My favourite song by Japanese rock band ONE OK ROCK. It has lyrics in both Japanese and English. The band has since relocated to Los Angeles, and their last half dozen or so albums have been all/mostly English (sometimes with Japanese versions with more Japanese lyrics, but even those are still mostly in English). But this song came out well before the relocation, and vocalist Takahiro Moriuchi’s English isn’t quite as good here. But still an awesome song. I will allow that it’s not their best song, but it is my favourite. When I post their best song, I will qualify that statement there.

ONE OK ROCK might sound like a nonsensical name, but it’s kind of code. It’s a reference to “one o’clock,” as in the hour after midnight when they would practice in studio because that was the cheapest hour to rent it out. The name is also represented as a number, 10969, because the 1-0 in English is pronounced “one-oh” and the 9-6-9 in Japanese is pronounced “ku-roh-ku,” and it’s common enough in Japanese to drop the final vowel that they can say “10969” says “ONE OK ROCK” across the two languages their songs are performed in.

Some say rock is dead in the west. It isn’t exactly dead, it’s just not popular anymore. Rock music was fueled to popularity by MTV and action movies. The former doesn’t exist anymore and the latter has switched to rap music. A lot of rock radio stations have shut down or converted to something more popular. But in Japan, the music hit maker equivalent to MTV is the anime industry. Interestingly, ONE OK ROCK never licensed their songs to anime, unlike many others. Only very recently did they license one, after they were well established. Their song Prove can be heard in Beyblade X, which is a kids’ anime about, I believe, spinning tops battles (except the tops are more like spinning mechs). From what I gather, it’s like Pokémon but with robots that spin. Anyway, anime has brought a lot of attention to Japanese bands, but not to ONE OK ROCK. The closest they came to anime was being similar to another band, Survive Said the Prophet, which did and does license songs to anime, so if someone discovered SSTP and was looking for similar bands, ONE OK ROCK would be among the first mentioned. (You can bet an SSTP song is coming to this comm sooner than later! The one I have in mind is all in English, though.)