Originally Posted by Deepwaters
OK, I decided today to do a YouTube search for Superbus, because I'd heard one of their songs and wanted to hear more. Good group, great music, all of it really danceable, good videos, too. But I found I was having a real hard time understanding the lyrics. I don't mean I didn't understand what the lyrics meant, I mean I had a hard time picking up what Jenn (the lead singer) was singing in the first place. What the words were.
I found a web site called Lyrics Mania that has lyrics for just about everyone including Superbus, so I started looking them up and reading them as well as listening. And now I understand why I was having problems. Take the song "Butterfly" for example.
To start with, obviously "butterfly" is an English word. This group does that a lot, tossing English words and phrases or in one case an entire English chorus, into an otherwise French song. In this case, they put "butterfly" in there because it rhymes with a whole slew of French words, "pagaille," "détails," "bataille," "entrailles," which "papillon" (French for "butterfly") does not. Oh, and they also had "bye-bye" at the end of another line in the song. I sometimes have a problem figuring out where one language stops and the other starts. The first three words are "J'ai des butterfly," and was slurred enough that I kept hearing "Silly butterfly."
On top of which, sometimes Jenn's pronunciation is, shall we say, creative. She pronounced some of the above words so they sounded like "pie guy" or "buy tie," and I could not for the life of me recognize "pagaille" or "bataille" from that! Sounded pretty damn cool, though! There's a wonderful bouncy verbal rhythm running through the song that wouldn't be the same if all of it were pronounced correctly. And if I were a native French speaker or maybe even had been studying the language for more than 3 months I wouldn't have a problem.
Has anyone else run into this sort of thing?
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