FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Friday, June 16, 2006
Bad English in Lyrics!
Last week I did a post about pet-hates when it comes to popular song lyrics, some of which didn't make much sense and others that just spouted rubbish, such as the Natasha Beddingfield lyric I cited there. As an extension to that blog, I wanted to say something about lyrics written by people who have English as a second language, where the sentiments of the song get across fine but there's something in the way that they're expressed that just doesn't quite work when heard by a native English speaker.
There are many good examples of this in the lyrical content of Shakira's chart hits over the past couple of years, not least one of her most recent ones, Don't Bother :
Another more obvious example is in the song that came after Don't Bother, Hips Don't Lie - a collaboration with Wyclef Jean. Here the main hook of the song is "I'm on tonight / you know my hips don't lie and I'm starting to feel you, boy.." Now, I'm not sure whether the same slang is used in the United States of America but in British English the phrase "I'm on" suggests that the speaker is telling us that she's menstruating, which I presume is not the sentiment that Shakira hoped to convey in this lyric!! This case could just be a dialect issue, but you'd think that someone would have thought about this before releasing the song for mass consumption.
Ah well, I actually like both songs very much and think personally that Shakira has a great voice along with a wonderfully fiery attitude. But these little slip-ups do kinda bug me when I hear them!
There are many good examples of this in the lyrical content of Shakira's chart hits over the past couple of years, not least one of her most recent ones, Don't Bother :
She's almost six feet tall -
She must think I'm a flea..
I'm really a cat, you see,
And it's not my last life at all.
She must think I'm a flea..
I'm really a cat, you see,
And it's not my last life at all.
It's that last line of the verse that gets me : a native English speaker just wouldn't say it like that. Of course, to be fair, I couldn't tell you how it would properly be said in Spanish, French, German or any other language for that matter, but then I'm not making a very good living out of writing and recording this stuff.
Another more obvious example is in the song that came after Don't Bother, Hips Don't Lie - a collaboration with Wyclef Jean. Here the main hook of the song is "I'm on tonight / you know my hips don't lie and I'm starting to feel you, boy.." Now, I'm not sure whether the same slang is used in the United States of America but in British English the phrase "I'm on" suggests that the speaker is telling us that she's menstruating, which I presume is not the sentiment that Shakira hoped to convey in this lyric!! This case could just be a dialect issue, but you'd think that someone would have thought about this before releasing the song for mass consumption.
Ah well, I actually like both songs very much and think personally that Shakira has a great voice along with a wonderfully fiery attitude. But these little slip-ups do kinda bug me when I hear them!
