Southern All Stars -- Ai no Kotodama ~ Spiritual Message（愛の言霊）

Woof! Haven't heard this one by Southern All Stars（サザンオールスターズ）in a good long time.

Back in high school, I had a middle-aged, very eccentric and fairly tragic fellow as an English teacher about whom I, along with a number of my classmates, felt that he possessed a certain genius within him but somehow it was overlaid by a lot of madness as well, and not in the congenial Doctor Who way. In one of his relatively few lucid moments, he often referred to the tribal experience where people would come together and share in something truly celebratory (kinda like the Raptors' victory celebration back on Monday). Although I wasn't in that particular class, I was once told by a school friend who had been in that lesson that the teacher once had all thirty kids stand up and do a famous march based on something by Shakespeare. My friend mentioned that was probably one of those tribal experiences that our teacher had been talking about.

Anyways, commenter Fireminer had asked about this 37th single by Southern All Stars from May 1996, "Ai no Kotodama ~ Spiritual Message". As I noted above, it's a song that I haven't heard in many years and once my ears heard it once more, I realized that it did have its 15 minutes of fame in karaoke boxes and TV shows. Listening to vocalist Keisuke Kuwata（桑田佳祐）strut and twist through the lyrics like an Olympic ski slalom master, my old teacher's concept of tribal experiences came to the fore again.

Fireminer asked about the meaning of the lyrics by Kuwata, and apparently so have a number of people online via Reddit and other sites. I myself have taken a look at those lyrics and I'm still mystified. There are fanciful expressions and references to lyric poetry, stories of blue stars, summer melodies and even the abode of the Hindu god of death, Yama. What does it all mean?

Well, after looking at those lyrics and then reading through the J-Wiki article on "Ai no Kotodama" which means "Love's Power of Language", I theorize that it was just Kuwata throwing in all of these mystical concepts and patching them together into a musical quilt. And into that quilt, he added embellishments such as playing around with the delivery of those words; when I first heard the song in the 90s, I had assumed that there was some French in there but actually it's mostly Japanese with some English contributed by tarento/host Katsuya Kobayashi（小林克也）and Indonesian rap by music scholar and gamelan performer Hideharu Umeda（梅田英春）. Kuwata's melody even includes a bit of a jazz riff (including something Miles Davis-ish at the beginning).

"Ai no Kotodama" hit No. 1 and went Triple Platinum, ending up as the 7th-ranked single for 1996. It was also a track on Southern All Stars' 12th album from July of that year, "Young Love" which also hit the top spot and the 7th spot on the yearly rankings. In fact, the album is currently the 41st-ranked entry in Oricon's all-time album charts with sales of 2 million.

All in all, I think it's Southern All Stars putting out another cool hit song but also this time, the band is having a tribal (and fun) experience with the wonderful world of the languages. The lyrics aren't there to convey a certain story but just to provide the equivalent of a linguistic playground for the kids of SAS. So, on that basis, it's probably no wonder that I was having trouble translating the song. Let the words flow through and around you, and just enjoy the sounds of the music and words. However, if any of you intrepid translators have been able to translate the entire song, let me know what you think about it.