There are a lot of great acts I’ll see today at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. But the highlight for me will be Café Tacuba.
Who?
If you’re Latino – and especially if you’re an immigrant from Latin America or the son or daughter of an immigrant – chances are you know who the Mexican band is. If you’re not Latino, chances are you don’t.
People in the United States and other English-speaking countries always have been less likely to listen to music in other languages than residents of other nations. So much of the top-selling music is in English that many listeners never get exposed to songs in other languages.
Most U.S. radio stations (apart from non-English stations) seldom or never play music in Spanish, Arabic, Korean, French, Chinese or Punjab. And U.S.-based music Internet sites, where people increasingly find out about new music, typically feature little or no non-English music.
Even many best-selling foreign acts sing in English rather than their native language. Think Abba, Psy, Björk and Phoenix. Colombian artist Shakira sold millions of albums in Spanish – but even more when she began singing in English.
Yet there’s some great music that gets a lot of play in Mexico or Japan or Egypt that few people in the United States have ever heard because it’s not in English.
In my opinion, Café Tacuba is one of the best bands in the world – not just one of the best Spanish-language bands, but one of the best bands, period. And their 1994 masterpiece Re is one of my favorite albums in any language. Today will be my seventh time seeing Café Tacuba live.
You can hear Café Tacuba on a few Southern California Spanish-language stations. And you can find some of their songs on YouTube.
In the past, radio, friends and music magazines determined much of what we listened to. The Internet offered some hope that more people would be exposed to music sung in languages other than English. But most U.S.-based music websites feature or promote little music in other languages.
I have to admit that even though I have several dozen Spanish-language albums, I only have a smattering of music in other languages. But some of those albums are among my favorites.
I bought one, the Planete Kabyle compilation of Berber music, on a lark, while at a French-owned music store in Madrid in the late 1990s (some of the singers are North African immigrants living in France). The store’s description of the album made it sound intriguing. I never would have found it, though, if it hadn’t been displayed prominently.
I found out about another album, Apocalypse Across the Sky, by Morocco’s Master Musicians of Jajouka, when I read a somewhat rare review of a foreign-language album in The New York Times.
Hopefully one day music such as this will be peppered among English-language songs on U.S. radio, satellite and Internet stations. Not everyone will like every song, of course, just as a lot of people don’t like, say, Taylor Swift or Jay-Z or Keith Urban (and as much as I love Café Tacuba, I’m sure a lot of people who have heard them don’t). Everyone has different musical tastes.
But until more U.S.-based stations, Internet sites and magazines promote foreign-language artists, most Americans will never even get the chance to decide for themselves whether they like that catchy new album from Argentina, Thailand or Malawi.
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