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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.

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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.

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.

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.