did queen/or would queen ever considered making an album in a language other than english?.
as one of the biggest bands ever and having such a massive fan base around the world i am curious as to whether a thing like that was ever considered..
think of south america(spanish,portugese,french,etc).even japan.
many diffrent countries many diffrent languages.
if they recorded an album in ,say....german?.
would they then have been even bigger in germany.
im sure some swedish bands.abba for instance speak other languages ,rather than english.
so the biggest market for them was the english speaking world?.
or...aha..nina(99 red balloons).there must be many foreign bands(foreign as not from the uk)have made albums ,not in there language but in a seperate language.
the singles market is splattered with non uk bands with english lyricks(scorpions for 1).
if queen had done so.would that had made them even bigger.ahead of the beattles,stones ,and zep..
In the 60s many international artists have done singles in foreign languages, as they thought, the audience would want that. The Beatles recorded in German, the Beach Boys....Spencer Davis, Manfred Mann...the list is endless. In the end it had no real effect on the popularity and only led to some funny collectors items.
In the 70s Bowie recorded Heroes in other languages and Peter Gabriel even did a german album. ABBA did some songs in foreign languages, Police recorded a song in japanese.
But did it have any effect on the popularity? I don't think so, only the originals are the ones, that became classics.
English has turned out to be the definite language for pop music and it's always best, when you hear artists singing the language they know. It's a nice gesture, when Brian May sings a line in german during a tv show, but it doesn't really sound as good as the original. I would not have wanted "A night at the Opera" in german. Those few lines in Teo Toriatte and Las Palabras are enough. Not to forget the german telephone voice in "Dancer"...;-)
It seems that if you sing in English, the song sells all over the world. If you sing in any other language, the sales are very limited. And when alls said and done, it comes down to record sales. Not only that, if you translate a song into another language, you end up having to re-write the song, you can't translate directly - it just won't scan. I spent a while translating Bohemian Rhapsody into Spanish, some phrases are impossible to transfer into Spanish because there are a lot of colloquianisms in it.