Dengue Fever

Note: This blog post was drafted ahead of time and has been released through pre-scheduling.

Dengue fever is not a nice disease. It is not great news that this disease appears to be spreading, globally speaking.

But we’re not really here to talk about dengue fever the disease.

No, we’re hear to talk about the American band known as Dengue Fever, for this post about music in different languages on my playlist.

Once upon a time (six or seven years ago now) I listened to a lot of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. I eventually got a bit tired of it, and have no idea what is happening in that weird world anymore, but it did keep me entertained on and off for a year or two. (I believe I binge listened to the first 150 episodes or so.)
One of the features of the podcast is that they include a “weather report” aka a music break in each episode. Some of the music was really quite good.

For example Sni Bong was used in Welcome to Night Vale.

I do not understand one word of Khmer, which is what is being sung in that song. (Dengue Fever do also have some songs with English lyrics.)

I also have this song, “Chaiyya Chaiyya,” with lyrics in a language I will likely never understand (Hindi) on my Spotify playlist, I added it to the playlist after having a slightly annoying experience brought to me by faulty DVDs while trying to watch an okay American film – Inside Man (2006):

This song was a pop hit in India after it’s inclusion in a 1998 Bollywood film. Somewhat unfortunately, the Spotify algorithm decided that I must want to listen to a whole lot more Bollywood songs after I added this to my playlist, which I didn’t particularly, and it took me about two weeks to convince the algorithm to give the Indian music recommendations a rest.

(When I added a few Dengue Fever songs to my playlist, the Spotify algorithm simply sent me more songs from the Dengue Fever discography, it didn’t suddenly start sending me music in Khmer. I don’t know. I don’t understand how the algorithms work, except that sometimes they seem to work troublesomely well, and then other times they seem totally bonkers lost.)

While continuing to avoid English, here is some Tanya Tagaq, who doesn’t need to use many words at all to share music.

Of course, since I’m trying to learn German, I also have some German-language songs in my playlist, which I also for the most part don’t understand, and that sometimes gives me pause, but I think I think I’ll save discussion about that for a later post.

Do you listen to music with lyrics in languages you don’t understand?