https://www..com/watch?v=hc0ZDaAZQT0 How the hell do you review a music video? Even as someone who really loves animated music videos it seems impossible and before I saw the MV accompanying Shinsei Kamattechans Rurus Suicide Show On a Livestream Id have had no motivation to try. Yet like many commentators on the arts I have a weakness for taking wild swings at the zeitgeist. Sometimes even if only for yourself you come across a singular piece of art that seems to just click things into place. Seems to get it in a way that most do not. The Rurus Suicide Show MV premiered all the way back in early January just eight days into what would become what is unquestionably the darkest year for the worldatlarge that I have ever lived through. 2020 finally winds down in just over a month as Im penning this and I think I can safely say that somehow no other anime anything this year captured the unique mixture of toxic spiraling misery delirious denialistic euphoria and the tragic endpoint of both quite like this song and this video. 880https://i.ur.com/0u8LEU3.png All of this I must imagine is very much accidental. Perhaps its unique to me even and given that the video with its scant runtime of just four minutes sits atop this article perhaps youve watched the whole thing and are feeling very confused as to what Im on about. But as I write this the video sits at over fourteen million views far more than any other music video ever associated with a Shinsei Kamattechan song. It makes sense the band are immensely talented and wildly creative but theyre definitely niche despite being signed to a major label Warner Japan via their Unbonde sublabel. Lead vocalist Noko is an acquired taste Im not even sure if thats them on Rurus Suicide Show. It doesnt entirely sound like them but their voice is very flexible so who knows. and the band in general are no ones idea of a shinypolished pop group. Rurus Suicide Show itself is the kind of song whose utility is difficult to put into words. It is based albeit only loosely on a very real tragedy involving a young girl named Roro that occurred some seven years ago which can make it seem odd possibly even exploitative to the uninitiated. More broadly it taps into a long lineage of Japanese rock that Im frankly a little unqualified to explore indepth. And its beyond the scope of this article anyway. On a surface level it isnt hard to understand why a song about suicide would resonate in a particularly bleak year for the world but I think dissecting our opening question of why specifically this requires digging a bit deeper than that. 880https://i.ur.com/EFEj71U.png Songs that are simply sad are one thing Rurus Suicide Shows trick such as it is is relatively simple. Despite its bleak subject matter it is sonically upbeat. However most songs like this rely on simple lyrical dissonance the classic example over here in the US being OutKasts Hey Ya which itself is merely about heartbreak. Rurus Suicide Show goes well beyond that. Its relentlessly upbeat sound is pushed into the proverbial red becoming first disquieting then almost a kind of confrontational and finally cathartic. Rurus Suicide Show is not a song for people who need a pickmeup it is a song one listens to so that they know that they arent the only person in the world whos ever suffered like this. And whether or not Rurus Suicide Show is the sort of music that resonates with you can be correlated pretty well to whether you know what I mean when I say like this. It is a song for a very specific sort of person. That a major labeleven an indiefocused subsidiary of onewould bankroll a video for this thing is nothing short of astounding. 880https://i.ur.com/6IwzKSj.png And yet there it sits. Fourteen million views and counting throughout the course of just one calendar year. Some of that popularity like with many things nowadays can be thanked to / blamed on TikTok where the song caught on as something of a minor meme of all things. But while that might account for an initial spike in popularity it does not account for its continued success. And indeed if one visits the videos comments section it is mostly people fairly young ones is my impression defending the song the video the late Roro herself and so on from being appropriated as a fad / fandom / meme / whatever term you care to use. These users to whom the song clearly means as much as it does to me demand that it and its subject be treated with respect. I think some of this broad resonance may have to do with the elephant in the room. The music video itself and how it welds to the song. Enhancing as it does every line with surreal dire imagery that expertly conveys internal crisis through symbolic destruction of the outside world. And sadly the very literal destruction of the self. 880https://i.ur.com/gpMovst.png Music videos like other shortform projects can be some of the purest animation imaginable unbound by conventional narrative. Some months ago I compared Eureka Seven to a collage of images but thats often literally all music videos can afford to be given their limited runtime. Its no surprise then that Rurus Suicide Show is on the more surreal end as far as such things go. One can map out the broad story of the main character but the real resonance lies in the details. 