Episode 20 – Songs not in the English Language

Xenophobia is a perennial problem facing humanity as a species. It would seem one way to tackle this particular kind of small mindedness is to spread far and wide the artistic outputs of all cultures for everyone to enjoy, and thus cultivate a commonality to better aid mutual understanding. And whilst the written word requires either translation or additional work by the reader, we can all tap our feet to the tunes that popular beat combos across the globe are churning out – or can we?

For that is our quest this week, to find songs that you probably can’t understand but can love anyway. The risk, of course, is that we find the only music worth listening to is written in the English language and we end up being the official playlisting poster-boys of some hideous totalitarian mix-taping regime. Were that to come to pass, we would of course graciously accept the commission from our narrow-minded overlords but we’d like to think that we would nonetheless attempt to change the system from within, slipping the odd Nusrat Fattah Ali Khan track into our state-sanctioned broadcasts.

Highlights this week include Bill recategorising all of world music into either “Dance Hall” or “Iron Maiden Rip-offs”, Carl risking a double-prejudice by declaring his hatred of French Hip-Hop, and Tim continuing his one-man war against The Smiths, expertly going off-topic to put the boot into Morrissey’s singing voice once again.

This Week’s Playlists:

Bill:

Carl:

Tim

Don’t forget to check out The Golden Shuffle

Virgil and Alan Tracy

Listen to the previoust podcasts here or on your preferred podcast provider.