A glance upon the charts of any non-English speaking nation will reveal a plethora of songs in the English language. Spain and France currently have 13 songs in English in their top 20s, Germany has 17. The UK chart currently has no songs not in it’s native language.
This seems like a big discrepancy. It can’t be that the majority of the best musicians in the world are English speaking. The UK haven’t won the Eurovision song contest since 1997. While this is often claimed to be a political contest rather than a musical one, and whilst the winners have often sung in English, it is a sign that musicians from non-English speaking countries are as good as those who speak English.
So why do we have so few foreign language songs in our charts? Psy’s Gangnam Style was the only non-English song in the top 100 singles of 2012 and it is one of those freak occurrences which occur every so often when the song is just so catchy that we can’t ignore it over here on our fair isle. Other examples are Macarena and La Bamba but these are so infrequent as to be largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.The biggest foreign artists often sing in English to get biggest exposure. Bjork, Daft Punk and Kraftwerk (at times) have all taken to our language to get us to accept them as musicians. Why are we so averse to songs sung in a language we don’t understand?
English is spoken throughout the world. The cultural influence of both English music and films is so pervasive that it can be difficult to go anywhere in the world and not be able to survive speaking only English.
Whether it is a sense of self-importance, the difficulty of learning other languages or just a reluctance to learn one when it isn’t necessary, the English-speaking world is largely mono-lingual.
The art that we accept into our culture is therefore an extension of this. We will send our blockbuster movies abroad but will rarely see many world cinema films in our cinemas. We will send our music overseas but except for the odd dance hit, rarely embrace any songs when we can’t understand what the musician is singing about.
Rammstein are a notable exception. They are successful outside Germany partly because the German language actually suits their style of music better than English. The metal band benefit from the harsh sounds of German complimenting their heavy bassy guitar sounds and they have probably been more successful than had they sung in English. Try translating and singing ‘Du Hast Mich’ to get an idea of why this might be.
A similar argument could be put for why Sigur Ros have gained popularity in this country as their post-rock melodies are very much suited to singing in their mix of Icelandic and Hopelandic. These can be seen more as exceptions that prove the rule rather than a sign of change.
It does seem to be a modern phenomena. Opera is sung largely in Italian, Russian, French, German as well as English. Foreign language operas are still extremely popular today and form the bulk of the operatic cannon. This is perhaps a historic legacy which would not occur if opera first gained popularity in modern society. There may also be elements of class difference as the audience for opera is generally middle/upper class whereas pop music is predominantly aimed at the lower/middle classes.
The size of the music industries in the UK and USA must be part of the contributing reason for this. There is a larger budget pumped into them which in turn could produce higher quality musicians.
The artist’s desire for success and attempting to reach the largest audience will be another factor. To gain the largest exposure, it makes sense to sing in the language that the largest number of people can understand. This is and probably will be for a long time English and hence the biggest commercial musicians are likely to sing in English.