Comment by chx

Comment by chx 2 days ago

4 replies

Excellent quote. While the effect of American music is huge without a doubt let me go off on a personal tangent because it's related.

I have immigrated from my homeland (first to Canada and then Malta) and I usually say "I had the bad luck to be born in Hungary but I fixed that when I could". In other words, I am not particularly fond of the country / people living in there. But it being my mother tongue, growing up there has an interesting effect: some Hungarian songs have a much stronger emotional effect than any in say English. These are not even songs I knew as a child. I am actually quite curious whether there has been scientific research in this.

tirant 2 days ago

Nelson Mandela had a famous quote about the power of speaking someone's native language:

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."

The idea here is pretty straightforward: speaking to someone in a language they merely understand reaches them intellectually, but speaking in their mother tongue resonates on a deeper, emotional level. You can imagine now why songs in Hungarian resonate more to you than the ones in English.

bigiain a day ago

I shall follow you down your personal/Hungarian tangent...

There was a guy called Jackie Orszaczky who was a Hungarian jazz/funk musician - bass player, bandleader, and singer - here (in Sydney, Australia) who made some of my most loved jazz/funk music.

This is one of his bands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hydb0dyB9GQ

Sadly, he died about 15 years back, way too early. Fuck Cancer.

Apparently he was "a big deal" in Hungary, at least amongst music circles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Orszaczky

axus 2 days ago

I'd bet the culture that produced the singers and songwriters mattered more than the language, but how could I measure those independently