Regarding liking songs I don't understand at all (LONG)

This recent exchange I had with Yukiya (@__snowlight) got me to write this thing up.



"So, Era, why do you like listening to Vocaloid songs you don't understand?"



I mean, it's not a novel thing. A lot of people can and do enjoy music in languages they don't know. Although people can assume that I'm an otaku and thus just listen to it simply because it's Japanese, that is a very small part of the story.



I grew up listening to instrumental music or music with low lyrical burden - Enya, choirs, Gregorian chants - as well as other foreign songs. One of my favorite songs then was a Windows Vista sample track - the Malian song "i ka barra" by Habib Koité. Many of these songs influenced my Vocaloid tastes from genre (ballads etc) to preferred synths (IA and Yukari). Of course I also listened to a lot of 70s to 90s classics, but I eventually noticed that outside the catchy choruses I lost interest in the lyrics.



For example, I can still sing the choruses for a good number of Cat Stevens, Carpenters, and Chris de Burgh songs. However, outside of karaoke, I can't recall the rest of the lyrics, much less what the songs meant. I still like them all the same.



Isn't that a widespread thing - that people keep listening to the melody and the rhythm and lose sight of the lyrics? There was this incredible essay series by Max Landis (https://www.ascarnooneelsecansee.com/) asserting that Carly Rae Jepsen's usually upbeat and catchy songs have a really dark side to them, and it took him tens of thousands of words to show how they fit together. A lot of pop songs have some really dark undertones that people skip over, even if the lyrics weren't subtle about it ("Hallelujah", anyone? "Born in the USA"?)



So instead of fixating on the lyrics, I went the other direction - I treated the voice as another instrument, capable of expressing and delivering emotion and meaning to the listener, even through linguistic barriers. When I started to listen to doujin music and anime soundtracks, I was able to fully focus on the melody and rhythm, and stop being distracted trying to interpret the lyrical nature of the song. Of course, having a translation handy would be nice, but it's far from critical to my enjoyment for a song.



This approach extended to my current Vocaloid listening, although now with another dimension: my fascination with vocal mimicry and its usage of the voice explicitly as an instrument the producer can control added fuel to my passion for this kind of music.



I know that, with this approach, I've lost something. There is a lot of value to understanding the lyrics for a song, in order to fully understand the message the producer wants to tell me. I also hope that, with this approach, I do not give disrespect to the producer's efforts. But I feel I can get the gist well enough with the emotions of the voices singing to me, synthesized or otherwise. Furthermore, due to my history I've always just viewed the voice as another instrument - so this isn't much of a loss for me. Not prioritizing the lyrics worked with people for English songs - why should it not work for songs in other languages too?

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