"Grateful Days" - Your Best Performance

Hello, good day, good luck! Bring your A-game today, cause we'll push you to your limits on today's StudyOke! Where we usually look at grammar, today it's time to take a crack at Dragon Ash's hit song Grateful Days and the art of performance in karaoke.

Original Lyrics / Romaji

About the Song

Dragon Ash is perhaps the most well-known Japanese hip hop group and certainly the one most responsible for popularizing the genre in Japan.

Starting out with a grunge/punk sound with 1997's Mustang, the band began incorporating hip hop sounds into their mix with 1998's Buzz Songs and 1999's Viva La Revolution. By mixing the more familiar punk sound with steadily increasing doses of hip hop and rap influence, Dragon Ash brought a new sound to the masses (though they were far from the first hip hop group in Japan).

This new sound paid off with their third single and first number one Oricon hit, Grateful Days. Featuring fellow hip hop artist Zeebra and soul singer ACO, Grateful Days propelled Dragon Ash into the big time

Rather than a punk group or a hip hop group, Dragon Ash is best seen as a fusion group. Nothing learned along the way was thrown out as they switched genres and started incorporating more sounds - samples used on Mustang's third track Cowboy Fuck! were reused in Grateful Days. Samples turned into electronica, samba, reggae fusion and bossa nova. Dragon Ash didn't outgrow any style or genre, they simply grew.

By the way, if you're a fan of Japanese cinema, you may already have heard a Dragon Ash song without knowing it. 2000's Shizukana Hibi no Kaidan wo is the ending theme for Battle Royale. 

[Today's Topic: Your Best Performance is after the jump]

Today's Topic: Your Best Performance

Up until now, we've talked exclusively about studying Japanese grammar, but that's only half of what we're about here at StudyOke! Karaoke is an excellent opportunity to put your Japanese skills to use, but it's also a social activity - something best done with other people.

The biggest mistake I see people - Japanese and foreign - make at karaoke is picking songs that they enjoy listening to. That's an easy mistake to avoid, but one that plenty of people make.

But then, it doesn't seem like a mistake at first, does it? Songs you like to listen to are the songs you know - the songs you know by heart. Shouldn't that make them the best songs to sing?

Well, yes. And no. Yes, because that's the list of songs you have to choose from. Good luck singing a song you've never heard before!

The "No," the mistake, comes in two forms. First, when you pick a song you enjoy and can sing well but doesn't fit the mood. For example, if everyone is having fun and laughing, maybe it's not time to sing Hurt or Suicide is Painless. We'll talk more about mood management in future posts.

The second form of this mistake is picking a song you love, but can't sing. Maybe you're a dude with a super low voice - maybe don't sing the female part on Barbie Girl (unless you're playing it as a joke). Maybe you're a dude with a high-pitched voice - maybe don't put on the gravelly metal. Maybe you're a girl with a limited vocal range - maybe don't put on Celine Dion!

Personally, I don't have a wide range and that limits the songs I can pull off. Even after years of karaokeing, I still can't sing some of my favorite songs (at least, not in a way you would want to hear!). Fortunately, there is an answer - learn to bust a fucking rhyme.

Pulling off a Japanese hip hop song demonstrates a number of key StudyOke! values. First, unlike J-Pop, J-Rap uses a wide variety of vocabulary and grammar structures, If you study J-Pop at all, you've probably noticed most popular songs recycle the same vocabulary and images at an alarming rate. J-Rap bust through that.

Second, adding rhythm and flow to all those new words makes them into vocabulary bombs exploding inside your head. It embeds them in your brain like pieces of shrapnel - it's very hard to forget something you can bust out to a beat.

Third, pulling off a Japanese hip hop song is fun for the group, for the simple fact that most people (Japanese or foreign) have never seen a foreigner do it, Hell, most Japanese people can't pull off hip hop at karaoke. It's something new, something fresh, something fun. Grateful Days is a great pick because you can recruit someone to do the chorus, boosting group participation.

You may think your Japanese isn't good enough to pull off a song like Grateful Days. Maybe it isn't! You should wait until you're confident to try busting it out in a group. But I will say one thing - your Japanese is good enough to start practicing a song like Grateful Days.

You're good enough to listen to a song like Grateful Days. You're good enough to start looking up the vocabulary in a song like Grateful Days. And you're damn well good enough to set a song like Grateful Days as a goal.

Keep your eyes on the prize, and keep StudyOkeing!