I can’t tell you exactly the first time it happened, although it would’ve been some time around 1976 and Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. The song was, and still is, “Ngiculela/Es Una Historia/I Am Singing” (a song, incidentally, I would like to have played at my funeral). It was the first, but by no means last, time that song lyrics I couldn’t understand gave me some serious goosebumps.
I can tell you the second time. It would’ve been early in 1994 or 1995, listening to World Café on NPR. Bill Bruford was the host, and he was spinning an eclectic blend of stuff. I don’t remember most of what he played that night, because one song instantly wiped out everything he played before and after: “The Truth,” by Youssou N’Dour. It’s not that I hadn’t heard N’Dour before; anybody who’s heard Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” which by now is pretty much everybody, has. But it was the first time I’d heard him like this, on his own. The vocal and the music raised goosebumps. Never mind that I didn’t understand a word of Wolof, the singer’s native language. Something there spoke to me. When I picked up the CD a short time later, I was happy to find translations of the lyrics, and happier still to see what the goosebumps were about:
Look at the sky
Then look at the sea
Look into the depths
Look there at the forest
You will discover Truth
In everything
Of course, music doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The same as musicians–or artists of any other stripe–are hunters and gatherers, pulling together all the “stuff” in their environment and experience, so too do listeners. When we hear or see something, we’re bringing a lot to the (turn)table ourselves. Our lives, loves, losses, and the total mass of all that we’ve experienced intersects, however briefly, with the artist and everything that they’ve brought to the proceedings. As a listener, then, I’m bringing all of the above–plus a dash of Metheny, a handful of Rundgren, a smidgen of Santana, the wonder of Wonder, and oodles more–with me when I listen. Everything builds on everything else, and each new experience primes you for everything else.
So every time someone first asks, “Can you understand a word they’re singing?” and invariably follows that with, “How in the hell can you enjoy it if you don’t understand a word of it,” I invariably give the short answer–”I just do”–versus the much longer one, which I’ll lay out here.
Do I understand a word? Not usually, though I’ve gotten better. It’s odd how, once you hear something for the nth time, things start to jump out at you, little islets of meaning among that torrent of speech. Consider this, from Caetano Veloso’s “O Estrangeiro” (The Stranger):
O amor e cego
Ray Charles e cego
Stevie Wonder e cego
E o albino Hermeto não enxerga mesmo muito bem
You don’t have to speak much Portuguese to get that one (“Love is blind, Ray Charles is blind, Stevie Wonder is blind, and the albino Hermeto isn’t blind but doesn’t see too well”), though the verse is a heck of a lot funnier if you know who Hermeto is.
And how, exactly, do you enjoy something when you don’t understand the words? Well, try starting with something that doesn’t have any. Case in point: the title track from Pat Metheny’s The First Circle. Not a single word is sung, but if you take Pedro Aznar’s voice out of the mix, a transcendant track (and I don’t use that word at all lightly) becomes a merely decent one. Those wordless vocalizations, distant cousins to Armstrong’s scatting, or Ella’s vocal acrobatics, put the voice front and center, but not as a lyric delivery system; the voice instead becomes another instrumental texture. So when I hear something in a language I don’t understand (and for that matter, plenty of times in English as well), I’m listening to the voice in the same way I’d listen to, say, the guitar. A vocalist like Aznar, Gustavo Cerati, Rachid Taha, or Marisa Monte–to say nothing of a vocalist like David Bowie, Mick Hucknall, or Peter Gabriel–”plays” their voice with the same virtuosity that someone like Hendrix brought to guitar; not a blaze of chops and technical prowess, but something that’s as direct, and sometimes as visceral, as a punch to the gut.
And in the end (pause for a second for the Beatles song to finish percolating through your head; okay, resume), it’s that directness that’s the rub. Sometimes you don’t need to understand the words, or need words at all for that matter, to get at the spirit of something. Now, I don’t know if someone singing like Ian Curtis is exactly going to translate, though I’d wager that his detachment would probably come through whether it’s in English or in Czech.* But I get the feeling that if someone sings from the heart, and you’re prepared to approach what they’re singing in the same spirit, you won’t have a problem understanding regardless.
*And I get the feeling that Robert Smith would sound silly in any language.
To me, at least, the most obvious example of this is opera. The other day a commercial came on for some opera (they seem to be showing a lot of Met recordings at theaters these days) and someone pointed out that there were subtitles, even though they were singing in English. Well, yeah. It’s opera. Good luck understanding that no matter the language. And yet still, the audience is moved. You may not know the meaning, but you can still feel the emotion.
I’d agree, up to a point. I don’t know why, but a lot of opera leaves me cold. Some of it raises goosebumps but, on the other hand, some is just so overwrought and overdone. I wonder if anybody’s ever done a really subtle opera? I’d pay good money to see someone mumble in key.