09 Multi-Language Songs

Today’s episode is all about music that exists in multiple languages. Join Scot on a journey of discovery exploring the ins and outs of some of some great examples of this phenomenon.  We talk The Beatles, Shakira, BoA, Encanto, Phil Collins, Avril Lavigne, Shania Twain, Johnny Cash, and more!

From all over the world find out about the artists that have done this strange yet impressive feat and hear them in the act. 

Check videos for all the songs discussed here:

http://perfectshow.site/09-multi-language-songs/

Check the original songs here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxDnKc4gzWuwjpl1tz6WUw

Special thanks to fiverr artists who worked on the songs from this episode: 

 

Cana Rialto - canarialto: https://www.fiverr.com/canarialto

 

Chloe Chan - jiachen782: https://www.fiverr.com/jiachen782

 

Arunabh Kumar - arunabhkumar: https://www.fiverr.com/arunabhkumar

 

Charu Haran - charuharan: https://www.fiverr.com/charuharan

 

Ekata Sharma - ekatashreya: https://www.fiverr.com/ekatashreya

 

Thomas Mennuni - thomasmennuni: https://www.fiverr.com/thomasmennuni

 

Lucas GM - lucas_gm: https://www.fiverr.com/lucas_gm

 

StudioBlackroom - studioblackroom: https://www.fiverr.com/studioblackroom

Music from this episode by:

 

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

 

Bastreon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

 

Handanu - https://www.fiverr.com/handanu

 

Shawn Korkie - https://www.fiverr.com/shawnkorkie

 

KG Rap Official - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial

 

Lofi_rob - https://www.fiverr.com/lofi_rob

 

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

 

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

 

Mall - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328

 

A Calm Moment to Remember Before Taking the Dangerous Road - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Helice_Awesome_Dance_Adventure_/a-calm-moment-to-remember-before-taking-the-dangerous-roa

 

AI-Generated Transcript:

 

Speaker 1: 0:19

Hey, it's Scott. Quick disclaimer here at the top this episode has clips from a lot of songs and one of them has a curse word that I haven't beeped, so if that's something you like to be aware of ahead of time, well, now you are Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I find it very impressive when people are able to function in multiple languages. I've had conversations in mixed company that switch back and forth between English and Japanese frequently, and those are the moments when I really feel the seams of my own language ability stretching much more so compared to times where I only need to operate in English or Japanese. But some people just seem to be able to flip back and forth between languages mid-sentence effortlessly. I'm also quite impressed by musical ability of any kind. In particular, singing Instruments carry their own complexities, for sure. I played a few growing up and I get that. But to me they are maybe less daunting because, as long as they are in tune, they usually have an obvious mechanical action for achieving a note, like press this key or cover that hole. Singing feels like you're asked to do the same thing just without the help of any equipment or machinery. You're just expected to nail the note all on your own. So then it should come as no surprise that people who can sing in multiple languages nearly short circuit my brain. I've memorized some non-English lyrics to a few songs over the years. But to be able to perform musically in front of a microphone while operating in a language that isn't your well, I can't even say native language, because some people absolutely do grow up speaking two, three or more languages, but it's just a stack to me, you know. Difficult thing on top of difficult thing on top of yet another difficult thing and pulling it all off. That's why this episode I want to celebrate music that travels across languages and the singers putting their skills on display. Now let me jump out here and set up some guidelines, because there are some gray areas in that statement, but I'm looking for songs that follow a very specific set of rules. First and foremost, it has to be the same singer doing both languages. I came across some foreign language versions of songs, but they were sung by a different singer and I'd consider that to be pretty much a cover song, even though it's in a different language. But that's not what I'm talking about here. So the singer needs to be the same, but also I'm looking for the song to be the same too. Right, someone singing all their regular songs in English but then throwing it in an Ave Maria on a Christmas album or something? That's not going to count. Same singer, same song, multiple languages. By the way, the more language versions the song has, the happier it makes me. I mean, remaking a song in a second language is mind-blowing enough to me, but some musicians don't stop it only too. My joy about the whole thing just increases exponentially for each additional language that's involved. When I started this search, I only really knew of a handful of examples, most of which I had personally collected over the years as just oddities and curiosities, and I'll get to each of those. But in researching for this episode, I discovered a ton of additional examples and started taking notes. Remember, I love this type of song where some people may light up at the first edition of a famous book. I light up at the French edition of a famous song. In collecting all the songs for this, my multi-language music collection grew way bigger, like Grinchart style, and when the song list got long enough, I started to see some similarities among the different tracks, and what I came up with was three different categories for these songs on my list. Category 1 Category 1 the first category is for singers who release music in multiple markets regularly. Usually, if I find out about them, there's an English version involved, and oftentimes, if there's another version of the song, it'll be in Spanish due to the large overlap of Spanish-speaking and English-speaking markets where I live. I'm sure there are a ton of examples that I have no idea about out there with songs and pairs or trios of languages that just don't involve English. Now, this may seem obvious, but a lot of the artists in this category are multilingual, meaning they speak two or more languages. I mean, it's got to make it easier to sing in a language if you're already comfortable communicating in it, right? Ricky Martin, who became a huge star in the late 90s, early 2000s, has a ton of songs like this. A good example is Liv and La Vida Loca, which, like a lot of his songs, has an English version and a. Spanish version released simultaneously to play in both the Spanish and English-speaking markets. Same thing with Gloria Estefan, who has released a ton of her songs in two languages for those two markets, as both a solo artist and as a member of the Miami Sound Machine, making her an icon of Latin music. While Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were battling it out at the top of the English pop charts, christina was pulling double duty, with her songs climbing the Latin music charts at the same time. The first time I heard Christina's voice sounding like this but it was also on different radio stations and rotations sounding like this Shakira is another great example for this category of musician. Shakira is a Colombian singer who got huge in Colombia and other Spanish-speaking countries. Then her success started to prompt her to venture into other markets, first from Spanish to Portuguese for the nearby Brazilian market, then from Spanish to English, starting in 2001. So on her crossover album Laundry Service, shakira hit it big with the lead single Whenever.

