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LUVORATORRRRRY! is a song written by giga-p and reol and sung initially by vocaloids gumi and rin. i am quite ignorant of vocaloid on the whole, but i love this song and it's iconic. i absolutely love the robots, the clubby sound, the thirsty energy (several scandalous typo in the music video certainly helped), the high energy electronic squawks of the early 2010s.

there's a part of me that wants to learn japanese to know what other meanings there might be in it, but (1) that part of my brain activates with media in any language i don't already know, and (2) just listening to it, there's enough in the english parts of the lyrics and in the structure parts of the song, to follow the story even without an accompanying translation.

shortly afterward reol puts out a version with some additional verses crammed into the crescendos, with her singing and featuring nqrse rapping. and girls. this version is one of my favourite songs of all time. if that makes me a basic bitch then you can find me at 14 pH :eggbug-uwu:


near as i can tell, the lyrics are about the indulgence of affection and seduction, and the anguish and desperation when those passions are neglected or unreciprocated. there's a lot of sonic—and, if we include the music video or even just the official promotional art, visual—reference to robots and automation: their impersonality and emotional coldness conveyed by their literal form, but also there can be striking and sexy and exciting in the force and (im)precision of their designs or behaviours; they provide a language for discussing agency that, at least with the hindsight of 2022, makes perfect sense to help the song carve out this emotional location and fill it completely.

the verses alternate between the girls' honest assessment and seduction, while the choruses are bouts of acute and desperate passion. the translations of the bits that aren't in english usually skew provocative, but it's complicated because horny just means something else to me than to the people involved with creating this song.

there's some finely tuned vocal quality stuff going on in the original, but i prefer that nqrse's prechoral raps fill the previously instrumental crescendos, with what sound like responses to their affection: a partner that does it right and keeps up in an appropriate complement, if only for the critical passionate moment and then distancing later. especially after the downtempo bridge, symbolizing a low point where the girls' disillusionment is approaching its nadir, and they are ready to quit, trying one last time to chase that rush... nqrse turns it up even harder than before, starting early and belting out twice as many bars to set up the third drop to be the hardest, yelling over pounding synths and explosions, drawing the girls back in at maybe the most destructive but also the most powerful moment, reigniting the cycle of passion for just a little longer. just the right amount of bitter mixed into the saccharine-sweet chorus to let it end.


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