- Lyrics & Music: Kazuya Yoshii
- Arrangement: The Yellow Monkey
Original Lyrics
真夏にアイスを買いに行くように
願いをからめて吸いついてくれ
真面目な君の横顔と不真面目な君のからだごと
できればミキサーにかけて
飲み干したい気分さ Come on!
I love you baby I love you baby
I love you baby 感じる?
たった5,6分の宇宙などいらない
目の前のリアルな君が欲しいんだよ
この星は君のために回りこの夜は君のために歌う
君の生きかたとイキかたが
大好きさもう一度 Come on!
I love you baby I love you baby
I love you baby 感じて
絶望と希望のバトミントン
無性に君が必要だ
キャンドルがあと半分しかない
消えれば何も照らさない
足枷という名の幸せの鎖を外すカギを探す
何時までここに居られるの
必ず見つけるさ Come on!
I love you baby I love you baby
I love you baby I love you baby
枕の下かな? タンスの奥かな?
心の中かな? 見つからないかな?
I love you, I love you….
感じる…
Romanized Lyrics
manatsu ni ice wo kai ni iku you ni
negai wo karamete suitsuite kure
majime na kimi no yokogao to fumajime na kimi no karada goto
dekireba mixer ni kakete
nomi hoshitai kibun sa Come on!
I love you baby I love you baby
I love you baby kanjiru?
tatta go roppun no uchuu nado iranai
me no mae no real na kimi ga hoshii n da yo
kono hoshi wa kimi no tame ni mawari kono yoru wa kimi no tame ni utau
kimi no ikikata to ikikata ga
daisuki sa mou ichido Come on!
I love you baby I love you baby
I love you baby kanjite
zetsubou to kibou no badminton
mushou ni kimi ga hitsuyou da
candle ga ato hanbun shika nai
kiereba nanimo terasanai
ashikase to iu na no shiawase no kusari wo hazusu kagi wo sagasu
nanji made koko ni irareru no
kanarazu mitsukeru sa Come on!
I love you baby I love you baby
I love you baby I love you baby
makura no shita ka na? tansu no oka ka na?
kokoro no naka ka na? mitsukaranai ka na?
I love you, I love you…
kanjiru…
Translated Lyrics
Looking going out to buy ice cream in the middle of the summer
Cling to me, encompassing all my desires
Your serious face and flippant body
If I could, I’d put them both in a blender
Because I’m in the mood to drink them up, come on!
I love you baby, I love you baby
I love you baby, do you feel it?
I don’t need just five or six minutes in the cosmos
What I want is the real you, right in front of my eyes
The world turns for you, this night sings for you
The way you live your life, and the way you have sex
I love both of them, so let’s go one more time, come on!
I love you baby, I love you baby
I love you baby, feel it
A game of badminton between hope and despair
My need for you is so intense
Only half of this candle is left
When it goes out, everything will be dark
We’ll search for the key to remove these chains of happiness called shackles
How long can you stay for?
We can definitely find it, come on!
I love you baby, I love you baby
I love you baby, I love you baby
Is it under the pillow? In the drawer?
In my heart? I wonder if we’ll find it?
I love you, I love you…
You’ll feel it…
Notes
In terms of style, this song rocks a bit harder than anything we’ve heard from Yemon in awhile. In fact according to Yoshii, it’s kind of his version of heavy metal…but also kind of not…?
Because for people in our generation, it was a genre that really caused a revolution. It was based around the theme of freeing yourself from everything. The heavy metal that I liked…well there are all different kinds of heavy metal, right? It can be more pop sounding, or more aggressive sounding. I liked the more captivating styles of heavy metal. If you trace my roots back keeping that in mind, I ended up at David Bowie. And there were all kinds of dark and brooding guys that were into him. So I guess I’m not the only one who had that particular sickness! (Laughs) Though back in the early days I wondered if it was just me who had it. And when we got signed I saw that all sorts of other people did too. Then I started to really dislike it, and tried to get it all out of my system with “Jaguar”. Grunge began in America right around the same time that heavy metal did in Japan, two styles of music with completely different roots right? Right around that time we thought that the music that these American “bad boys” were listening to was really cool. But we also thought that we shouldn’t imitate it, but rather see if there’s a way we could do it that was more our own. And we wrote it not caring much about whether it was heavy metal, or whatever. “I Love You Baby” is kind of my own ideal version of heavy metal. And in putting my own real words to it, I feel like it makes it not really heavy metal anymore.
Kazuya Yoshii, Rockin’ On Japan Interview (October 1995)
Lyrically there isn’t a ton of superb stuff to be found, but enough of it is at least amusing: Opening the song with “Looking going out to buy ice cream in the middle of the summer” (what does this even mean when related to the next line in the lyrics?!) and the line about the blender mostly. Even so, this is one of my favorite songs on the album because it’s just so driving and energetic! And in a way that even Yemon’s more energetic songs haven’t been up until this point.
It’s pretty clear that they wanted to write a song that just rocked, and went from there. And though I don’t tend to favor the less lyrically deep songs, it doesn’t bother me at all here. Yoshii’s all-in and gruffer than usual vocal delivery really sells the song, and that’s really driven home in the live performances of it (and it’s hard to get tired of him saying “I love you baby!” before the song). He even does the first smaller guitar solo in this song, which is fairly unusual. I may be a bit bias toward this song: It was one of the first Yemon songs I downloaded from Napster back when I first started getting into the band. In fact, it was the third track on the very first J-Rock mix CD that I ever made! Now that I’ve shown just how old I am…
Finally, there’s a bit of interesting wordplay in the “kimi no ikikata to ikikata ga” line. We have two different versions of the phrase “ikikata”: The first one is written out with the kanji meaning “life”, the phrase itself meaning one’s way of living life. The second one has the “iki” written in katakana, usually meaning “way of having sex”.
“I Love You Baby” hasn’t been played live very much, unfortunately. Naturally it was played during the Four Seasons tour, a bit during the Sicks tour, and oddly made an appearance at their last big live performance at the Tokyo Dome before they broke up in 2001. It’s also been played a couple more times since the band’s reunion in 2016, though not on any concerts that have been recorded.
