site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1656 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Which music did you hate the most in the duelling half-time shows, Latin pop or country? I have to begrudgingly admit that I hate country more than Latin pop.

Bad Bunny is a weird case for me. I can objectively recognize that he's skilled, but I absolutely loathe music performed in romance languages, and rap maximizes all the things that I hate about it the most.

Something about the linguistic structure of the verbs, along with the comparatively low number of phonemes, makes it feel repetitive and bland in a way that drives me nuts.

It makes me wish we could have somebody perform using one of those Caucasian languages that have 80+ consonants and half a dozen vowels.

There’s plenty of Chechen music on YouTube. It’s not the best stuff.

What are your favorite languages for music?

I really do think English is fantastic for singing.

I also enjoy the sound of Swedish a lot, and I think it works surprisingly well for rap. Check out Fel Del Av Garden by Movits for a good example.

Russian also has a really appealing sound. SidxRam and Glucoza have some interesting pieces. I'm not somewhere that I can copy paste names, but a good example of the SidxRam style is a video where they're dressed as demonic Japanese schoolgirls, and the best Glucoza example is the cyberpunk music video where the heroine has to save a dog.

The best way I can describe it is that I don't like songs written in languages where the word endings are highly constrained by the grammer. Rhyming when nearly every word ends in -a or -o feels like cheating.

Honestly, it seems like I mostly disagree with you. I really like Japanese music for its often high BPM, and the rap I do hear tends to sound pretty good. I actually think English is a bit hindered because it has to rhyme, and if you listen to enough music, you hear many of the rhymes over and over and over again. On the other hand, Japanese accepts that rhyming doesn't make any sense for the way the language is set up, so rhyming is not something they even try to do.

Japanese is entirely too strange to my ear to really speak about it intelligently.

I don't mind Latin music but I genuinely find Bad Bunny's stuff to be weirdly totally inoffensive elevator music. I wouldn't say I dislike it it just has this ability to essentially pass by my musical taste in the same way I don't have culinary opinions on common building materials. Kid Rock might be all over the place but atleast I can identify what he's going for.

I can think of a bunch of genres I find grating and I wouldn't put Bad Bunny there it's just a nothingness to me.

I genuinely find Bad Bunny's stuff to be weirdly totally inoffensive elevator music.

Enjoy these "inoffensive" lyrics from Safaera, the third song Mr. Rabbit performed last night

I see no reason for quote marks. Inoffensive to mainstream media consumer tastes, and has been for several decades.

I'd be extremely surprised if the NFL let an english language performer recite those lyrics.

Pointing back to the 2022 half time show, Snoop and Dr. Dre sang censored versions of their songs from the 1990s.

Not a fair comparison. Bad Bunny belongs in the Super Bowl for the Latin conference; Kid Rock wouldn't even make the playoffs in country music.

Kid Rock has played at a Super Bowl before: he was part of the infamous 2004 halftime show, although not as famously as Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

Kid Rock was 20 years younger then, Bad Bunny's current age, he was 30 and actually pretty cool. Kid Rock's last hit was, what, All Summer Long?

Yeah he's also clung to relevance for a decently long period. Top 10 albums between 1998 and 2017 is decent longevity for anybody

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats