lafemmefatale

In Asian music, there are a lot of singers that will sing (or try to) in another language to broaden their audiences. One example is the artist BoA




She's really special in that she's native Korean and is more or less (as far as I can tell) fluent in Japanese and sings in both languages successfully with big htis. Recently she released her new CD in Taiwan and to my utter surprise...she has two remakes of her songs in Mandarin. Um. She's a great singer and the melody is there. And her Mandarin isn't horrible but it's just so...ODD. Similarily when lots of Japanese artists sing in English. You can't tell that it's in English I swear.

So what do you guys think about these multi language singers? I'm using an Asian example because that's what I'm familiar with but what other artists have done this (Euro techno pop exculded I guess haha)? Is it worth their effort at all?

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la petite moi

It's pretty cool. Noir Desir (French group) does this as well. But I don't really see them much in the states, unfortunately.

stonegrody

I think it's cool for the most part. I thought it was lame when Christina Aguilera sang in Spanish and acted like she was hispanic. Tried to get momentum off of the Latin explosion. She has, for the most part, lost the accent and is back to being white. Good for her and more importantly, good for the hispanic community

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Charlatan

Celine Dion (yikes!) is a native French speaker and singer... she's from Quebec. She only learned to speak English in her late teens early 20s.

Way more cooler (and more to my taste) the Pixies did a number of songs in Spanish and they are English speaking.

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roachboy

it is a strange feature of the american corporate music market that almost nothing not sung in english gets any exposure. given the size of the market, it is therefore not surprising to find lots of performers trying to sing in english as a way to access it. so you find all kinds of performers in the strange field that is "world music" who try it out---sometimes it s interesting, sometimes it is a debacle.

i think einsturzende neubauten switches back and forth well--blixa has different lyric-voices for each language. i kinda like when alpha blondy tries it, but probably not for the reasons he would prefer.
it is sad, though, because there is a huge amount of really interesting music that americans have difficulty accessing on account of the language. i think french hip-hop has been more interesting than american, for example--but where can you hear it in the states? certainly never on the radio.....

maybe this will break down a bit as a function of netradio.

personally, i look forward to the implosion of the corporate-dominated music industry altogether, but that is a different matter........

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Zephyr66

Nargaroth is a german death metal band that has songs in german, english and czech

Rammstein, the german industrial band I'm sure you've all heard of, due to Du Hast, has songs in german, english and russian

plus there are countless scandinavian metal bands that preform in english and finnish, swedish and/or norweigen

clonmult

Mylene Farmer has done some stuff in English, although I don't think she ever really tried to push herself into the english-speaking markets. Shame, as he music and videos are generally kinda good, the videos tending towards the epic proportions at times.

MrFlux

Ill Niño have both spanish and english...
Sepultura have both portuguese and english
Soulfly ditto

I like it. Doesn't matter if you don't know what they're on about as long as it sounds good, right?

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Derwood

Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry both sing in multiple languages, including gibberish (not as silly as it sounds....just singing the notes with sounds in stead of La's or whatever)

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rev_skarekroe

Gerardo.
Falco.
Just about any one-name artist ending with the letter "o".

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