After “Der Kommissar,” for instance, Falco had a huge hit with “Rock Me Amadeus.” Originally all-German, the international version featured English lyrics. One apparent rule of having a foreign-language hit in the United States is that you probably won’t have another you can have other hits, but they have to be in English. It was also a goofy YouTube clip that introduced Americans to Moldovan pop a few years ago, specifically “Dragostea Din Tei,” better known here as “ The Numa Numa Song.” Earlier, this year, a Mad Men episode had viewers Googling “ Zooby Zooby Zoo” (actually “Zou Bisou Bisou,”), when a scene featured Jessica Pare singing the 1962 French tune. “Gangnam Style” broke internationally thanks to its viral video. It helps that the Anglophone tastes of mainstream radio stations have less and less influence. In addition to the wild success of “Gangnam Style,” there are other signs pointing to a more multilingual pop horizon. With Piaf’s doleful delivery, do you need to know French to know the story of “ Mon Dieu” is a sad one? Others, from France’s Edith Piaf to Germany’s Rammstein, have had no problem attracting audiences who have no idea of what they’re singing about.
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Thanks to After the Fire’s English version of “Der Kommissar” we know the song is about druggy underground folk, but we lose the swagger of Falco’s staccato German from the original. I don’t speak a word of Korean, but my guess is it would be something of a letdown. Given the history of pop, an English translation of “Gangnam Style” may not be far off. Those throat-clearing sounds you hear in German? That’s the voiceless velar fricative, and it adds a wonderful percussiveness to “ 99 Luftbalons.” English speakers don’t have it it’s one reason the Anglicized version of Nena’s 1984 hit falls flat. That most of us don’t understand the words only allows us to better appreciate the phonology of a language and concentrate on the human voice as a musical instrument. English-only listening habits deprive us of the natural rhythm and melody of other languages-the nasal vowels of French, the alveolar trills of Portuguese, the consonant clusters of Czech. A non-English-language song hasn’t topped Billboard’s Hot 100 since Los Lobos’ version of “ La Bamba” in 1987 (not so fast, “Macarena” fans-half the lyrics of that 1996 song were sung in English).
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1 on the pop chart the same year (1963) has dwindled significantly. But the sort of multilingualism that allowed for both a French-language song (“Domenique”) and a Japanese one (“ Sukiyaki”) to become No. (The ’90s also saw the odd pop success of actual Latin: those chanting monks and Enigma’s Sadeness (Part 1)).
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Given that some 50 million people in the United States are of Hispanic origin, the market is certainly viable, and some Spanish-language songs have enjoyed crossover success. Pop hasn’t gone entirely monolingual since: A Latin music boom emerged in the 1990s, giving rise to stars like Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin, who occasionally sing in Spanish. In the 1950s and 1960s you could turn on the radio and hear a tune in Italian (“ Volare,” 1958), German (“ Sailor” 1960), or Xhosa (“ Pata Pata,” 1966). “Gangnam Style” is the first smash foreign-language song in the United States in years-and, with any hope, a sign of more to come-but it’s hardly the first.
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How to account for the more than 650 million YouTube views of “ Gangnam Style”? That jaunty dance surely deserves some credit, but might the faucalized voice and aspirated consonants of the Korean language play a part as well? It may seem unlikely, though perhaps no more unlikely than everything else about Psy’s megahit.