Trying to analyze "No title" by Reol

It’s no secret that I love Japanese music. My collection is pretty damn large and I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a lot of good stuff in there but some songs just stand out because they’re a cut above the rest. One of these songs is No title, written and sung by Reol and produced by GigaP, with a nice music video directed by Okiku. Feel free to listen to it before reading the rest of this blog entry.

The entire thing is pretty damn solid! It has a catchy melody, an MV that compliments it well and Reol’s absolutely fantastic vocals (though, you can also hear Giga and I think even Okiku sing in the background in some parts). The lyrics she’s singing though are… quite mysterious. I feel like there’s a lot of things one could interpret into them. Here’s a translation by meido-trn on Tumblr. And another one by Tackmyn Y. The song sounds pretty upbeat, but I feel like the lyrics might be about something kind of sad, which certainly wouldn’t surprise me, because the list of Japanese songs that are like that is long enough to be wrapped around the earth’s equator. Twice.

My interpretation

I think we’ve all been there: We’ve all had to interpret poems/stories/songs/etc in school and it was always a horrible experience. (For sane people, anyway.) But when you’re free from the constraints that imposes, interpreting stuff like this can actually be kinda fun. By the by, in the case that literally everything I said before wasn’t enough of an indicator: I am a massive nerd.

This interpretation is pretty loosely tied to the lyrics, since quite a few parts have me really confused. There’s also several translations of the lyrics, but for this, I decided to take some parts of Tackmyn Y.’s translation and some from meido-trn’s, since they make more or less sense than the other in some places. Also, this is just my interpretation. You may find yourself disagreeing with parts (or maybe even all) of what I’m about to say.

The first few parts of the lyrics up until the chorus kinda confuse the hell out of me. Extrapolating from the little bits I can understand, the “protagonist” in this song seems to have been trying to run away from some kind of pain, stating that they’ve become used to it and their fast breathing as they’re running.

The chorus seems to be about the speaker and someone close/important to them growing distant, seemingly as a result of how different they’ve become over time.

After the chorus, the speaker begins to tell us more about this person and describe their relationship. We find out that the two have apparently been inseperable childhood friends, with the speaker going as far as saying that this person was “like the air” to them: As we all know, the air is around us at all times, and it’s kinda essential for us to live. This might just be an exaggeration, but as we’ll come to see very soon, it also might not be, because now the speaker then goes on about how they tightly held that person’s hand, telling them about everything, be it happy or sad. The important part comes now - the speaker recalls how their friend sang to them to drown out other people’s insulting voices, perhaps referring to bullying. Remember that part that went over how this childhood friend was “like air” to the speaker? Think about all that being a victim of bullying brings with it. This insinuates that maybe, this person really was needed for the speaker to keep on living.

Then, before the chorus kicks in once again, it gets a bit more hopeful: The speaker seems to be trying to reach out to their friend, who claims to be expendable. Now, the speaker claims they’ve managed to connect with their old friend once more for just a small moment and wants to help them the same way they have been helped all those years ago - by singing a song to them.

Nearing the end now, the speaker laments how they haven’t been able to reach their friend and seem to have given up on the possibility of getting through to them. They proclaim that they’re only one of a million that their friend has allegedly saved, “with neither voice nor body”. I’m unsure what “with neither voice nor body” is supposed to convey, but if it’s meant literally, then this would mean that everything I’ve said before would be wrong and this isn’t about a childhood friend, but instead about another song or artist. Finally, before the last chorus and the end of the song, the speaker talks about “red and blue” mixing and the world overflowing with them. Then, they describe that they (the speaker) are spinning round and round before “we” meet. The last line before the chorus is “If you listen to the sounds, they all go ’ ’”. Yes, that’s really supposed to be an empty quote. I’m not sure what to make of this either, the two possibilities I’m thinking of are that either the speaker or their friend died (which is unlikely, as they couldn’t have met then) or that maybe all communication between the two stopped completely, with nothing but silence between them.

Conclusion

I’m not sure what to think. This song has had me thinking for probably months now, and I still haven’t really figured it out. I pray that there’s some kind of miracle and that there will be an official answer telling me what this song is about, but that day will probably never come.

Before I finish writing this post however, (because I have literally been doing this for over 8 hours,)

I’ll quickly mention some things I noticed while writing this:

• The full list of meido_trn’s translations on Tumblr has “Suicidal implications, death” shown as warnings for No title.
• Meido’s post announcing No Title’s translation has this interesting bit in it:

  “To my beloved,” writes Reol.

Maybe the protagonist in the song is supposed to represent Reol? I don’t know.