"Calamari Inkantation," Art incantation.

I am sitting at night listening to Splatoon 1's "Calamari Inkantation" and crying again. I cry for the same reason the game De Blob matters to me, or The Giver by Lois Lowry or The Powerpuff Girls Season 1 Episode 22, "Mime for a Change." In Splatoon, "Calamari Inkantation" is the song that the Squid Sisters use to free people from totalitarian mind control, hijacking leader DJ Octavio's speakers. You can hear the crackle of this in the beginning of the original version, and it's still my favorite version of the song.

Hearing the "Calamari Inkantation" makes Octolings, the citizens of the totalitarian government, want to defect from the Octarian forces due to it being "etched in their soul." Callie and Marie use it to free Cap'n Cuttlefish in Splatoon, and Marie uses it to free Callie of her brainwashing in Splatoon 2. In Octo Expansion, it's shown that Marina and the mysterious Agent 8 were also freed from hearing the original "Calamari Inkantation" broadcast; she was purportedly heard saying "This changes everything," before freeing, and later referred to her soul having been freed, and that she could no longer live under oppressive rule.

"Calamari Inkantation," the J-pop-inflected dance tune, was originally "Chorus of Calamari County", a traditional folk song and the song that originally made the Squid Sisters famous. The recording of it in the Splatoon soundtrack has ambient beach noises and background crowd chatter, meant to resemble the first annual Youth Folk Singing Contest that first made their name.

The song that wakes Octarian citizens up from their numbing indoctrination, their sameness of belief and delusions of both homogeny and separateness, is a dance tune based directly on an old folk song, and that gives me chills. It is essentially a dance rave song, based on a folk song, that is "etched" in the souls of Octolings and Octarians, it's shared artistic heritage that wakes these Octarians up to their commonalities with the enemy. Culture is what makes them grasp that they are not opposites of the people speaking to them.

Reading that "Calamari Inkantation" was originally "Chorus of Calamari County" brought back memories of my sister singing "I'll Tell Me Ma," or my extended family all crowded in an assisted living facility rec room singing "Whiskey In the Jar," the last St. Paddy's day that I'd get to hear my grandfather's jovial, jowly, round-cheeked laugh. It reminded me of us singing "The Parting Glass" in his hospital room last September as he died. The fact that Octolings' authoritarian indoctrination is broken by older reminders of shared artistic heritage is not only not facile, not silly, it's the oldest and most serious thing that exists.

I'd have to talk a long time to describe to you why these things move me, why old songs move me, why familial excuses for shared joy move me, and I'd have to tell you about this decade of cold isolation and crowdsourced entertainment. And of how deeply humans can delude themselves, and just how far people go to claim they are fine, and what it is like to live around them and know they're not. To live in a time where I'm meant to pretend it's a coincidence that everyone is both more polite and more vitriolic. To slowly decay inside the vise grip of close loved ones that have insisted they are fine, and have projected insanity and strangeness onto me.

I have a friend who is a producer and a musician; I know, privately, that he doesn't think his music is something anybody listens to, and I wish I could tell him about how his music wakes a soul up in ways he'd believe right now. I wish I could tell him that his songs once wormed into me at my most self-loathing, most indoctrinated, most isolated, most self-flagellating, and most mindlessly cold. It doesn't matter what happens between us now, at this point, because I've learned that the "Calamari Inkantation" is not theoretical and turning alive people's emotions is not a ridiculous, minor significance.

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit cites walking songs, traditional songs that in different parts of the world have marked local landmarks and lengths of walking time for people who live there. There's no sane and rational reason for what the Derek Wakefield and the Young Wolfe Tones version of "The Foggy Dew" does to me. I don't think there should be.