In the darkness floated
A rusted sigh of relief
And your lingering scent ingrained in the wall—
I’ll smash it to smithereens ¹
The time that waits for morning—
We define as ‘night’
Did you get imprisoned? What an outrage.
Be suspicious of the rules
Break into a dance
Come on, sway, sway, in a silly way ²
Give your heart, blooming out of season, to the future— ³
Yeah, unfasten that screw
The dead of night is when a spirit lodged ⁴
In the pitiful ball-jointed being that you are ⁵
Your brain puts out a sneer again ⁶
Break into a dance
Come on, sway, sway, in a silly way
Give your heart, blooming out of season, to the future— ³
If you play, it’s the trigger ⁷
I don’t expect you to mind ⁸
I know I’ve said it before
In an inhuman world, blood is going to flow around
Receive the electric signal with your brain stem
And let’s dream up a fantasy taken flight
Break into a dance
Come on, sway, sway, in a silly way
Give your heart, blooming out of season, to the future— ³
Your brain puts out a sneer again, so
Come on, sway, sway, in a silly way
Cinderella, blooming out of season ⁹
Stay pure
Yeah, goodnight
.
NOTES / INTERPRETATION:
Blue font indicates text originally written in English in the official booklet.
oo1. Let me set the scene for you. The speaker expected to resolve something with Cinderella (the scent on the wall, along with the tone of the music lends a possibly sexual undertone to this), but Cinderella left, and the speaker is left frustrated, possibly alone—that wall (both physical and metaphorical) has got to go. A ‘rusted’ sigh of relief is one that would either get stuck in one’s throat, or come out at great difficulty.
oo2. As silly as it is, I deliberated a lot over which word to use here, because the word in Japanese can be used in a negative sense or a positive sense. Given the way the chorus is written, though, I think ‘positive’ would be the only conclusion to draw. Still, I went with ‘silly’ here instead of something like ‘funny’ or ‘comical’, because it still has a connotation of ‘absurd’ without being as harsh as the word ‘ridiculous’ can be. And in English at least, calling someone ‘silly’ has an endearing feel to it, can even imply naïveté.
oo3. Wait… what? Where did Cinderella run off to? Is what you might be asking yourself if you’ve read the lyrics booklet beforehand. Because in the booklet, what is written for this line is Cinderella, blooming out of season. But that is not what Show actually sings. To the best of my knowledge, what he actually sings for these lines is 心に未来を (shin ni mirai o) which would be Give your heart to the future, in the sense of moving forward, or keeping hope alive. I have no way of confirming whether what I’ve heard is the true line that is being sung, but I can say that if you compare those lines to the final ‘Cinderella’ line, in which he actually sings it as written in the booklet, the contrast is very noticeable. He enunciates very clearly in that last line. Tricky, tricky…
oo4. In this line, the ‘dead of night’ is how I chose to translate the word, but it’s actually far more precise in meaning than that. ‘Ushimitsudoki’ pops up as ‘midnight’ in JP-EN dictionaries, and that’s even less correct! The real time of day this word refers to is… between 2:00AM and 2:30AM. Sound familiar? If not, you should go take a peek at the lyrics of RAINBOWS to refresh your memory (“2:00AM revolution“). If such a nod to RAINBOWS seems unlikely, then just keep in mind the fact that the demo for Neophilia was actually composed around the same time that RAINBOWS was!
oo5. Technically, Show just wrote ‘ball-jointed’ here, but as it is virtually impossible to word it alone like that in English and keep the rest of the sentence from falling apart, I added ‘being’ to the phrase. Normally, the term he used is associated with dolls, but as he didn’t actually add the word ‘doll’ in there, I assume he wanted to really emphasize the ‘ball-jointedness’ of the person instead. Now, ball-jointedness being pitiful might refer to having the ability to bend oneself in all sorts of ways and being able to maintain poses, even if it might not be pleasant, or what the person wants to do. It might be the idea of going along with things because you physically or mentally can, and because you don’t want to rock the boat, rather than because you truly want to do them.
Now if we take that meaning with the line just before it, I would interpret the two as, the person being referred to, who in the light of day would bend over backwards for others, would grow a spine in the dead of night and assert themselves.
Even so, it’s not painting a particularly nice picture, especially with the line that follows…
oo6. This, and the first line of the chorus that immediately follows, are possibly the whole crux of the song. In English (unfortunately), they don’t seem all that similar, but in Japanese, they are both compound verbs, and they both share the same ‘secondary’ verb, ‘dasu’. This sets up a contrast. In this line, the brain ‘puts out’ a sneer (‘warai dasu‘), and in the following line, the speaker is encouraging the other person’s body to ‘break into’ a dance (‘odori dasu‘). The contrast is even clearer in the final chorus, where the other person’s sneer prompts an immediate repetition of the speaker imploring them to dance.
In essence, dancing is presented as the solution to getting rid of the sneering, condescending impulse that the other person apparently has. I think of it as deprogramming their cynicism through dance—Stop thinking, just act.
Get out of your brain, and into your body!
oo7. As is often the case in his lyrics, ‘play’ here refers specifically to the playing of an instrument. But I’m sure you’ve gotten the picture by now that nothing is quite that simple, so let’s take this further. The same Japanese verb for ‘play’, written the same way, is also used in the verb phrase ‘to pull the trigger’. This doesn’t change anything about the translation, it’s just a great pun, given that ‘trigger’ is right after it.
So, to take this one with the previous line, playing an instrument is the trigger to giving one’s heart to the future. On the other hand, if you read the ‘Cinderella’ line from the booklet, then the two lines together just sound like a non-sequitur. Ha!
oo8. In this context, the line probably means that the speaker doesn’t expect the other person to care about or listen to what they’re about to say—the speaker instead expects their advice to be ignored (as usual).
oo9. Let’s end this whirlwind on the notion of blooming out of season. What exactly does it entail? Generally, getting a flower to bloom out of season requires a huge amount of effort and planning to trick the plant into flowering at a time of the year when it normally wouldn’t. For instance, freezing perennial bulbs during the hot months so that they’ll be ready to be planted and bloom indoors during the cold months (normally, their lifecycle would be the exact opposite). The Japanese verb is a combination of ‘confused’ and ‘bloom’, so it carries a negative, or at the very least chaotic, disordered connotation; a closely related verb is ‘to go crazy’. So, despite how romantic it might sound with the word ‘bloom’ in there, the term is quite negative. You can think of our Cinderella (or the heart in previous chorus lines) as being confused, out of sorts, or just being off somehow through no fault of their own. Because, again, flowers don’t just bloom out of season willy-nilly. It often takes human intervention, or a really exceptional situation to cause it. In essence, a plant blooming out of season is being made to perform (flower) on an unnatural schedule. Like Cinderella, we could imagine, put into a beautiful gown for a night, and then forced to flee and hide before anyone can recognize her for who she really is (I would suggest The Brothers’ Grimm version of the story if you are interested in reading the fairy tale).
Finally, the title ‘Neophilia’ itself is a bit of a mystery, as there is no direct connection to that name or the notion behind it within the song. Neophilia is the desire for novelty; a neophiliac is someone who can’t bear sameness, and who constantly desires new experiences. I think we can tentatively imagine that in this case, the Cinderella might be a neophiliac, who has been imprisoned by sameness and their inability to rock the boat by protesting. By contrast, breaking into a dance is shaking off that sameness and giving in to neophilia. Or it could refer to something completely different!
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アリス九號. ★ Neophilia → PLANET NINE (将・2018)
ALICE NINE. – Neophilia | From PLANET NINE (Show – 2018)
Original text translated from Japanese.
Listen on itunes/Spotify.