So I have all these Japanese pop/rock singers I enjoy. I listen to a variety of styles of JPop, and my favorite artist is aiko. I like ZONE, and MARIA, and High & Mighty Color (love that guitar solo), and Ai Otsuka (that’s possibly the most bizarre music video ever made, and maybe NSFW), and even Morning Musume, and going all the way back to Pink Lady, and even further back to Kyu Sakamoto.
Now, even though I neither speak nor understand the Japanese language, I’ve listened to enough Japanese music that my ears can recognize that each of the above singers is singing in the same language (some with a bit of English thrown in, too). This is probably a combination of recognizing certain words that I do know the meaning of, as well as recognizing the sounds of a lot of the peculiar-to-Japanese syllables, such as those that start with “ts-” or “ky-” and adjacent vowels pronounced separately.
And that brings me to '80s JPop group Rebecca. I’ve listened to several of this group’s songs, and I’m completely baffled when I listen to NOKKO sing. To my ears, she seems to be singing in a completely different language. Can any Japanese speakers here explain why? Is it just her delivery and style? Does she enunciate poorly? She’s certainly a “ballsier” singer than most of the others I’ve mentioned.
This is a bit of a hijack, but maybe this is a good thread to ask this in. There was this jpop song I heard once that started out as a normal-sounding jpop song, then launched into a rendition of Glen Miller’s “In the Mood”. At the end, the singer was singing the melody of “In the Mood” a capella style. I found it pretty amusing. Anyone happen to know what song this is?
It might just be she’s from a particular area of Japan. There are certainly accents *very * noticeably different from what I would call “general” Japanese (which at a guess is Tokyo-based). I can’t recognise them myself though.
I only listened to the first 45 seconds or so, but she is singing in Japanese (and with no real accent either.) That I can tell, about all that is different with her is that she’s more changing her volume with the music rather than pitch–i.e. she’s singing pretty flat.
Here’s some singing (rapping, really) in Osaka dialect.
Hmmm. Maybe I should have linked an actual music video instead of a live performance.
One other thing I’ve noticed about her songs is that they seem to contain considerably fewer words than the songs of the other artists I mentioned. Could it just be that she’s drawing the vowel sounds out a lot longer — thus stretching fewer syllables to fill a comparable amount of time — and that has the net effect of giving her words a different sound?
For an English comparison, put Travis Tritt’s T-R-O-U-B-L-E next to Elvis’ I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You:
Well you’re sweet talkin’ sexy walkin’ honky-tonkin’ baby
The men are gonna love ya and the women gonna hate ya
vs
But Iiiiiiiiiii caaaaaaaaaan’t heelp falling in loooooove wiiiiiith yooooooo
The first example also takes about half the time to sing as the second. To a non-English speaker, these might sound like two different languages.
That was cute My favorite Japanese singer, aiko, is also from Osaka (and is a graduate of the Osaka College of Music). I’d be curious to find out if she writes her lyrics in the Osaka dialect.
NOKKO’s Wikipedia page says she was born in Saitama Prefecture. Of course, I don’t know what effect, if any, that would have on her dialect - assuming that she even wrote her own lyrics.
I couldn’t say. I can understand Japanese so to me it just sounds like Japanese, which makes it hard to try and think what could mess someone up who doesn’t understand Japanese. Maybe it’s just the comparitive age of the style. Rebecca looks to be 80’s J-Pop, while as the other stuff is more modern so the presentation and singing style matches up with what you are used to via American music.
And yeah, some people aren’t as good live. Bonnie Pink, live, was pretty awful when I saw her. In her case it seemed to be an instinctual need to raise the volume of her voice to fill an auditorium even though she had a microphone–doing it threw off her ability to hit the notes.
My favorite Japanese singer, aiko, is also from Osaka (and is a graduate of the Osaka College of Music). I’d be curious to find out if she writes her lyrics in the Osaka dialect.