Speaker 3: 6:13

Wherever.

Speaker 1: 6:31

But I remember this happening. It was everywhere and taught the English-speaking world the name Shakira, but where she was already hugely famous, they were hearing this wonderful version. There are a ton of examples from this group, especially in African, latin and South American countries, that I haven't mentioned because I just don't know about them. I have huge blind spots here for sure. I feel like I'm trying to skim over all the music from everywhere in the world from all of time, so I expect I'll miss a ton. Sorry, it's not on purpose. I'm gonna miss some and not for nothing, but that would be a great type of thing to make a note of and email me to let me know about through the show's email address, perfectshowshowcom. Okay, at the core of these songs is the language ability that the singer already has or sometimes develops. I mean they can conceive of doing the song in another language because the language ability is already there In each case. I think the singer's language skills are at the heart of the idea, and being able to be the song's voice in more than one language really helps them gain footholds in each language's music industry. Speaking of singers with impressive language talents, shakira is fluent in Spanish, english, portuguese and Catalan. She can also sing in Italian, french and Arabic, which is justwow. Looking at that list, arabic might stick out as a language not as closely related to the others, but Shakira is of Colombian Lebanese descent and has released music in Lebanon, where the official language is Arabic. Now, if Whitney Houston had sung Whenever, wherever, instead of Shakira, I'm sure it would still be a great song and probably even a massive hit, because Whitney Houston is a hitmaker, but she probably wouldn't be able to sing hers perfectly in seven different languages. As an honorable mention to this category, I want to list someone who did something sort of the same and sort of different. Canadian singer Shania Twain also wanted to cross over between two different music markets, but they weren't in different languages. Shania was a country music star to this point. She was selling tons of albums but wasn't a mainstream pop artist. So she put out her own crossover album in 2002, meant to take her not from a Spanish market into an English market or vice versa, but from the country charts to the pop charts. That album is called Up, and the unusual thing about it is that it came with two discs. Each disc had the same songs, just mixed and remastered in a different way. One was a green disc with the songs mixed in the modern country music style that she had been doing up to that point. The other CD was a red disc with the exact same songs but mixed and built for pop and top 40 radio stations. Being an American with an older sister who was into country music, she owned Shania's album, so I was familiar with both of these versions. But outside of the US there isn't really a market for American country music. So Shania Twain's international CD also had two discs the red one mixed as pop songs, and a blue disc where instead of country music it had the same slate of songs but this time mixed in more of a world music style with some eastern instruments and rhythms. So the same song would sound like this on the red pop disc and then like this on the green country disc and then like this on the blue international disc, and it worked. All that effort really paid off. That album was a number one smash and it was huge for Twain's career. It also really wrote a playbook for how future artists like Taylor Swift would make the same move. Well, maybe without the world versions. I haven't heard any T-Swift songs like that, with the sweet sitar sounds playing underneath, though I'd be into it. But the first multi-language songs that I ever became conscious of were when I was living in Japan and first got really exposed to the world of J-pop. J-pop is a genre of music where the J stands for Japanese and pop stands for popular music like how we use it. There's J-pop, k-pop, of course, for Korean pop music, but also C-pop for Chinese music, v-pop for Vietnamese, t-pop for Thai and so on and so forth. You get the idea. Pretty much every language is going to have its own pop music scene and stars, because these markets can be smaller individually. The mega, mega stars often have appeal that overlaps into multiple music markets, appeal that even reaches the teenagers of another country and has them singing the lyrics and doing the dances of these pop idols BTS, anyone. This is where I came in. Well, not the singing and dancing part, but when I was teaching junior high schoolers in Japan, they'd often have questions for me about what it was like, where I was from and what the kids their age did in America. I would share my experiences, but also ask what kind of TV or music they were into too. Then I would head down to the rental store with a list of media to look for. I say the rental store to set it apart from a video or DVD rental store Not that those even exist in America anymore, but because of the bigger rental stores in Japan, like Tadaya Rented Movies, sure, but they also rented video games, books and music CDs too. I'd talk to my students and ask them to check my list to make sure I got the names right, which you may think is an unnecessary step or an exaggeration, but I would need to remember new artist names and sometimes weird J-pop music group names, so that I could go to the store later and search for the latest single from bands like Rip Slime or Bump of Chicken, small detour. My daughter saw this bit in my notes and was really curious about the Japanese band Bump of Chicken and what their name meant. Having lived for years in Japan. I got pretty used to seeing strange English phrases like that so I hadn't wondered about it. It was just Bump of Chicken's name, if anything. I guess I would have assumed it was about pieces of chicken that you eat, although no form of chicken I know of is measured in bumps. But sure Turns out it's actually a sweaty English translation for the Japanese phrase Jakshan no Hankeki, or counter attack of the week. In this sense, chicken is their way of saying like a coward or weakling someone you might hear called a chicken, and the Bump is more along the lines of a pro wrestling term, meaning a hit or an attack. That's interesting to me. I'd never do that before. Okay, bump of Chicken aren't out there singing their songs in English, so I should probably get back to the main topic, end detour. Anyway, I would find these singers that my students were listening to Deep dive on their albums for a weekend or so, photocopy the lyrics from the lyrics book and try to memorize some lines to show my students that I cared about what they were into, and in turn I would usually get students more engaged in my classes. It was a mutual benefit. This also wasn't any kind of torture for me. I like J-pop. I like all music for the most part, and while I'm aware that's an obnoxious thing to say, I just don't know any other way to describe it. I'm way more particular about any spoken audio I'm listening to than I ever am about music. So I already liked rock and rap and alternative and R&B, but I also liked super pop music like Backstreet Boys, hanson, you know whoever. That part made the transition to J-pop easy and pretty seamless. I gave anything a chance and since I wasn't listening to the radio or seeing whatever anime it was from, I would just pick the songs