Hi! Here’s the first of a series of posts I’m hoping to make about the Japanese band Mili! I’m a huge fan of them because their songs frequently touch on themes of alienation, queer life, capitalism and even imperialism. This series of posts will be about some of these songs! Each post will be about a different song, and will contain an analysis of their lyrics. This probably won’t be a weekly affair, but I’ll try to get fairly close to it! I admit that I’m not like a superfan of Mili or anything: my enjoyment of the band mostly starts and stops at the music, so I don’t know much about the history of the members or anything. I can say that the band was founded ~10 years ago, and they’ve made music for a variety of games (both indie and not), and more recently they’ve also done songs for several anime. Their lyrics tend to take the form of narrative following the main character in what’s pretty clearly a fantasy or allegorical environment, so while they don’t directly talk about many things it’s often easy to read some meaning into their music.
I got into the band because, to be honest, I was depressed and a lot of their songs (e.g. Bathtub Mermaid, Birthday Kid) were very relatable to me. But as I listened to more of their discography I realised their songs took on a lot of anticapitalist themes.
That brings us to today’s song: A Turtle’s Heart! This is one of their older songs, originally releasing on the album Mag Mell in 2014. I’ll be honest: their newer works do sound much better, but I wanted to start with this song because it’s one of the oldest ones that clearly talks about some themes we’ll probably appreciate.
The plot of this song is pretty straightforward. The speaker, a cowardly turtle with an office job, laments their place in life where they’ve been ‘left behind.’ They seek to recall their old lover to come back and save them from their purgatory.
It’s pretty clear that the speaker is dealing with significant alienation from their job: they’re stuck in a cubicle, the epitome of ‘bullshit jobs,’ with no support system (no body to support my heavy but empty shell). What I really think is interesting is the way that the speaker seeks to solve the issue: by ‘killing’ their heart. Trying to become dead inside is one real solution to being stuck in an alienated position. It’s not quite the same thing but that is something that I had more or less tried in order to fit into a shitty relationship. The problem of course is that it’s pretty hard to ‘kill your heart’ and, you know, it’s not very healthy in the first place, so it doesn’t really work.
Another thing the speaker talks about is a bit of a ‘fear of missing out’ that occurs in the first verse. I think that it’s reflective of a bit of a false conciousness that’s easy to attain when you do get stuck in an alienated position where you can see people ‘progressing’ through career ladders and becoming more wealthy. Of course, with the falling rate of profit being what it is in the west, it’s hard to really see this happening any more: the myth of social mobility here has been permanently shattered.
On that happy note, this is where I’ll leave this first post! A nice lovely song about office jobs and the depression it causes. Tune in next time for a very fungal song!