Would you listen to music in a language you didn't understand?
 

i remember when i started my quest to hear every song in the world (an endeavor that would turn out to be fruitless), i started listening to stuff i didn't understand, it was really hard to be interested because it just didn't sound good to me, until i found a few russian bands that i fell in love with (and tried to learn russian because of, i know some, not alot) and listened to even tough at the time i couldn't understand.. i can't explain why one language sounded good to me and all the others didn't at all, but i was wondering what other people think of this.

i only put this in the punk forum to show love to two russian punk bands that ROCK, korol i shut and tarakany

Of course!

I love a lot of 60s garage rock and pop music from Europe - namely sung in French. I only understand half of it, but tend to be drawn to French music in general.

Some French punk bands I really like are Plastic Bertrand, Les Wampas, and Edith Nylon (the early stuff).

Definitely. I think there was a point in my life where I probably would have said no. But I think my early appreciation for certain music styles with incomprehensible vocals (ie industrial, some punk & metal, etc) made me realize that lyrics aren't as important to me in music as the overall sound. In the past few years I've gotten into a lot of progressive rock from various countries, and I love it. I'd probably like it less if I could understand the lyrics, it would probably end up being some cheesy stuff.

Anyway this is a good discussion for General Music...even if you show love to a few punk bands. It's inevitable that in a discussion like this someone would post examples.

This song pretty much answers the question for me:



This thing's ballin. I really need to get the album...

I listen to a lot of foreign post-hardcore (Envy is the first band that comes to mind), but since you can't understand half of what they're saying anyways, the different language thing doesn't matter too much.

Highlife African music is one of my favorite things to :). I also have a couple of German rock bands I'll listen to occosionally, it's interesting stuff. Oh and it sounds odd but I adore Spanish language music.

Yep. Of course the language barrier is what fails to make such music as much a staple in my listening habits as the English-speaking stuff, but if the music as a whole's good enough, you learn to get past that and treat the vocal as you would any other instrument.

For example;


^ Baaba Maal - Jamma/Jengii




etc

Not quite punk, but there you go.

Right so, when I was younger I spent most of my summers in Turkey, so Turkish music came sort of like a second nature to me. Bearing in mind I was really young and had no taste in music whatsoever, don't judge me :laughing:. But when Holly Valance’s – Kiss Kiss came out all my friends loved it, I really recognised it but I never liked it. I found out once I went to Turkey that summer it was Tarkans – Kiss Kiss translated and obviously sang by her. I basically hated the English version yet, loved Tarkans and knew all the Turkish words even though I never had a clue what they meant. I think that just goes to show if a songs in English it doesn’t necessarily make it any better and foreign songs should definitely be left foreign.

I wrote that 3 times and made spelling mistakes 3 times so pressed backspace, it took me to my search results, and deleted the whole paragraph. I stopped trusting Firefox by this point and wrote this whole thing on Microsoft Word. :(

Someone please listen to the song I posted. It's so awesome, I need some appreciation.

Also Conan I love Spanish music too. One of my favorite acts is Rodrigo y Gabriela, and though they're instrumental I think that kind of ties in with the theme of not understanding what's being said. In this case there's just nothing being said!

honestly, it was good for what it is, i just personally hated it, but if you notice some of the bands i talk about, its obvious i wouldn't listen to that style in english

but i do agree with the vocals as an instrument, i never would have had the balls to sing before i realized that, and i love to sing now (never mind the quality of my voice), and they do kind of build to fit in the song in a way where, if you understood it, you would hate it because you've takin the song somewhere completely different

that happened quite a bit to me, as i learned more russian and understood the songs better, certain ones just became uninteresting to me, i didn't want to hear the message anymore, especially when it applied to a group of people 5000 miles away.