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Notes -
Ever since I saw how Japanese songs are written, I have kind of thought that rhyming is a bit of a stupid thing to require for every English song. When I say that, I'm usually thinking of Yorushika songs, though there's a lot out there that I think is very pretty, speaks to life's fundamental tribulations, and is artfully put together. Do you have any opinions on English poetry/songs versus Japanese poetry/songs?
Of course, I doubt removing the rhyming requirement would improve the content of American pop songs at all.
In the first song there in your link, there is a lot of end rhyme, though in Japanese end rhyme of that sort is less the word and more the word ending, e.g. だ and さ. True, it's slant rhyme (there is no intentional insulting pun there goddamit) but it is rhyme.
I don't read Japanese poetry in Japanese, and J pop songs now are mostly background noise to whatever dance routine there may be. Unless one listens to indie or alternative, which I will if exposed to it but don't seek out. I don't even hate American pop songs as a whole, but at some point in the early oughts I started hating both rap and hip hop, though until then I had mixtapes of both (actual cassettes). Something happened somewhere in there with those genres, or maybe I just got old.
Generally my tastes run eclectic in music and my Spotify playlists are all over the shop. On this train ride at the moment I am listening to ambient. for no reason except Tuesday.
I'm sure there are differences in Japanese and English rhyming, but I don't know what they are. Even Japanese literature I tend to read in English. Yukio Mishima is not difficult to read in translation but apparently very hard to read in Japanese. Murakami is easy in both. Literary translation is an interesting field, and I wonder how well LLMs do it. Or people, for that matter. As an aside, I only realized a few years ago that Yoda, in Japanese translation, has no distinctive way of speaking. That's a small point and not literary, and now I'm way off topic.
Mind blown.
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