Selling Spring by Yorushika: To sell your life
Album cover for “Plagiarism” by Yorushika
May 11, 2021
Don’t you think it’s sad? It’s more silly than real prostitution. To stay alive, we throw away our pride, choose themes to appeal to the masses, and put together pop melodies. Create beautifully verbalized and easy-to-understand works. In this way, I sell myself to you in the form of music. I call it selling spring.
— N-buna
It’s hard to say if anything in the music world is “original” and “creative” or not. Melodies and phrases in instrumentals have been created, reshaped, reworked and sent out to the masses. Lyrics have been arranged to fit the tastes of those who listen, with meaningless, repeated themes having no relation to the songwriters.
Japanese rock duo Yorushika with N-buna as the songwriter and musician and Suis as the vocalist created a song called Haru Hisagi (Selling Spring) as part of his album “Plagiarism.” The album follows the story of a man who “steals sounds.” It analyzes the position of being a musician trying to succeed in a world where music’s worth is predominantly in the hands of the listeners.
Haru Hisagi is jargon in Japanese for prostitution. In the song’s description, n-buna mentions how the title “functions here as a metaphor for ‘music being sold like products.’” Music’s beauty comes from the expression, emotion and story it brings, yet now it’s another consumer good to be sold to an audience that always wants more.
Throughout the song, the protagonist addresses those subjects. He realizes “no matter how much you throw up” the “words will never be enough.” While he wants to write songs about “love without the sad things,” people only desire to hear more of the “meaningless things” he wishes to forget.
The songs he wants to create something meaningful to himself, yet what he creates has to succeed for him to live. Even if he “can’t listen to meaningless things only,” to fulfill his desire “to be loved” by the masses, he complies to the system and sells his meaningless music, formatted to the same structure as any other pop song.
The album “Plagiarism” contains various other following the protagonist’s story, such as Thoughtcrime and the main feature song, Plagiarism, following how he stole “sound” and what his life became like because of these actions. Prior to this album, the duo released an album called “Elma,” following a struggling musician Amy and his friend, Elma, their relationship to music and what occurred to Amy because of it.
Though Yorushika is a Japanese rock group, the power of their songs are not constrained by language. Though translations can not always capture a song’s depth, the instrumentals, the videos produced for it and the vocals express what can not be translated.
