The Default Language Of Pop Music

I was not sure how to title this but I knew what I wanted to say. Essentially the English expect everyone to be able to understand them by having English as a second language. It's a spill out from Imperialism where a lot of people seem to think it still exists. You see so much that is skewed towards English despite Mandarin being the most spoken language in the world.

One of the problems is English is so complicated , but that does mean it’s a great language for writing in , but the complication you would think would have stopped it spreading.around the world , but it's’ amazing what guns, genocide and imperialism can do.

But that is far too much political soapboxing because the point of this is just to share a list of hit records that I know of that were big hits but were actually sung in the bands or singers native language. I often think Abba’s lyrics are a bit dodgy but English is their second language, I certainly couldn’t write in a foreign language.

These days a lot of bands are fine performing in their own language , I am thinking Rammstein and things like “Du Hast” but again they are not troubling the mainstream singles chart. There are also bands like Sigur Ros who combine Icelandic and a made up language and if we go back to the seventies Christian Vander’s Magma used a completely made up language for their relentless space operatics although the titles were still understandable.

Then there was Esperanto who used the Esperanto language (the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language.) for their songs , but again not mainstream.

That was a hell of an introduction. I am going to share videos for all the songs that I list.

Richie Valens - La Bamba

The earliest I am aware of is “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens which was a Mexican folk song, originally from the state of Veracruz. It was a Top 40 hit in the U.S. charts. Valens's version is ranked number 345 on Rolling Stone magazine′s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It is the only song on the list sung in a language other than English.

"La Bamba" has been covered by numerous artists, notably by Los Lobos whose version was the title track of the 1987 film La Bamba, a bio-pic about Valens.

Autobahn - Kraftwerk

The title track of their 1974 album took up the first side of the album and clocked in at around twenty minutes, the radio edit of the song became a surprise international hit, reaching number 11 in the UK, number 12 in both Canada and the Netherlands, number 25 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, and number 30 in the Australian chart, and it was in German.

Da Da Da - Trio

Done as bet by three university professors who reckoned they could write hit single. This is a minimalist masterpiece and there are some English bits dropped in , but it is mostly in German and is totally brilliant.

Ca Plane Pour Moi - Plastic Bertrand

This 1977 punkish pop song by Belgian Plastic Betrand was definitely French and people still sang along to it. Again some English dropped in but not quite Franglais , but still an excellent couple of minutes to listen to.

So sorry that is only four songs although lots more bands are happy singing in their own language and younger audiences are happy accepting a non English song, let’s face it all the songs above you can easily sing along to the chorus regardless of whether you know the language or not.

Enjoy and feel free to tell me all the ones that I have missed