Translation: Ongaku (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

A few years back, I found out that Caleb Mulkerin of Big Blood, my favorite band on earth, adored the Meat Puppets growing up. The Puppets wrote the three songs on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged that I've always liked best. The Goo Goo Dolls' A Boy Named Goo and Nirvana's Unplugged were the first two CDs I owned, age ten or eleven; I clearly remember how it felt to get them, that terrific Christmas Eve. Learning that Caleb loved the Puppets was a great moment too, one in which the distance between the ten-year-old and the thirty-year-old seemed suddenly to collapse in on itself.

As was I falling hard for the magnificent Peter Stampfel, there came a day when, for no particular reason, I pulled Tad Williams' Stone of Farewell off the shelf and, flipping through it, read the acknowledgments page. Peter Stampfel's name appeared in a list of people Tad felt he could count on if he ever needed protection from Norns. Flabbergasted, I did some googling and discovered that it was Stampfel who rescued the manuscript of Tailchaser's Song, Tad's debut novel, from DAW's slush pile. So the fantasy writer that my older brother had loved and gotten me into when I was eight or nine, and whom I read obsessively for years, and the underground musician who the twenty-nine-year old me was listening to obsessively, were old friends. 

What's more, John Cohen, the model for the title character in the Grateful Dead song Uncle John's Band (which was the song that finally broke down the defenses I'd built up against them as a preteen; the Dead had become my brother's favorite band, as eventually they would become mine too; he played them around the house all the time and I was intrigued, but also resisting, because I felt my brother had betrayed Pink Floyd, our old joint favorite) became a bandmate of Peter Stampfel's in the mid-to-late oughties somewhere, and together they recorded one of my favorite Stampfel albums, The Sound of America. "Come hear Uncle John's band," the Dead song enjoins.  I was listening to the Stampfel/Cohen every day.

As for this song, Ongaku (Music), comments on the premier Chinese streaming app note that Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote it for his daughter, Miu. I was looking up how old she would have been, and incidentally learned that she had grown up to become a voice actress, and that she voiced Kanzaki Hitomi, the main character in The Vision of Escaflowne, a classic anime series my brother and I had adored. Go figure, right? Twelve years old, thirty-four years old, what does the difference amount to, really? Apparently the heart has a steady center and the world is all connected, "past" and "future" both just myths.

The page for Naughty Boys on Discogs, which isn't typically the place I'd go looking for impassioned and insightful analysis, has an amazing comment section. Two quotes:

"Worth it for Ongaku alone. Absolutely brilliant track that perfectly captures a mid-80s Tokyo street scene. Brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it."

And:

"Another area where the album really shines is in the vocals. The thing about YMO is that not one of them has the greatest voice in a traditional pop music sense. Each of their voices has its own peculiarities, but here they're singing to their fullest potential anyway, straight from the heart. During the second verse of Ongaku we hear each of them taking a line of their own before joining together again in unison. The result is one of the more endearing moments in recorded music."

In short, we might call Ongaku the Yellow Magic Orchestra equivalent of The Beatles' Because. Or rather — it's their The End! — except with vocal lines taking the place of the electric guitar solos.

The last line of the second verse is beautifully succinct in Japanese, literally: "you — train, goto-goto" the last word being onomatopoeia for the sound a train makes as its moves. Context suggests that the reference is to a toy train that Miu is playing with, but trying to put "toy train" into the English version ruined the magic.

Miu was two or three when Ryuichi wrote this for her. My daughter Vanya will soon be two and a quarter. Musically the song is way beyond my capabilities — this is Ryuichi Sakamoto we're talking about here! — but lyrically, in heart and sentiment and to an extent also in style, it could might as well be mine.

.

I spread our atlas open: hey, that's music.

You climb onto the piano: hey, that's music.

Can't wait 'til we can sing together!

I spread our atlas open: hey, that's music.

You climb onto the piano: hey, that's music.

I nibble on an apple: hey, that's music.

And you rattle the train: hey, that's music.

Can't wait 'til we can sing together!

Can't wait 'til we can dance together!