Jon Schild wrote:
> 
> Richard Tibbetts wrote:
>> Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Red Army had an
>> official choir composed of male soldiers and musicians. It still
>> exists. The Red Army Choir performs throughout Russia to this day.
>>
>> Now consider the Finnish rock band called The Leningrad Cowboys. A
>> little while ago, they held a concert in Russia, in which - to the
>> screaming applause of Russkie teenagers - they got the Red Army Choir
>> to join them on stage for a performance of "Sweet Home
Alabama." In
>> English. You couldn't make this up.
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UuFJoexdlU
> 
> In several foreign-language movies I have seen, there is live music in 
> English in one or more scenes. When I noticed this in a Dutch movie, I 
> asked someone I know who grew up in Amsterdam why that would happen. He 
> said that a lot of music is performed in English if it was written that 
> way because that is how people are used to hearing it.
> 
> (Besides, I can't imagine the difficulty of translating Sweet Home 
> Alabama into Russian decently. I know that translations of operas are 
> often extremely bad.)

Abba performed in English only, even though all four members were Swedish.

Moreover, except for Peter Noone, nearly every British or Commonwealth 
pop singer since Cliff Richards has sung in an imitation American 
accent, and many of them have written lyrics in American English, too. 
(I am fascinated by the fact that Andrea Corr's solo album, "Ten Feet 
High", not for sale in the US, employs a number of British and Irish 
idioms ["amn't", "one year on", "chariot" in
the sense of "horse 
carriage"], something the Corrs as a group avoided in their original songs.)


-- 
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
   -- Charles Williams.  "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"
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