I’m feeling a lot of FEELS right now, and wanted to give a little blurb.
This pertains to music and the emotions it can wrench out of you, even years later in life.
Bored, and ignoring work, I went and watched the Nikki Tutorial video that she did for a BLACKPINK makeup look.
Being rather detached from trending music these days, I decided to look into who BLACKPINK is.
As I’m watching their videos, I remembered my love for a J-pop group called ARASHI.
I hadn’t thought of ARASHI in YEARS, as they were an obsession of mine back in high school. For me that was 2006 - 2010.
I found ARASHI through the show, HANA YORI DANGO, which is a Japanese drama based on a manga/anime series. (There is also BOYS OVER FLOWERS, and METEOR SHOWER, which were based on the same series.)
The leading male was played by Matsumoto Jun, who is also a member of ARASHI. They did the opening theme songs for the show, and this is where the rabbit hole opened for me.
In that particular range of years, Youtube was still a bit underutilized, so finding their music videos was a challenge. A challenge I took up, and gained a bit of leeway on.
In the end, I’d gotten to watch a few decent quality videos, and managed to rip the songs onto my mp3 player.
I’m not sure when/how I lost my touch on their music, but as tastes and interests often do for me, it faded away.
Jump to present day, and I’m doing a Youtube search for ARASHI.
To my immense joy, they’d recently made a come back (I think, I have no idea if they’d been active all this time, but it seems last year they have been getting really busy.)
They have their own official Youtube channel, and profile on Spotify. They’ve uploaded a lot of their older work on both platforms and I immediately went to one of my favorites.
This is where the emotions have started to kick in.
As the song picked up, and I was dancing in my chair, I found myself lip syncing to the song that I hadn’t heard in ages, and yet, there I am, knowing each syllable. The nostalgia, and upbeat music nearly hit me to the point of crying.
I’ve heard of studies of Alzheimer patients responding to music they hadn’t heard since they were youths, and experiencing this small taste of emotional connection, I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have brought up in them.
If you’re interested, here are a couple of my favorite songs by ARASHI. Each name contains the link to the music video.
MONSTER
LOVE SO SWEET
TRUTH