880https://i.ur.com/EpZv29e.jpg To state the obvious the Rurus Suicide Show music video is gorgeous. Director Rabbit MACHINE has built up a body of music video and commercial work over the past decade or so but its hard to imagine any of it could top this. Theres a particularly unnerving edge to the editing in this video. I imagine its an attempt to underscore the sharp distinction between the main characters flights of fancyoften rendered in an even more cartoonish art style and depicting such feats as her miraculously ducking under and dodging a trainand the darker side of her psyche including the suicidal ideation itself. To me the grimmest shot in the entire short is a firstperson aside where the camera is tossed into the path of a speeding train presumably the Chu Line mentioned in the lyrics. 880https://i.ur.com/PQ1dN4E.png Elsewhere our protagonist laughs lugs her stuffed rabbit around an unfriendly city stands alone in a classroom at one point in front of chalk drawings of butterfly wings and at another as the world outside explodes is lost among a forest of nooses envisions a rose blooming from her corpse poses atop an ocean of what else? power lines and pictures herself crawling into a coffin. She speaks of being bullied of building a gravestone for herself oncamera. Finally she laughs again as she jumps. Despite many of the details matching to the real tragedy alluded to in the songs title I dont believe most of this is intended to be literal. Even the bleakest moments of the video are defined by a bright art style that does not lend itself to such interpretations. Our protagonist seems cast less as specifically Roro and more as an amalgamation of all whove taken their own life because they could see no other way out and were spurned there by the uncaring masses of the world. She wants to stop hurting she wants to stop being lonely she wants people to look at her. All of this is driven to its horrible endpoint. Her lookdownright stylish if were being honestmight seem at odds with the core theme of the song and the video but the same dynamic present between the music and the lyrics is repeated here. Her blonde hair the pink smartphone taped to her face the black lightning bolt hairclip providing a visual metaphor for the term denpa all of it is intended to push past merely cute into a funhouse mirror reflection of getting lost in your own head. If youre the sort who demands evidence of a mask slip there is a literal one in the video though only for the briefest moment. 880https://i.ur.com/8Vvog2s.png We are clearly intended to both sympathize and empathize with the protagonist but what happens to her is tragic and here we have to return to the song itself again and more generally to Shinsei Kamattechan as musicians. I am admittedly a neophyte when it comes to the bands discography but I can tell and have been told as much secondhand that much of their work deals with alienation and a feeling of not belonging. Be that to some specific part of society or simply the world in general. It is an uncomfortable feeling and one far more people have than I think many others may realize. It is no wonder so many of us want to be witches that talk to kittens or aliens riding in a UFO. It is no wonder then again that so many of us come to eventually halfbelieve we really are. Checking each other keeping each other in good spirits but away from the brink is arguably the duty of those of us afflicted by mental illness. Because the consequences of dealing with this alienation alone or with the toxic fakehelp of bad actors can be as Rurus Suicide Show illustrates tragic. 880https://i.ur.com/HSXUSMn.png So the real power of Rurus Suicide Show is in melancholic solidarity. You are not alone but giving in to this feeling will not end well. Its also a plea for understanding some of the lines spoken by the protagonist in the chorus could just as easily be said from a child to their parent the sosimpleitsdevastating Mama please listen this isnt a phase foremost among them. In this strength we find that Rurus Suicide Show is in a peculiar way a sort of twoway elegy. On the one hand it is a memorial to the titular Roro and many others like her. On the other it is a prayer from those who did not make it for those who are still alive. In my heart I am a worrywort. Any time I listen to this song I think about those people in the videos comments many of them obviously kids and I hope that theyre okay. Its nave but my hope is that by writing this I am somehow doing some small portion of my part in the duty outlined above. To you my limited audience I simply want to reassure you if you are reading this you are still alive. For those who arent the most we can do is to remember and to eulogize. Take care of yourself. Notes Disclaimers Usage of Anilists review feature does not constitute endorsement for Anilist as a platform the Anilist community or any individual member thereof or any of Anilists policies or rules. All views expressed are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons groups or organizations. All text is owned by me. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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