I liked off the albums with no real context apart from the way they sounded, put them on my iPod and then listen whenever I rode the bike or the train. This was the way I discovered Boa. That spelled B-O-A, or more specifically, with a capital B, lowercase O and then a capital A. I don't have anything more interesting about that. I just thought I should say it, since I'm not confident that you could just pick up with your ears, and I'm pronouncing it with a capital A at the end Boa, okay. Boa is a J-pop star and was on top of the charts when I lived in Japan. I dipped in on a lot of the chart-topping music. This was the era of Ayumi Hamasaki, tadahikaru Kotokumi Otsuka-Ai. The boy groups were there too, like Orein, shidaenji, glee and News, but Boa was a juggernaut. She's one of only a handful of artists in Japan to ever have six albums in a row hit number one on the Oricon charts, which would be like the Billboard charts here in America. Boa fit right in with the classic J-pop songs of the early 2000s, with her bouncy dance tracks and soulful ballads. It really was wild to see the pop aesthetic of American artists like Britney and N-Sync fully replicated in these Japanese pop acts, all the way down to the outfits, vocal ticks and dance choreography. The thing that set Boa apart, though, was her scope. She wasn't the biggest selling artist in Japan, sure, but Japan also wasn't the only place she was selling music. Boa's full name is Boa Kwan, and, for those unfamiliar with East Asian languages, kwan is not a Japanese surname, it's Korean. I was hearing Boa in Japan for the first time like this, but music fans in Korea were hearing her like this. Other people heard her singing Mandarin Chinese like this, and then there's also the people that heard her first in English like this. Boa was first discovered by a talent agency who decided she was someone they wanted to turn into a pop star. So they got her taking lessons in singing, dancing and Japanese, because a crossover career was very much in the plans from the beginning. She debuted with moderate successes in Korea as a teenager and then switched to focus on the Japanese music market and a music career in Japan. Her first Japanese album came out in 2002 and debuted at number one, which was the first album by a Korean artist to ever do that in Japan. A huge part of her being the first Korean to do that had to do with timing. Boa was very much a case of right person, right place, right time. Not only was she young and talented, boa was achieving her popularity right as the worlds of Japan and Korea were changing forever. So there's a huge history under this. It's complicated, it's ugly and I certainly won't do much of it justice here, but Japan and Korea have had tensions with each other for a very long time. It's pretty mild now, but there's a lot of history there, from World War II and many years after Korea was occupied by Japan, and it wasn't until decades later that they could end the occupation, form a democratic government and become the South Korea we know today. In the wake of ending that occupation, south Korea also implemented bands on Japanese music or media from being imported, sold or broadcast on Korean stations, which led to a mutual ban between the two countries for decades. Right now, in the year 2022, it's still against the law to broadcast Jappies music or TV over South Korean terrestrial stations. But the first part of the ban started to be lifted and open back up in 1999 and 2000,. Then, slowly, more and more, over the next couple of years. Bowa was a Korean artist atop the first wave, the hallue of Korean music popularity that was gaining real force in the early 2000s, right when the restrictions in Japan were finally lifted. Those restrictions were pretty much all out of the way by the end of 03, culminating in the date of January 1, 2004, when it once again became officially legal for stores in Korea to sell Japanese music media movies, animation, comics, etc. After the ban that had lasted for decades was over, bowa released her first major albums, originally in Japanese, where she had gained immense popularity, and then, writing that popularity, she started releasing albums in Korea, again containing many of the same songs on her Japanese albums, but now in Korean. Of course, some of the singles on those albums came out Mandarin, chinese and English as well, which allowed her music to move across nation and language boundaries, cementing her popularity in multiple countries across Asia. She is a humongous star, and I was just diving into Japanese music when she was doing her thing and cranking out hit after hit, so naturally a lot of her music wound up on my iPod. I want to also add Sebastian Yatra as a really current example. He sings the song Dosorugitas, or Two Little Caterpillars, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda for the Disney animated film Incompto. The song appears on the soundtrack twice, first in Spanish and then again in English, both sung beautifully by Yatra. This actually segues quite nicely into my next category, category 2. I'm going to call this category cog in the machine songs. I know that's a terribly clunky title, I'm working on it, but what I mean is that these songs only exist as part of a larger thing needed to make that whole thing run, and in that regard, disney songs are a perfect example on a couple of levels. On one level, the songs in Disney movies are cogs in the movies themselves. A classic hallmark of musicals is that they tell part of the story through the songs. If you were to cut out any of the songs, you wouldn't get the complete story. The songs are built specifically to function as both music and plot. CATEGORY 2 Since Disney is an international mega corporation, they release their big movies translated into many languages, and since the songs are a key part of those movies, the songs get translated too. The translations from my first category started with a singer creating the song and then a version, but with the Disney model and the channels for distribution, it's actually the reverse, where they know for a fact they will need a translation of the same song into 27 different languages before there even is a song or a singer. Without fully getting into the cynicism of Disney actually being a merchandise company and these movies existing largely as means to sell colorful plastic trinkets en masse, it's a good bet to think that these animated musicals will continue to happen, especially since they've been knocking it out of the park with them lately, which means Disney's world-conquering song translation machine should also continue chugging along. Now, while Disney movies hit over 2 dozen languages, they understandably search within each language's speakers for vocalists who can deliver solid songs in that language. Let it Go was a monster of a song for Frozen, and I saw that video of it being sung in every language, but each one of them had a different vocalist belting it out. That makes total sense to me. You have a machine that needs to keep rolling, so you get the person who can do the job and you move on Back to Incanto. Though I don't speak Spanish at all, and when the song Do Soro Guitas plays in the film itself, it's Yatra's Spanish version. The English version does play later over the credits, but in the movie the Spanish version plays without subtitles and it doesn't matter at all. With that guy's voice, with the imagery they're presenting, with just the way the notes sound, you get it.

