Yuu is different. In this music video titled Genjitsu to Iu na Kaibutsu to Tatakau Mono Tachi (To Those Who Fight Monsters So-Called “Reality”) everything goes against what we could possibly call “trends.” You have this very ordinary looking guy wearing bottle-bottom glasses who happens to be on a nondescript roof rocking in an acoustic guitar, screaming and seeming to enjoy himself very much. The entire music video is consisted of nothing but Takahashi Yuu singing on some dangerously high place with strong wind blowing his hair and gloomy sky that carries a signal of imminent storm. It also has one more thing, white lyrics written with dry erasers casually on top of the video. Oh well, this is some seriously untypical piece of work.
What makes it funnier is that the A-side song, Fuku Warai, does the exact, same thing. So really at the first glance you look very much stupid for buying a single with two music videos made in exactly the same fashion. I guess that’s also a proof of the bad economy in Japan, but seriously, there’s of course a purpose behind this simplistic and outright design. Without fancy special effects, catchy scenarios and eye-popping colors and choreography, these music videos set up a forthright stage to deliver to you the core message of this song: the lyrics. It’s indisputable that Takahashi Yuu really wants you to read the lyrics, after all he wrote them all over the video and minimized his own distractions by standing and rocking himself out in the cloudy background. I find this rather artistically impressive. Finally a video that puts an emphasis on the very basic backbone of this pop song: soundtrack and lyrics.
One last thing I can’t emphasize more is his lyrics. They reflect what he looks and does: very honest and straightforward. Especially seen in that long titled song “Genjitsu to Iu na Kaibutsu to Tatakau Mono Tachi,” with proper translation or Japanese comprehension, you just get it. You simply understand his message like reading a narrative novel. That’s definitely a good thing for a song about fighting reality. We are exhausted of battling the harsh reality, so no more philosophizing and contemplation in a song that aggregates all of our bitter and sour feelings.
There isn’t much more for me to say here, lastly I want to wrap up this short review by linking this “Live Digest” video of Takahashi Yuu performing on stage while being live-streamed on the Internet and receiving real-time comments. What a creative way to communicate with fans; indeed he’s the star of the common.
