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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3673 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?

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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.

I've heard of Bad Bunny before, but I've never heard his music before. I'm not a Spanish speaker and I'm not overly big on listening to foreign language music where I'm expected to understand.

The half-time show was... ok. I've seen better. I've seen worse. From what I've read online from native Spanish-speakers, I wasn't missing much and many people are reporting that they couldn't understand it either.

I'll probably never listen to his music again. I didn't find it interesting enough to ever seek out in the future.

(Exceptions to the foreign language music for me include things like German industrial where it's a chill beat for me to program or some classical/operatic music)

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.

No judgement here, but I can never get over how cringe Japanese rap sounds to my American ear. I realized long ago that it's not for me, it's for the domestic audience who have a completely different idea of what rap is. But it is so goofy and poseur-ish (and not in an ironic self-aware way) that it triggers a disgust reflex when I hear it. Objectively speaking, there are some quite talented Japanese rappers, but I just can't get into the genre.

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

Man that’s even dumber than I expected

Wasn't really referring to the lyrical content more in the sense of 'if this were on in the background I wouldn't mind it but also not really get anything out of it', whilst other recent spinoff genres like Drill or whatever have more of a sonic impact.

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.

Okay, agreed. But I don't think it's enforced because of any consensus about rules of propriety or moral standards. It looks like more like such rules are what a biologist may call a vestigial remnant, rules from the land that time forgot. The powers-that-be already know that sex sells, it's only matter of time they realize there is no moral majority to hinder the sales potential of more explicit sex appeal. First it will be a surprise, then it will be commonplace.

Beware of mistaking a loose consensus for no consensus. There is still a sufficient moral majority to hinder the sales potential of appealing to many sexual niches.

Well, you're not wrong

(Link above to OpenAI planning to release "Adult Mode" in early 2026)

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

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