Speaker 3: 22:10

You totally get it.

Speaker 1: 22:16

Interestingly enough, with Do Soro Guitas. While it's rare for Disney to have a song sung in two languages by the same artist, what's rare still is that it's not covered in any of the other languages that the movie's released in. In all the other versions, on all of the soundtracks, the other songs are translated into the different languages French, flemish, serbian, swedish, etc. But Do Soro Guitas appears on all of them in its original Spanish sung by Yatra, and then again, as in English version, by Yatra. None of them have it in another language. Strong evidence that I'm not the only one who thinks the song does a pretty good job of Transcending words and language on its own. Now, I said that this was a rare thing because I am aware of one other instance of this happening in a Disney movie, and pretty impressively so. I just didn't become aware of it until years after it came out. In 1999, disney released an animated film called Tarzan, and it was about Tarzan, the baby who gets raised in the jungle around animals and grows up really good with the environment, wildlife, that he gets discovered by people who are like whoa. Hey, check this weird guy out. You know it Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs is Tarzan, but an animated version with talking animals and catchy songs For Disney's Tarzan. These catchy songs all come from Phil Collins, the British musician who has had a huge career both in a band called Genesis and as a solo artist. Phil was pulled in to provide the songs for this, which was a move Disney had been refining. Disney started with interlinking one song by a major recording artist per movie, like in Beauty of the Beast or Latin, and it would usually run over the credits. But then Disney hit real gold on the Lion King, without John doing all the songs, and that's basically what they were trying to replicate, again on Tarzan, but with Phil Collins. So Tarzan has four different songs and a reprise in the movie. There's another song that's all percussion, but it doesn't have any lyrics or singing, so I'm not counting that one for this. Another track is a longer version of one of the earlier songs for the movie's credits and radio play. So it feels fair to call it four songs in a reprise. Phil Collins sings those four songs on the Tarzan soundtrack. That much I knew when the movie came out, sure, but it took moving to Japan and running into the movie on DVD to find out the next bit. Tarzan got released in 35 languages. They were expanding the reach of their animated films and this was the most languages. To that point, japanese was one of those languages. So when I was living in Japan and went to the DVD, it was set to Japanese as a default. Also, spoiler alert, phil Collins doesn't sing the Japanese songs. That's not where I'm going with this. But when I'm switching languages and looking at the choices on the DVD menu, I see that it also gives me a whole bunch of language options. Now, I was already a fan of the soundtrack. I had it on my iPod and I was into the tracks. I'm not afraid to say these songs are bangers. They're solidly good. So as I'm watching the movie, I start to wonder how they deal with the songs in the different languages and I start flipping through the Audio tracks with the remote while Tarzan is playing. First I'd be hearing Phil Collins sing Son of man in English. Then flip, now it's in Spanish. But wait, is that still Phil Collins? It is flip, again French Phil Collins, and again and again English, spanish, french, italian and German. Phil Collins himself sang all the Tarzan songs in five of the languages that Disney released them in. I Also briefly thought he might have done the Bulgarian version too. But that's not Phil, it's just a talented Bulgarian musician who does a pretty good Phil Collins so Phil Collins is madman records four songs in a reprise in five separate languages. That is just unbelievable to me. I actually have all of Phil's versions in my music library too, and that makes the comic book collector and me very happy to have a Complete run. But what makes this happen on Tarzan? Well, here we clearly have the perfect storm of a person from category one who can handle multiple languages being used in category two, where there's already a pre-made need for the translated songs when the project starts. It also helps that several of the songs are pretty short, under three or even two minutes, which is not to downplay anything at all about what Phil Collins did. I am truly in awe of that kind of ability. Maybe this would be a good time to shift gears again and talk about the third and final category. I was able to break these songs down into category three. So if category one is driven by the singer and category two is driven by the well, maybe the company or the producer, for lack of a better word. Then category three is driven by the song. Sure, song popularity overlaps with the overall popularity of a singer. But some songs just take off like a rocket and they're huge hits for a musician, even when compared to their other hits. I guess the first one of these I ever knew about would have been 99 red balloons from 1983, which I learned about way later during the one year of German I took in high school. The song was in German first as 99 Luftblüten's and then was such a hit that recording artist Nina rerecorded it in English for the American market. Another German band named Romstein would do the same thing in 97 with their single do host. Five years after that Russian duo tattoo recorded their hit song oh Boy, okay, I'm gonna give this one my best shot. But they recorded their hit song yes, I saw some ah. And released all the things she said in English. Doing any internet search for these type of songs, I'll tell you a band that pops up front center lot is of course the Beatles. If we're talking about pop songs that were such Huge hits they break borders and cross cultures. I'm not sure anyone can even touch the Beatles in that arena. They hit such a popularity level that their songs went everywhere in the original English form. You'd have teens in Poland, egypt and Peru all singing Beatles songs in English. But before this was the case, they were trying to get famous just like any other pop band and early on their record, execs Told them they would need alternate versions of the songs to break into non-English markets. Wikipedia says this was a time when that was a standard practice and the execs finally convinced the Beatles, so they recorded a single and released it in Germany with two Beatles songs I want to hold your hand and she loves you. But now in German, I want to hold your hand because come get me or die in a hot. You may have even heard this one recently. It was just prominently featured in the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, directed by Tycho with TT and she loves you, of course becomes she leaped deep. The German versions did well in Germany, because of course they did. It's the Beatles German version of I want to hold your hand hit number one. But the Beatles followed it sort of a different strategy after this. Instead of making more foreign language versions of their songs, they've just decided to become the biggest band in the world so everyone could come to them and they wouldn't have to bother translating their songs again for anybody. I mean, I'm kidding in my characterization, but that is essentially what happened. The Beatles never made another alternate language version of one of their songs again, and the popularity of their English songs and music is even credited with spreading and boosting the popularity of the entire English language across Europe and into other parts of the world. That's, that's just an insane amount of cultural outreach. But other artists who weren't quite as big as the Beatles a category that included literally everyone else continued to record some of their biggest hits in other languages for other markets. Country music legend Johnny Cash also released an EP in Germany with him singing five songs in German, the most notable one being his famous hit I Walk the Line.

