hi! i think you're doing a great job at translating all these lyrics and posting updates about the band so thank you so much for that!! however, i've been racking my brain over the meaning of 五月の蝿 because let's be honest, the lyrics are pretty brutal and shocking. so i was thinking if there's something that's not coming across in the translation or if you had any idea what the song is about? bc if it's about raping a girl (that's all i've come up with) then idk how to feel about the band
Hello!
Honestly, it amazes me that this keeps coming up. It shows me that almost no one outside Japan is actually listening to the song, reading the words, listening to Noda himself in interviews, etc. It shows me they heard a misinformed thing from someone else and ran with it. Let me start off by saying I’m sorry in advance if this answer comes off snarky or bitchy or something. It’s just that I get asked this a lot. Let me also say that there are a lot of (non-Japanese speaking) fans who only know RAD from one or three or five songs and think that all they write are sweet, agonizingly heartfelt love songs. That is SUPER SUPER not the case now nor ever has been with them.
Now about this song in particular. No, it’s not about raping a girl. What it says essentially is, “if you were raped I wouldn’t show any pity to you, that’s how much I hate you now.”
That’s not a nice emotion, in any context. However, it is a very human one. This song is written from the point of view of a person who was seriously wronged by his lover/girlfriend/wife/etc. A lot of people can relate to it and a lot can’t.
Let me put it this way. Think of all the TV shows/movies where there is a married woman cheating on her husband. The husband comes home and finds them together. He is surprised, angered, confused, hurt. He is not going to hurt the wife, because he isn’t a monster. But in that moment, that first ten seconds of finding his wife with another man, she has become the ugliest vermin on the planet in his eyes. She is trash, she is dead to him now, she deserves every terrible thing to come down on her that the universe can dole out. But after ten seconds, the husband’s rational mind returns and he can start to be angry in a more appropriate way, dealing with the situation in a way more normal for the real world.
Like I said, it’s not a nice emotion, but it is human. What RAD has done is they have taken that angry ten seconds and stretched that emotion into a five-minute song. They aren’t saying that it’s right to feel that way. They are saying ‘this is a feeling that people have’.
This is a really long answer, and I’m not sure that’s what you wanted, but here we are. If you don’t want to trust any fan translations, the band-sponsored translations for this song are here. Just scroll down to number 6. As to how you feel about the band, I can’t help with that. Musical choice and who to spend time listening to is a very personal decision. I don’t know who else you listen to and how their music compares to RAD. I just hope I could help with this one song in particular. Happy listening!
