Emmy the Great: 'It’s time to retire English as pop’s lingua franca'

The Hong Kong-born singer-songwriter Emmy the Great asks why more and more musicians, from Gwenno Saunders to Maria Usbeck, are turning to their first languages for their lyricsIn May this year I released two music videos for the same song – one in English the other in Mandarin. After a decade as a singer-songwriter, it was my first time releasing music in Chinese. Around the time that I began to translate my songs into Chinese, two of my fellow multilingual musicians had embarked on simi...

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