Speaker 3: 31:15

But of course in German.

Speaker 1: 31:31

But of course in German. And you've probably heard Johnny Cash sing Ring of Fire. You may not have heard him sing it in Spanish, but he actually put out a few tracks in Spanish when Ring of Fire was coming out, figuring that would overlap well for Latin music markets with the Mariachi style riff in the song. Abba is the number one selling Swedish band of all time and the first band ever from a non-English speaking country to have consistent success on the music charts of English speaking countries. Being a quartet of Swedes, abba was of course able to sing in their native Swedish, and we knew that they could sing in English. But then, in that classic European move, they translated and sang their biggest songs into a ton of other languages too. So we have English for most of their songs, but ABBA's song catalog also has four Swedish songs three in German, one in French and fifteen in Spanish. The Spanish songs came from a play that makes waves and inroads into South America. Those were all released on an album called Oro, which is essentially an ABBA greatest hits album, but the songs were all re-sung in Spanish. It's amazing. The current landscape of musical royalty has produced a few great cuts, for my collection too, also in Spanish. All millions of English speakers were here in the Spanish market heard. That's right. Beyonce is also a player in this game and, like she usually does, she killed it. In her next album, she did the same thing with If I Were a Boy.

Speaker 2: 35:02

Leading to this wonderful Spanish version.

Speaker 1: 35:15

Beyonce's voice still slays, no matter what language she sang it. In 2012, the American band chairlift released their second album, and the single I Belong in your Arms Also got released as a Japanese version. They made the Japanese version as a bonus track for the Japanese release of that album, a thing I saw a lot in Japan and had already known from showing out what were big bucks to me as a teenager to get Japanese albums from bands I love, just for that extra song or two.

Speaker 2: 36:13

Now not.

