songlines
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| Message 1 of 1 08 November 2012 at 4:06pm | IP Logged |
An article from Slate, entitled "In praise of the foreign language pop song":
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2012/11/gangnam
_style_we_need_more_foreign_language_pop_
songs.html (Please copy and paste, removing any extra spaces inserted by the forum software.)
The sub-heading refers to Gangnam Style (in Korean), but the article itself touches on a number of different other
languages, as this short excerpt indicates:
Quote:
...“Gangnam Style” is the first smash foreign-language song in the United States in years—and, with any
hope, a sign of more to come—but it’s hardly the first. In the 1950s and 1960s you could turn on the radio and
hear a tune in Italian (“Volare,” 1958), German (“Sailor” 1960), or Xhosa (“Pata Pata,” 1966). Pop hasn’t gone
entirely monolingual since: A Latin music boom emerged in the 1990s, giving rise to stars like Jennifer Lopez and
Ricky Martin, who occasionally sing in Spanish. Given that some 50 million people in the United States are of
Hispanic origin, the market is certainly viable, and some Spanish-language songs have enjoyed crossover
success. (The ’90s also saw the odd pop success of actual Latin: those chanting monks and Enigma’s Sadeness
(Part 1)). But the sort of multilingualism that allowed for both a French-language song (“Domenique”) and a
Japanese one (“Sukiyaki”) to become No. 1 on the pop chart the same year (1963) has dwindled significantly. A
non-English-language song hasn’t topped Billboard’s Hot 100 since Los Lobos’ version of “La Bamba” in 1987
(not so fast, “Macarena” fans—half the lyrics of that 1996 song were sung in English).
This is a shame for a number of reasons. English-only listening habits deprive us of the natural rhythm and
melody of other languages—the nasal vowels of French, the alveolar trills of Portuguese, the consonant clusters
of Czech. That most of us don’t understand the words only allows us to better appreciate the phonology of a
language and concentrate on the human voice as a musical instrument. Those throat-clearing sounds you hear in
German? That’s the voiceless velar fricative, and it adds a wonderful percussiveness to “99 Luftbalons.” English
speakers don’t have it; it’s one reason the Anglicized version of Nena’s 1984 hit falls flat... |
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Edited by songlines on 08 November 2012 at 4:08pm
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