MFT: Louie Louie in Japanese

"Louie Louie" is one of the greatest songs in history of music even though there is nothing special about it. Even if you overthink it so hard the fabric of reality will crack – there still will be nothing special about it. Any way you look at it – it is just a song. A very solid one but it is just a song.

The song is what it is – mind-numbingly sincere upbeat cheerful love song. The story goes: sailor is on the cruise for three days (!), he longs for his love but soon they will reunite and you know what it means. And nothing else.  

It is written in a crude creole english. This makes the song extra clumsy. Chunks of words are bound together into a narrative as if they were torn out of a dictionary to approximately match the content of the message. This tears away any semblance of nuance and leaves only barebones designations of events. This extreme simplicity makes "Louie Louie" curiously direct to the point. 

In a way, it is a perfect example of something so blissfully simple that its simplicity transcends beyond reason and attains charming somewhat gibberish mystique that is utterly unsettling and incredibly thought provoking.

Case in point – that time when FBI investigated the song for being obscene. It was ridiculous but you can understand why it happened - the song is too simple to be just a song - there should have been a second bottom or something. In retrospect FBI's quest seems like a hard case of pareidolia.

"Louie Louie" is easy to learn and fun to sing. Thus hundreds upon hundreds of cover versions of all walks of life in any shape or form. Even more – it was mimicked, elaborated and blatantly ripped off so much you can compose a box set consisting of all variations over the years (with a separate disc dedicated to Frank Zappa) without getting repetitive.

But of all the cover versions available, my favorite is not even recorded one. It is something completely different and absolutely inappropriate. 

My favorite version of “Louie Louie” is merely a Japanese translation of the song. Why? I can’t really explain. I just like the way it looks. It is different and unusual. I know what it is and yet i can't comprehend how something so familiar can be so different and unknowable.

Take a look:

I know what it is and yet it feels different to me. And that what makes it special. It was translated by Yumiko Ebina. Interestingly, one type of japanese writing couldn't contain the might of Louie Louie so it was translated using three types - Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana.