Ich spreche kein Deutsch

[part of my CD collection : favourites off the whole lot]

Some weeks ago, I was browsing through the shelves of my favourite CD shop. At my biggest surprise I found a Wir Sind Helden CD. As their name implies, they're German and they chose to sing in German, too. Which is the main reason for my surprise seeing that LP up there for sale in France. But as I grabbed the item to take a closer look at it, it appeared to be a compilation of songs off the first two LPs and, most important point, French versions of some songs with original German versions as bonus tracks. There was the reason why it made it over the border.

I don't quite understand why things tend to always go this way. Having artists remodel their songs with a language they may not even understand or have them change their solo song into a duet so that someone directly out of the local Pop Idol edition can pretend to be an artist and have their name glued to a real band's. There probably are artists willingly doing that but I suspect major labels to be behind it all. For a country as France where most people don't speak any foreign language quite correctly, it may come as understandable but that's not helping anyone really.

And do French people really care about lyrics, after all? Strangely enough, I doubt it. When you look at the latest best sales for singles, you'd be stumped to see how many crappy lyrics reached the top. I'm not going to name artists or songs here, that'd be too much advertising for them while they don't need any and actually don't even deserve to be known.

Money rules the world, that's the whole point, anyway. Good artists always have to work harder than the whole commercial pre-formated unoriginal guys and often battle years before finding some obscure independent label to publish their art. In a perfect world, diversity would be a strength, not something to work against.

"we are all polylingual
but some of us pretend
there's virtue in relying
on not trying to understand"

[Ani DiFranco - Work Your Way Out
I'm aware the quote is way off from the main topic of the song, don't sue me for that]