Speaker 1: 36:14

A lot of artists on this list are going from English to an Asian language. This chairlift song is one, and there are a couple more examples coming up, but for the most part the western artists I've got on here are translating their songs from western languages to other western languages. I started studying Japanese when I was in high school, so I've been around language study for a while and there's this pervasive thing around Asian languages in America anyway about them being impenetrable or extra hard or impossible for whatever reason. I personally think that a lot of that is wrapped up in Orientalism and this fetish desire in the west to characterize anything Asian as mysterious and unknowable. But I also just think different brains take languages differently. I took a year of German in high school, like I said, and never really felt like I was getting it. Japanese had challenges, for sure, but a different set than the challenges I was having with German, and I found that Japanese just made a lot more sense in my brain and I enjoyed learning it way more. I guess what I'm saying is Japanese is hard in certain ways and not in others, just like any language. In my experience, the hardest part about learning Japanese for a lot of people can be starting with the mentality that it's some especially hard thing to learn. Another artist that fits right in here is British singer Charlie XCX, who, if you don't know her by name, maybe you'll recognize her voice from this Iconopop hit that she also wrote. Well, charlie XCX also did the same thing as chairlift and other bands. For one of her albums, japanese releases, she added bonus tracks of two of her songs translated to Japanese. Charlie worked with J-pop artists to translate the songs and now, because of that, we get to hear 2014's Break the Rules in English and also Japanese. Likewise, in this album, we get to choose which version of her song Boom Clap we want to play English or Japanese. Now there's one final singer I want to talk about in this category, someone who's released a song in the most number of languages I could find. So, if you've been keeping track, boa songs were coming out in four languages Japanese, chinese, english, korean. Shakira was also a four language, or Spanish, portuguese, english and Catalan. Phil Collins sang guitars and songs of five English French, spanish, italian and German. Abba's another fiver. So I know you're wondering well, scott, who could you be saving for now? Who could have more than that? Well, how about some hints. She's Canadian. She's an icon famous worldwide for decades now. She's known for her ballads and her pop songs, selling millions of albums and going multi-platform. In fact, she currently holds the title for the biggest selling album by Canadian artist in the 21st century. Oh, and she sang a big song in a Disney movie. Do you have it yet? Do you know who it is? Well, I'm talking about, of course, the one and only Avril Lavigne. It really felt like I was going to say Celine Dion there, right? I mean, I did that on purpose, with those clues. That's what I would have originally thought to, and I do find Celine Dion to be conspicuously absent from this discussion. She's definitely someone who has multi-language singing abilities, but she used those skills to release albums in different languages with completely different songs on them, and then, as her popularity started to skyrocket, her song releases more closely followed the Beatles pattern, where the song would be so huge, like my Heart Will Go On from Titanic, that it topped charts worldwide while staying in the original English version. Celine didn't pack her multi-linguistic singing talents away, though. There are videos of her singing in 9 languages, but the difference here is she's often singing a famous song originally from that language, not a translated one of her own, like a famous Italian aria in Italy for a huge stadium, or a classic Spanish ballad that showcases her voice and range in Madrid no less impressive for sure, but just a slightly different flavor of amazing than what we're focusing on here. But back to Avril Lavigne. All those things I said that could have made it Celine Dion are also absolutely true about Avril. The Disney movie she did a song for was the live action Alice in Wonderland, and her top selling album All Time for a Canadian artist is her debut album Let Go. That's the one with Skater Boy and complicated on it. But I'm going to focus more on her third album, the Best Damn Thing, and the lead single from it, girlfriend. If you've listened to other episodes of this podcast, this might not surprise you, considering my clear love for this drop. The album came out in 2007 when I was still living in Japan, and let me tell you Avril was, is and will continue to be very popular in Japan. Avril's whole thing. It's very much in line with Japan's whole thing. Her look and music merge with the Japanese fashion and J-pop music scenes pretty seamlessly. So when her third album came out, I was seeing it being promoted on Japanese TV and in stores and heavily marketed different places. Now I am already an Avril Lavigne fan of fan role Lavigne, anyway, I was a fan at that point too, but not as big of one yet. I think Girlfriend was the song to really change that for me. I put her whole new album on my iPod. I remember that iPod was one of those tall, thin iPod nanos that I had a little armband for so I could wear it running, and it connected to a little Nike Plus doodad that I clipped to my shoelaces, and together the two devices would measure how far and how fast I was going on my runs. This is something that pretty much every phone does now, but I was excited by this very cool and very new technology back then, excited enough that it even got me to start running regularly, which was something I didn't particularly like to do at all. Another exciting feature for me on that iPod, one that I looked at as sort of a secret compartment or something, but you could program it to designate a power song. A power song was a track you set and whenever you pressed and held the center button oh, apple devices used to have buttons but you held the center button for a second and it would stop whatever was happening and fire up your power song and my power song. Well, I discovered that my sprinting pace at the end of a run matched the tempo of Girlfriend perfectly. So I would head out, listen to whatever I was listening to, run my route, and then, near the end, I would get ready to empty whatever was left in my gas tank on a sprint to my finish line. And so I would reach up my left hand to my right arm, find the raised button area through the moisture wicking meal print sleeve, and I was off. The song is three and a half minutes of pure pop perfection. One of the things people hate about pop music is the artificial energy it injects, but I actually love that. I mean, I used it literally for that purpose, to inject energy into my body when I was running on fumes. So I really liked Girlfriend, but I'm easy. What about the rest of the world? Well, girlfriend was a mega success. The video became the most watched video on YouTube of all time song hit number one in eight different countries. It gave Avril her first number one song in America In the effort to make it a success in other markets and worldwide. They created a total of eight different language versions where the verses were still in English, but that one infectious chorus part was translated from English, the first language, and then recorded in seven more. Even though she only recorded the chorus in each language, it's not a long song and the chorus repeats five times throughout, so that still leaves a decent percentage of each one in the new language. The versions were all released together on the Avril Lavigne girlfriend international single, which, bringing us back full circle, is a CD that I checked out from a Japanese rental store, and the rest is history. Okay, here we go. The girlfriend international translation lineup is English, spanish, french, italian, portuguese, german, japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Wikipedia says there was also going to be a version in Hindi, but they scrapped that one after two failed attempts because, according to a quote from her manager, we tried Hindi twice but the diction and meter of how you sing in Hindi versus the Western rhythms just didn't match and we just couldn't pull it off. So they stopped at only eight languages. They were focusing on Asia because, also according to a CBC article, asia accounted for more than half of Avril's total music sales at the time of girlfriend's release. It also says Avril spent time working on getting her pronunciation right in each language. I have no real authority in any of the other languages, but, honestly, in her Japanese version the pronunciation is actually not bad at all. It's a bit choppy and stilted, but, to be honest, that's how the English of that chorus sounds to me anyway, and I've also heard tons of J-pop singers sing Japanese in very similar ways. Back when the album was released, mtv News put out a piece where they assembled some native speakers for each of Avril's versions and critiqued the translations and pronunciations. Well, while they were less generous about some of the Western pronunciations, their Japanese speaker agreed with me that the Japanese version isn't bad. Oh, before I play these versions, wikipedia also clued me in on one strange coincidence that I wanted to bring up. Avril Lavigne is mainly known as a musician, but she has acted a few times. Her first role was in an animated movie called Over the Hedge as the voice of an apostle named Heather. Funnily enough, when that movie was translated into different languages, the voice of Heather was done by Boa for the Japanese and Korean ducks in that singer's very first acting role as well, that's all. No big meaning behind that, just thought that was a fun parallel dimension. So, at long last, let me now play these different versions for you, as we've already heard it in English, I'll start with the Spanish version and the French version, italian, and then we've got Portuguese, german and Japanese, and then we've got the Spanish version and then we've got the English version. So I've already said, the Japanese sounds pretty good. The English version, of course, sounds good to me, and even though they were critical of some of her pronunciation in the MTV newsroom, I'm going to assume that it didn't hamper the song that much, based on the fact that she won the award for most addictive track at the 2007 MTV Europe Music Awards and it was ranked the number one song of the year by MTV Latin America, which just leaves one version left Mandarin Chinese. This one's a little different. I've studied Mandarin a bit, but I am in no way any kind of an expert. Still, I can tell that there are some issues with Averil's Chinese on this and some of the chunks, well, they just sound super over-processed. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am fascinated by Averil taking a swing, this big, absolutely fascinated, but that Mandarin sounds crazy to me. Back to the MTV newsroom article. Their Mandarin speaker compliments her pronunciation in hitting the tones, which is a hard thing to keep in mind coming from a non-tonal language like English. In Mandarin there are four tones, meaning four different accent patterns that any syllable can have A falling tone, a rising tone, a high tone or a falling, then rising tone. Changing the tone of the syllable changes the word you're saying, so it's important to get those right. The MTV employee goes on to single out the line in English that goes I want to be your girlfriend, because in the Mandarin it sounds very chopped up and robotic here. Listen again. I suspect that's another function of having to hit the tones right on the syllables but not being able to connect them all in one string over the melody and tempo. So it sounds like they got Averil to correctly pronounce each syllable separately and then Frankenstein them together on the song's rhythm. But, scott, you say, can't you cut the woman some slack? She's in the middle of writing and releasing super popular music, touring the world and running some sort of fashion empire, while you simply look down on her from your ivory podcasting throne. And I'd say absolutely. You can only expect one person to do so much, and you can also only expect so much from an English speaker who's dealing with Mandarin Chinese for probably the first time and not only has to worry about the four tones but also being in key and on pitch while she does it for sure. And then you'd probably say and Scott, don't you also regularly get super strong urges to hire people on Fiverr and commission them to make music for you to use on the podcast? Sometimes by golly you'd be right again, I absolutely do so. I reached out to a Chinese singer on Fiverr and asked her to cover the Chinese version of the song, but to see if she could make sure the Chinese lyrics sounded really good this time. Well, I actually reached out to two, but the first one replied in quotes haha, it does sound cringe. And then that it was actually too cringe for her to sing and she wasn't interested. So I reached out to another Chinese singer and her cringeometer was apparently less sensitive because she agreed to it. When she delivered her version, she let me know she had changed the Chinese lyrics so they sound more natural, which is exactly the type of improvement I was hoping for. So now let's see if we've corrected the only flaw on this international single and come up with the good version of Girlfriend in Mandarin. Here's Kanari Alto singing her cover.

