that foreign music blog🌎

As New Year’s is approaching, I was looking at the top songs in Japan on iTunes and stumbled upon a few western artists. One of them was The Kid LAROI, the song that lured me into the fandom being ‘STAY’.

Now, I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Justin Beiber, but I actually really appreciated his contribution to this song. The synthesizer leading you through the song gives it an adventurous playfulness that’s reminiscent of the 80s. From the instrumental alone it sounds like it could be an upbeat song, but it’s actually about how “fucked up” the speaker is as long as their ex-partner “isn’t right here.” The simplicity of the lyrics makes it really easy to sing along to, as well as fully grasp the anguish of the speaker.

My favorite part of the song is the ‘OOOOOOH’ part. It mirrors the speaker calling out to their ex-partner or, screaming because they’re in so much pain. It could also just be a device to move the song along, but I still really liked the effect.

I also really loved how, in the video, everything is frozen. With the title being “STAY”, and knowing that “Stay” also means “don’t move”, it’s a clever interpretation. You could say that everything stopped because the speaker can’t move–‘ is staying‘ in one place until their partner returns. The beginning scenes also look like what could’ve happened just after the breakup, and that destruction also remains still in time. Everything is staying in place.

I’m kind of surprised by how young LAROI is, though, singing about being drunk and wasted at the age of 19. How on earth would he know what that feels like, hmm?? SUSPICIOUS MUCH???

After listening to ‘STAY’, I delved into more songs and discovered ‘Thousand Miles’. As a novice guitarist, the acoustic guitar at the beginning is what baited me. I thought I’d try to learn it myself, but what was supposed to be practice turned into a two-day loop cycle with occasional bursts of tears. Other commenters confessed how they’d been just as bewitched by the simple beat and melody, backed by guitars and pianos. How the chorus moves down in pitch also has a nice sinking feeling to it, which brings out the helplessness in the song even more. That helplessness, however, is what surprised me the most. I thought, “HOW DO YOU FEEL HELPLESS ALREADY?”.

In this song, he talks about self-sabotage and how, since he’s gonna fuck everything up, their partner should just stay away. A thousand miles away. I liked the song because of how much I could relate to it, but I’m 30. It’s normal for people my age and older to start saying how love is hopeless and that they can’t change. I mean, WE CAN, but it does take a lot more effort. We are certainly less pliable, so as a 30-year-old, I CAN kind of understand this “I’m gonna fuck up and I can’t change my ways”, but I have mixed feelings hearing this from a 19-year-old. I KNOW it’s just a song, but it’s the same as hearing a first grader say they have nothing to look forward to. IT’S VERY BIZARRE to hear a teenager sound this hopeless.

It’s as if LAROI has accumulated enough experiences to age him twice over, which is at once impressive and heartbreaking. While it’s good that artists like LAROI and Billie Eilish are open about their mental health and depression, listening to their self-destructive undertones is jarring.

Then again, I guess when I was a teen, I was all “emo”, too. I liked Hawthorne Heights. People used to say that I couldn’t feel a certain way because I was too young, but I guess pain doesn’t really have an age restriction in the end.