Akina Nakamori singles ranked by how much despair is hidden inside them
Almost any pop song worth listening to has a moment of pure, untouched desperation that slips through the otherwise upbeat manufactured happiness. A second where the mask of contentment slips and reveals how exhausting and crushing it is to live in the modern era, how life under capitalism is a burden on our souls that we all are forced to carry with us at all times, one that we can't even be free of for the three and a half minutes the average pop song lasts without cracking.
With that out of the way, here is a ranking of Akina singles that evoke that feeling in me, ranked by how deep of a spiral they're capable of sending me into. Single selection limited to a handful of her most popular 80s singles as I just don't have the time to tackle the entirety of her discography.
10. I Missed "the Shock"
"Being beautiful, being tender, is not being empty"
I Missed "the shock" is a great song in many aspects. It's an almost perfect encapsulation of what it feels like to have love pass you by without noticing because you're growing apart from someone so slowly that by the time you realize what's going on, it's too late to intervene. The title reinforces that by putting "the shock" in quotation marks. "Love is leaving me behind. Shock!" is clearly sarcastic, because an actual shock implies that you feel like you're an active participant in your life, not that you're watching it pass you by slowly without being able to intervene.
With that said, this song doesn't really send you down a depression spiral at 2am while you're considering dropping out of school for the seventeenth time that week because it doesn't have any high points. To bring you down a song needs to only have a moment of sorrow, because otherwise there's just no effect. If a song is just sad, then you're probably listening to it on purpose, because if you weren't sad already you would've just skipped it.
9. Nanpasen
"I'm lonely, I have nobody, I'm the shipwrecking of
love"
Nanpasen is a beautiful gorgeous song that I absolutely
never listen to because it's just too damn bleak. It's the type of song where
not even the language barrier stops me from just weeping whenever I sit down
and let myself take in the lyrics. She's practically crying in every
performance, but she's such a professional that it doesn't affect her vocals at
all which just goes to show how much of a queen she is. Still, it's just
regular sadness and as I said before I always skip this song. Honestly, I'm not
sure I have it downloaded.
Nanpasen is a beautiful gorgeous song that I absolutely
never listen to because it's just too damn bleak. It's the type of song where
not even the language barrier stops me from just weeping whenever I sit down
and let myself take in the lyrics. She's practically crying in every
performance, but she's such a professional that it doesn't affect her vocals at
all which just goes to show how much of a queen she is. Still, it's just
regular sadness and as I said before I always skip this song. Honestly, I'm not
sure I have it downloaded.8. La Liberte
"Only pain ripens when I meet you. A pair of deep eyes bewilder me, love travels to the tip of my pinky finger"
As I said the last time I wrote about this song it's "Aggressive, audibly angry, extremely passionate, yet somehow still underwhelming." But for a few moments during the chorus her voice cracks emotionally, not that it would ever actually crack. Short moments where you can feel her internally screaming for freedom to finally live, to fly and be the person she's wanted to be all her life but has decided to suppress for more realistic goals to the point where she almost can't remember who that person even is. I might be projecting, but isn't that the point of listening to music ? To hear multiple people's combined attempt at expressing an emotion that can't be verbalized and then interpret it for yourself ?7. Fin
"Hidden in the coat of my heart, I drink my tears and make a pistol with my hand"6. Solitude
Hidden in the coat of my heart
I drink my tears and make a pistol with my hand
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/fin-end.html6. Solitude
Forget what I said earlier about continously sad songs not having the same effect, I take it all back. Solitude is full of little moments of sorrow and misery, but no grand artistic metaphors to package them in. Instead it's about the isolation experienced when in perfectly ordinary places and situations. On the train, in hotels, with people you can't define as either lovers or strangers but desperately want to be part of your life. Being alone in a big city is a special type of torture and it's very well displayed here.
Twilight city, solitude
That's why, it's not a question of I love you, I hate you
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/solitude-solitude.html-65. Shojo A
"Not at all special, a girl next door, that's what I am―Girl A"
Shojo A is the type of song that doesn't need a translation because it's instantly understandable to the people it's directed towards. The subdued anger of being an insecure seventeen year old girl hopelessly struggling for others to recognize her as more is an emotion that doesn't need words to be communicated to others. It's the anger of not being treated like an individual, but like a replacable object with no inherent value, when you know that there's more to you even though you yourself are starting to lose faith that others will ever believe it. And maybe, you too are slowly starting to believe that others might be right about you after all.
4. Tattoo
"The city is a sweet drug, a paradise of hoaxes. Covered in loneliness, love is paranoia. Even tenderness is a poisoned jelly bean. Wake up!"
Tattoo is a religious experience. It's about an angry, raw love that I don't think can exist outside art because it's such a momentary, fleeting emotion. It's not about truly being in love with someone, it's a desperate plea to be loved deeply. In a world that's constantly changing and progressing to be more and more confusing and terrifying by the second, permanent and deep love is a craving that doesn't seem to ever be satisfied by ordinary relationships. Goes to show that love and anger are so close that if you're not sure of what you want they merge together very quickly. All emotions exist on a scale from weak to strong, and this song has all of them on the strongest setting possible.3. Blonde
"I want to be loved with glitter while I challenge the period, I want to dance embraced"After listening to blonde for the first time I felt like I had an epiphany. I'm not sure what it is exactly to this day but the feeling is there. So many songs about being desperate to be loved in a time where it feels like love is fiction, and this one might be the best. Blonde doesn't feel like she's asking to be loved, it feels like she's asking for anyone to make her feel something. Like there's a crushing emptiness in her heart that keeps getting heavier and heavier that she'd do anything to get rid of it. The type of pure despondency that makes you beg for any emotion, be it love or sadness just anything to feel like a human being instead of a mechanical clock that has no concept of sentience.
2. 飾りじゃないのよ涙は (kazari janai no yo namida wa)
"As new friends replaced old ones my mind got littered with memories, but I felt it was wrong to cry"
An entire song about crying is something I didn't even know I needed in my life. The song is constantly skirting the edge of self-awareness. The realization that searching for love is just a futile attempt to fill the hole created by not knowing oneself is so close yet so far. Instead it's struggling to convince the listener that this is a superficial conflict about love, and not a far deeper personal issue. Tears might not be decoration, but I shed an awful lot while projecting my own problems onto this song.1. Desire
"Yeah, everyone’s a fallen angel,
sweat flying instead of wings. What should I cling to? Lovers in an era where love’s nowhere to be see."
Despite my many attempts at learning Japanese over the years, and believe me, there's been plenty, I know very few words in the language. One of them being 淋しい. It's possibly the only one of them that has more than four strokes that I could actually write from memory. Depending on your dictionary of choice that one's pronounced either samishii or sabishii, and it means lonely. At the end of the first chorus of desire she practically screams it. With the exception of maybe five words, that was the only one I understood. And it resonated with me on a very personal level.
Desire is about love, but not of the romantic type. It's about a love for life, the desire to experience pure joy in everyday circumstances. It's about wanting to experience your wildest dreams and doing everything to get there. It's about wanting to be truly unabashedly happy with where you are in life. I want that too. And I hope that one day I can live it.
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