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As I write this post, I am blasting Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor into my noise-cancelling headphones, because I don�t want to hear the thunder and the rain currently assailing my area of Minnesota. Perhaps it would be more fitting to write this post while listening to Sigur R�s, but Sigur R�s is too mellow for the occasion; it just won�t cut it when there�s the sound of thunder to be suppressed.
Now, this is primarily a �film blog,� but I said right from the get-go that I�d write about works from other artistic media from time to time, and that�s what I intend to do now. The other day I listened to Sigur R�s�s new release, Valtari, and isn�t it delightful? It�s times like these that make me wish I�d had some musical training at some point in my life, or least an intro to basic music theory. Alas, that hasn�t happened (thus far). So when I talk about music, I generally can�t bring to bear on it the technical vocabulary that would probably do it greater justice.
So what can I say about Sigur R�s? Well, they produce what the kids these days are calling �post-rock,� which I gather is music that makes use of rock instrumentation but which frees itself from the forms/structures typically associated with rock. With Sigur R�s, this means a delicate, ethereal music that doesn�t sound like rock, or pop for that matter; it�s �ambient;� it�s difficult to pick out the individual instruments, they all kind of �blend� into each other. It is a very immersive music; I believe the New Agers would describe such compositions as �soundscapes.�
If we turn our attention to the linguistic aspects of Sigur R�s, I feel myself a bit more qualified to speak. Unlike their countrywoman Bj�rk�who sings in English (maybe she�s done some songs in Icelandic, but if so, I am not familiar with them; certainly the bulk of her songs are in English)�I say, unlike Bj�rk, Sigur R�s�s lead singer J�nsi sings either in Icelandic or Vonlenska (Hopelandic), a non-syntactical anti-language whose �words� contain no fixed semantical meaning. On their 2002 album ( ), all of the lyrics are sung in Hopelandic, and the Hopelandic language consists entirely of the following words: �You xylo. You xylo no fi lo. You so.� Again, there�s no apparent semantical meaning to these words, but the album works because J�nsi is a wonderful singer and he can do a lot with just the sounds of the words; �you xylo� can convey all sorts of different feelings depending on how you sing it.
And to a certain extent, this is the case with any music in a language one doesn�t understand. Just to continue with Sigur R�s, for instance, my experience of their music doesn�t shift dramatically from when they�re singing in Icelandic to when they�re singing in Hopelandic. I don�t know a word of the Icelandic language and it doesn�t convey to me any more semantic meaning than I get from Hopelandic . All the �meaning� I get out of the Icelandic lyrics in a song are predicated on the way in which they�re sung and the music that accompanies them.
The effect is different to varying degrees when I hear songs sung in Romance languages; I took French in high school and then again in college; on neither occasion did I master it. But still, in French songs, I can pick up fragments of meaning, although not whole verses, and frequently not even whole lines (although I got a fair amount out of the Maoist ye-ye song in Godard�s La chinoise, with its delightful refrain of �Mao-oh Mao-oh Mao-oh!�) So my knowledge of English and my fragmentary knowledge of French help me to pick out parallels and cognates in Romance languages.
I say all this so as to explain how it is that there is a spectrum running from comprehension to incomprehension that comes with songs in different languages. On the one extreme, we have songs in English, which I understand as a native speaker. So, as an example, let�s take Pink Floyd�s �Wish You Were Here.� I understand every line in that song; when I listen to it, my mind processes linguistic data and creates meaning out of it.
A bit further along the spectrum, let�s consider the Algerian singer Khaled�s sickeningly infection francophone love song, �Aisha.� Here�s a song in French, and a fairly simple, clearly annunciated French at that, where I can pick out whole phrases andunderstand them without much in the way of conscious effort; for example, �Aisha, Aisha, �coute-moi� (�Aisha, Aisha, listen to me,� or literally, �listen me.� I told you this was simple French). Further along the spectrum of French music, we have a song like �Justine� by the band Indochine; now, maybe the French here is more complex, or maybe they�re not annunciating as clearly as Khaled (perhaps their vocalist has a certain Thom-Yorke-ishness about him), but I have very little notion of what�s being said in this song. I gather that it�s about a girl, name of Justine, and that she�s having some issues, and that the singer is addressing a message to her, and that it is important, but that feelingis conveyed to me mostly by the music rather than the lyrics.
Further along the spectrum, but still in the Romance languages, we find Os Mutantes (they�re like the Brazilian Beatles, if we need a comparison) and their song �A Minha Menina.� Already, I�m only picking out stray words here and there, and very intermittently; otherwise, the lyrics are meaningless to me. I love this song, but I have absolutely no idea what it�s about.
And then leaving the Romance languages altogether, I am confronted with complete linguistic incomprehension. Let�s take a look at Mandarin-speaking rock star Cui Jian, and his infectious �??,� which Google Translate tells me means �Fly.� I don�t know what he�s saying, but judging by the accompanying music video, it must be pretty cool and probably subversive and ballsy (and here I guess I�m cheating, as I didn�t include visual clues amongst my previous examples, but whatever).
I find a certain pleasure in these songs with incomprehensible lyrics which is distinct from the pleasure I experience from songs with English lyrics. This pleasure is the pleasure of incomprehension. When listening to an Os Mutantes song, I am relieved of the weight of semantical meaning, and can enjoy words merely for their sounds; one can certainly enjoy English words for their sounds, but the pleasure is narrowed by the inescapable meaning which must inevitably attach to them. Furthermore, a song in a foreign language is pretty much immune from the risks of bad song-writing (or at least the lyrics-writing portion of song-writing). For all I know, Os Mutantes�s lyrics might be banal (Nicki Minaj: �A lot of bread; no sesame seeds�); stupid (Justin Timberlake: �I�m bringin� sexy back / Them other boys don�t know how to act�); incomprehensible (Red Hot Chili Peppers: �Three fingers in the honeycomb / You ring just like a xylophone / Devoted to the chromosome / The day that you left home�); or explosively bigoted (Guns �n Roses� �One in a Million,� where Axl Rose notoriously denigrates �police and niggers� and then �immigrants and faggots� for some reason in what is ostensibly a love song). But when I listen to Os Mutantes� lyrics, I don�t know what they mean, and so there is no risk of this very meaningsullying my enjoyment of them.
I am by no means the first person to feel and to articulate this pleasure of incomprehension (alas), and I want to conclude by (insufferably and pretentiously) quoting from Roland Barthes�s Empire of Signs, a short work about the semiological insights that he garnered while spending a week or so in Japan circa-1970. Barthes doesn�t know any Japanese, and he says early on, �The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity� (emphasis added). That�s the key element of the pleasure of incomprehension, as far as I�m concerned: the freedom from vulgarity. Although I suppose it�s somewhat sad to think that one�s freedom from vulgarity should come from a form of ignorance, we can reassure ourselves that it is only a temporary escape, that an Anglophone like myself cannot escape from English, even if the only English being �played� is in our heads. The pleasure of incomprehension is an escape; it constitutes a silence�a silence of meaning, that is�that, paradoxically, we can hear (in the form of lyrically incomprehensible music) and from which we can derive enjoyment.
