Recently I had a discussion with welbywife, who is Russian, about music and discovered that she has a long list of music that she no longer likes now that she understands the words. When I asked for examples, she said “Half of the Beatles’ songs, and most of the Rolling Stones.” Her explanation is that the music had a power of its own because she didn’t understand the words. Instead, she heard the music and created her own mental images to go with it. Once she understood the lyrics, she found that the songs either had nothing to do with her mental image, or were “too simple to mean anything.”
She also tells me that the process went both ways for her. For example, she’d heard Queen’s music in Russia, but was never a fan until she began to understand the lyrics.
Not translated, per se, but White Zombie songs make much less sense once you can understand what Rob Zombie is singing (ie., once you’ve read the lyrics in the album insert).
Spanish love songs can be beautiful until you notice that EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM mentions “mi corazon” (“my heart”) and even the best have the emotional depth of a song by The Archies. It’s best to ignore what the singer is saying and enjoy how he says it.
Dropzine, you made my co-workers look at me. I kind of get the same feeling. There’s a song I stole from my son by a Russian singer. I like it, but have no idea what the words mean. I don’t think I want to, now that I consider it.
True for me when listening to english-language songs (most of pop and rock) with limited English knowledge.
A lot of the great english hits of the 60s and 70s and even 80s, now that I can look up the complete lyrics online (instead of relying on the only half-understood singers version), I was astonished that they really were shallow and didn’t make a lot of sense, as the cliche explanation that both the songwriters and the people listening to the music were high. The first example for this I can think of is Suzanne by Leonard Cohen - very nice music, he has a good voice, but the lyrics is WTF?
Or “The night they rode old Dixie down”. Once I learned that the song celebrates the Old South during the Civil War, it lost most of its appeal.
I sometimes want to take a song where I really, really like the music, and can’t stand the message of the text, and rewrite different lyrics to it - but fitting words to the rhythm is harder than it looks, alas.
Thanks for reminding me of another point Costanze. I do the same thing with my few Russian songs, sometimes going so far as to make up entire (bad) songs to go with the music.
O/T, but related: I’ve always had a problem with identifying lyrics, in any song. I’ve always listened to melody, beat, rythym, etc. Lyrics were always an afterthought.
This left me going through high school, college, and years beyond without knowing the words to any songs, let alone being able to sing along. The words just didn’t mean much to me.
Since that was the case, I usually gravitated towards more “musical” songs-- classicial stuff, rock with power chords, even trance/house stuff.
Recently, however (in my 30s), my ear seems to have changed dramatically. I can now “hear” the lyrics better, and I’m constantly finding myself surprised at songs that I’ve listened to (and loved) for years, even decades, are about things I had NO IDEA they were about. Really obvious deals, too-- like Christian rock even (“Ohhhhh. . . Jars of Clay are singing about JESUS!”).
My personal favorite: I now know that the Kinks’ song “Lola” is about a transvestite. I learned this last year, at age 32. I’ve been humming the song since I was 10, give or take.
Life is plenty weird, once you start paying attention!
(BTW, to the OP’s question-- 99 Luftballons is one of those songs that seems to work in either language, although admittedly the politics makes more sense when you can understand what she’s singing about ;-).
I don’t know about the words or how they’re translated, but the Spanish verses in this performance of John Denver’s Annie’s Song has far too many syllables. (Spanish bit starts at 1:30.)
chu chu lovely muni muni mura mura purin purin boron nurururerorero might be the catchiest song ever but 2 things ruined it for me.
First was watching the video on youtube and seeing that they’re Japanese Goths and the second was translating the lyrics and figuring out it was about raping underage girls.
99 Luftballons sounds wonderful in German, and is a bit less dramatic in English. I can only pick out a few of the German words, but it is a song I never again want to hear in English.
Well. Rape. Period. The male part clearly doesn’t give a crap about age. Like, at ALL. The last verse goes something like ‘A college girl’d be good, or a high school girl, or a middle school girl, or a kindergarten girl’. He’s just an all-round creepy SOB. There’s also no particular indicator of the age of the girl he’s stalking at the time (although I’d guess from the imagery she’s a young adult).
It doesn’t celebrate the old south at all. It’s a story song about the way the US Civil War impacted on average people living in the south at the time, spoken by a man looking back on the war and the things and people he lost to it. It was written by Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, after visiting the south US and being struck by the spoken rhythms and underlying sadness regarding the past.