The English-Language Bias

 

In my collection, I have Italian, French, and Portuguese prog and although I cannot understand a darn thing (just a tad, seeing as Italian and Portuguese are somewhat related to Spanish), I find the music and vocal melodies to be very moving.

 

I will offer an analogy. Several years ago, while living in South Korea, I bought a copy of a Canadian movie of which I am fond. The movie is called Blackrobe, and a large proportion of the dialogue is in the Huron language, i.e. inaccessible to most Canadians. Thus, in its domestic release, the Huron bits have subtitles. In the Korean release, of course the subtitles are in Korean, which even then I could not read quickly enough to follow. The result was that about a third of the dialogue in this movie--dialogue I had once been able to follow via subtitles--I could no longer understand. I could still appreciate the cinematography and other elements of the movie, and even the non-linguistic elements of the acting, but I was accutely aware of how much I was missing, having once had it and then lost it. That said, I believe that the choice of presenting that dialogue in the Huron language was ideal, and added a legitimacy to the film that it would otherwise have lacked.

 

All of this is to say that engaging in music in languages other than one's own is certainly a good idea, as is a band performing in its native tongue. But to claim full appreciation of an art form presented even partially in a language that one does not understand is, I think, self-deceiving.

But that's cheating ... you and I can see a movie from these countries and within 15 minutes we can sync in to the subtitles and boom ... we know what they are saying.  And the music does not appear so foreign to me due to my classical music upbringing ... there is a difference between German Music and italian Music ... and you can start with some opera as the greatest examples of it all.

 

The same can not be said for English ... whose music can not be said to be totally original ... well to be fair, they killed the originals a long time ago, like it happened in America ... and you have a "misplaced european" in search for a soul and ignoring their very ancestors and the ghosts of the past ... and I doubt that America will have a better sense of "self" and "person" until they better focus and nurture and involve the cultural elements of those ... they helped get rid of. In a way, sub-consciously, these people are trying to find an identity ... but I'm not sure you can as long as you deny the existance of the past, and your own "sins" and "crimes" ... Europe by comparison has gone quite far beyond that and the cross culturization of Europe is very good, specially in the arts ... but in America? ... it's an idea ... there is no culturization of anything when you compare the West Coast to the East Coast to the South Coast to the Northern Coast ... it's a different country! And mind you ... they don't speak English around here ... some speak Ebonics, some speak Texan, some speak Jive ... you can imagine what happens to the music after all that! ... yeah ... only top ten in every "style" ... is possible in America, since no one can imagine a group in NY being better than the group in LA ... so the difference becomes who sells the most! And Billboard will tell you about it ... how do you think that Country Music got there? ... it was not even considered a valid music for the longest time!

 

To most people, the most beautiful language is their own. Fair enough: our native tongues are what we are most used to, and what we measure other languages against. Other languages will often seem dissonant or even ugly by comparison. There are many sounds in English that seem ugly to speakers of other languages: the consonants can sound harsh to some, while to others, the large number of unvoiced TH's and terminal S's make it sound as though English speakers spend all their time hissing at each other. But to actually criticize one language because it doesn't meet the standards of beauty arising from another language, as seems to be going on in this post above ("sounds like dogs barking jajajaja") is bigotted in the extreme, and illustrates nothing more than the narrowness of one's own standards.

 

Please, folks: Let's keep it respectful.

Nicely said.