Speaker 3: 51:38

You're so fine, I want you mine. You're so delicious. I think about you all the time. You're so addicted. Don't you know what I could do to make you feel? Alright, Don't pretend I think you knew I'm damn precious and hell yeah, I'm the motherfucking princess. I could tell you like me too, and you know I'm right. She's like. So whatever you could do so much better, I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about. I hate that girl. I need her. I'm in love with her. I can love her until I'm in love with you. I don't know if you like me or if you want to lie to me. I want to have the love you love me. I can see the way. I see the way you're looking at me, and even when you look away, I know you think of me. I know you talk about me all the time, again and again. So come over here, tell me what I wanna hear Better yet, make a girlfriend disappear. I don't wanna hear you say her name ever, again and again and again. She's like. So whatever you could do so much better. I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about. I hate that girl. I need her I'm in love with her. I can love her until I'm in love with her. I don't know if you like me or if you want to lie to me. I want to have the love you love me. In a second you'll be wrapped around my finger cause I can cause I can do it better. There's no other. So when's it gonna sink in? She's so stupid. What the hell were you thinking? What the hell you're not gonna do? Wish you all the good things done. What could you done? It's just a lie. Hey, hey you, you. I know you like me. No way, no way I want to lie to you. Hey, hey, you, you. I want to have the love you, love me.

Speaker 1: 54:42

It's beautiful. Kana really did a great job on this.

Speaker 3: 54:45

Hey, hey, you, you, I need a new one. Hey, hey, you, you, I can love you.

