Falling

Walking back home from Shibuya after the aborted club experience I talked about in the last post, I listened to Mission of Burma's song "Falling" from their new album. I'd just read music journalist Michael Azerrad's profile of Mission of Burma in his book "Our Band Could Be Your Life", how the band was forced to call it quits because of their guitarist's ear problems, so it came as a pleasant shock to find their first album in 21 years (!), ONoffON, on sale in Tower Records Shibuya recently. Was Roger Miller's ear problem cured?

Japan has entered its June rainy season and this year's Typhoon #4 has landed in Kochi prefecture in western Japan, and therefore it was pouring as I walked home. Trudging through the concrete canyon of Meiji street in heavy rain, the song 'Falling', whose lyrics I listened to seriously for the first time, seemed strangely appropriate to the night.

'Falling' is an eerie song. It's about a guy who had fallen from a skyscraper. It has lines like "I was falling through the air/From the tallest building/away ok away" and "I could see the future rushing up to meet me/Between the seconds split into smaller parts". The 'fall' is probably a metaphor for something, but I wondered, walking, whether the image of the suicide jumpers from the World Trade Center on 9-11 inspired, consciously or subconsciously, the image.

Maybe it was just the gloominess of the rainy night and the fact that many raindrops were falling from the heavens that made me feel the song was the right one for tonight. At the same time, bad weather, people-less streets and a dark song on headphones sometimes makes you realize that always, all your life, you're descending slowly.