Turn on CC (Closed Captioning) for the english translation!!!
This is the 5th song in my translated japanese song series, Missing by Kubota Toshinobu (久保田利伸) which came out in the year 1986. I’m not entirely sure how I got to picking this song, but I got to it somehow while listening to youtube’s autoplay. I ended up deciding to translate this song simply because I really liked the melody.
It turns out that Missing is categorized as an R&B song. You’re probably completely unconvinced about since my ukulele rendition doesn’t really fall under the style. But, here’s what the original song sounded like if you want to be slightly more convinced.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to R&B. Living in the Bronx may have influenced this part of me. I remember being in a very particular school bus in either fifth or sixth grade, the bus driver always had Pussycat Dollz, Ne-Yo, and Usher playing on the radio.
You know when you know the feeling of a certain genre of music? I feel like I know what counts as R&B but never really had a formal definition. I looked on Youtube for videos that might break it down for me, but was pretty disappointed. So I turned to Wikipedia.
“Contemporary R&B, also known as simply R&B, is a music genre that combines elements of rhythm and blues, soul, funk, pop, hip hop and dance.
The genre features a distinctive record production style, drum machine-backed rhythms, an occasional saxophone-laced beat to give a jazz feel (mostly common in contemporary R&B songs prior to the year 1995) and a smooth, lush style of vocal arrangement.”
Yeah...I don’t know about you but I feel like this is a pretty vague definition that doesn’t really do anything for me. So I thought about what made something feel R&B to me:
- It’s smooth sounding, the lyrics and phrases roll into each other, and words often linger
- It has a relaxed beat in the background, and sometimes has some syncopation elements
- There are single word runs in the song
Some artists that I would consider as R&B artists are Mariah Carey, Usher, Rihanna, and Frank Ocean.
And here are a few songs that I personally really like:
We belong together - Mariah Carey
Thinking ‘bout you - Frank Ocean
My Boo - Usher and Alicia Keys
So my question now is, does Missing count as a R&B song? Most of my encounters with Japanese music fall under J-pop, J-rock, and Enka. The idea that Japan went has it’s own R&B/hiphop era was not something that I really considered. Here’s the video of Toshinobu Kubota singing Missing if you didn’t click it the first time I linked it.
It has the same smooth quality that other R&B music has, and definitely has a relaxed background beat. It has a distinctly chimey sound, woodblocky sound, which is something I’m not used to in the R&B music of today.
To give it a benefit of a doubt, I looked up the music charts for U.S. R&B in 1986 (same year that Missing came out), and the top song was “Don’t say no Tonight” by Eugene Wilde:
Lo and behold, it fits my R&B checklist, but also has chimes and woodblocky sounds in the background. This makes me pretty confident that this is just what R&B sounded in the ‘80s, and the similarity between the two songs stylistically is almost uncanny. Seems like R&B music in Japan was pretty synchronized with the trends in the U.S.
I did some more digging around Missing, and it turns out that Boyz II Men (an R&B group based in Philadelphia) actually made an english cover of the song… I was party wondering if they would cover it in Japanese but that sounded pretty absurd (despite the fact that a lot of asian artist cover English songs in English)
AAAAAAAnd it’s in English.
They got rid of the chimes and the woodblocky sounds, which instantly sends it to this millennium. But listen to the lyrics. The English lyrics are basically the original Japanese lyrics translated. The translator/song writer makes some discretions, but for the most part they keep the same motif. The thing is that the English version of the song, if you listen to the lyrics, is kinda bad, flows poorly, and evokes chuckles.
Their Cover:
Though the feelings of lust I've felt, they seem to come and go
I hear sounds that realize the pain, bittersweet melodies
Colored by the tones of love, the sky provides to us
Everlasting signs of faith, more than words can say
|
My Translation:
I’ve had a lot of puppy love before,
But it’s the first time that it’s hurt so much,
And as the setting sun dyed the sky pink,
I saw the dream that we talked about for forever.
|
One thing that I’ve talked about in my Johnny the Surfer blog is how in Japanese, sentences are frequently flipped. Partly because Japanese sentences are formed Subject-Noun-Verb, and partly because flipping sentences is just more normal in Japanese. You can see remnants of this flipped sentence structure all throughout the lyrics:
“I hear sounds that realize the pain, bittersweet melodies”
vs.
“I hear bittersweet melodies that realise the pain”
The English lyrics are really awkward, and maybe overly poetic. Japanese music in general just tends to love metaphors more than their American counterparts.
I’m not saying that my translation is any better than what they did, but I think this goes to show that it’s difficult to translate a song from one language to another. That well done localization of music (like in Disney movies) requires thoughtfulness, and an understanding of both cultures.
No comments:
Post a Comment