Speaker 1: 54:55

And with that, songs sung by the same singer in different languages become the next. That's weird. I was crunching all the show data through the data crunch-a-tron 5000, like GuyNormally do, but it says this experience is stuck processing at 99% and it's just showing me a spinning wheel. Animation Looks like something's missing One piece. That's still not quite complete, but we did everything, well, everything, except we tried Hindi twice, but the diction and meter of how you sing in Hindi versus the Western rhythms just didn't match and we just couldn't pull it off. Just couldn't pull it off. So I know what that missing 1% is. That's right, the unfinished Hindi version that Avril and her team abandoned back in 2007. Now I don't have the ability to go back in time and convince her not to give up, and I've never met Avril or anyone in her circle, so I have no ability to contact her in the present either. I do, however, have the ability to contact some very talented musicians in India who agree to not only translate but also sing Hindi lyrics. For our very own, very, first and very only one in existence the perfect show's bootleg version of Girlfriend by Avril Levine in Hindi. And so the perfect show would like to present the often-rumored, never-completed, long-lost Hindi version of Avril Levine's Girlfriend. This will finally complete the ancient set of nine sacred girlfriend versions and should unite the world once again in blissful divinity, usher in the girlfriend's aunt's and bring about the Avroclips.

Speaker 2: 57:19

Let's get this shit around to. I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about.

Speaker 3: 57:36

Ha, ha tu tu bani teri basana Nei nei nei nei chai tu zi nei Ha ha tu tu bani. Sa bhi tu Ha ha tu tu basana zi nei Nei nei nei nei basana nirani Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana.

Speaker 2: 57:59

I can see the way. I see the way you look at me, and even when you look away, I know you're thinking me. I know you talk about me all the time, again and again, again and again. So come over here, tell me what you wanna hear. Better yet, make a girlfriend disappear. I don't wanna hear you say her name ever again and again, and again and again, cause she's like so whatever, and she can do so much better. I think we should get together now, and that's what everyone's talking about. Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana, nei, nei, nei, nei chai tu zi nei. Ha ha tu tu bani sa bhi tu. Ha ha tu tu basana zi nei, nei, nei, nei, nei bai chai teri basana. Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana. In a second you'll be wrapped around my finger, cause I can cause, I can do it better. There's no other. So when's it?

Speaker 1: 59:05

gonna sink in. She's so stupid. What the hell were you thinking? In a second you'll be wrapped around my finger Cause I can cause. I can do it better, there's no other. So when's it gonna sink in? She's so stupid. What the hell were you thinking? Ha ha tu tu bani teri basana Nei nei nei nei chai tu zi nei. Ha ha tu tu bani sa bhi tu. Ha ha tu tu basana zi nei Nei nei nei bai chai teri basana. And with that song, sung by the same singer in a different language, that type of song becomes the next entry into the perfect tour, the index of perfect things. You can find a direct link to the perfect tour by going to perfectshowsite. You can also find all the credits and links for the music in the show notes on this episode's webpage. And usually the web pages for these episodes are pretty sparse. They have the episode, the show notes and links to the musicians, but this webpage will be way more involved. I wasn't going to play the whole songs that I used as examples here. I don't own any of them, to be clear, but I will embed the youtube videos for them on the webpage of this episode and you can head there if you want to listen to any of these cuts in full. I want to thank all the talented musicians on Fiverr who made the end of this episode possible. I continue to be impressed and amazed by the things that people create for me there, and those songs created by my Fiverr artists will be added to the perfect show youtube page and included in the list of videos on the webpage for this episode as well. This seems like the perfect time, then, to remind you that the perfect shows youtube channel is under the name perfectshowshow and you can connect on twitter or instagram with the same handle. This episode was recorded and mixed in Lake Tahoe, california. Subscribe if you'd like to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop the perfect show, a perfect rating or review, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show once again. The perfectshow site is at perfectshowsite. That's S-I-T-E also. This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive. I have found many more examples. By the end of making this episode, then I had going into it, as I said, and I'm sure I've missed some great ones out there along the way too. So if you do know of a good one that I missed and would like to clue me in on it, well, that'd go perfectly in an email, along with any comments or music or other things, which you should send to perfectshowshow at gmailcom. Oh, and Avril Lavigne just released a new album in February called Love Sucks, with sucks, of course, spelled S-U-X, which is such a perfect Avril thing to do, but it's out now. My favorite tracks are currently Avalanche and deja vu. It's solid work. Check it out, by the way, for people who have been with me for a few episodes, do you remember that thing in the Dan song episode where I ordered multiple songs in case the first one fell through, but instead I got two songs and they were both worth listening to, so I found a spot to play the other one at the end of the episode instead, would you believe I did that again. Well, that first artist on five, or the one who said it was too cringe. She wrote me back with a counter offer that was double her normal singing price, and I agreed to her cringe tax. So now we have her version too. Here's Chloe Chan with her cover of Girlfriend in Mandarin she's so much better and we should get together now.

Speaker 3: 1:03:21

And that's what everyone talk about. Hey, hey, you, you, I don't like your girlfriend. Oh hey, no, I need your signal. Hey, hey, you, you, I'm gonna rush in and put you. Hey, hey, you, you, I know you're a fool. Oh, no way, no way, I'm not a good singer. Hey, hey, you wear out another new dress. Hey, hey, you, you, I don't like the way you look. I know you're talking face. Oh, I wanna just tell you no go, no go, no go. So come over here and tell me what I wanna hear better say oh hey you, I'm gonna rush in and put you. I'll never again look at you again. She's like so whatever you could do so much better, I think we should get together now. That's my son. Let me talk about you.

Speaker 1: 1:04:31

I wish you were your father. No way, she only has a single name. I'm not gonna let you know, and just remember whoever you are out there. I don't like your girlfriend and I think you need a new one. Anyway, until next time, I'm Scott Moppin, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.

Speaker 2: 1:04:59

I'm gonna eat 58.