Aaaaa

Well, one famous thing about the Spanish Civil War is the International Brigades: volunteers, largely in highly varied shades of leftism, from all over Europe and the world who showed up to fight the fascists. (Anglophone readers may recall Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.) So alongside the songs in Spanish and Catalan that came out of or get associated with the war, there are many International Brigades songs in English, German (yes, lots of German communists and other anti-fascists in the '30s went off to fight fascism where it seemed vulnerable), Italian (ditto), French, and this collection appears to have at least one each in Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and one that's attributed to "Yugoslavia" but I do not have the South Slavic expertise to tell you what language it is in. Not a song, but I have seen a poster specifically recruiting Esperantist volunteers. Very multilingual environment already.

And then... the Spanish Republic lost. The fascists won. The songs went pretty quiet in Spain. But the international volunteers that survived and went home kept singing them. And so did one of their sympathizers: Pete Seeger, whose recording Songs of the Lincoln Brigade introduced many of them to a broader audience. On that album you can hear Seeger singing songs in both English and Spanish:

Or how about the German communist volunteer and singer Ernst Busch doing the "Song of the United Front" in Spanish, English, French, and German:

(oh gosh my YouTube music recommendations are going to be so communist for a bit. That's all right, they've been quite Jacobite lately so that will balance it out.)

Of course, fascism in Spain didn't last forever, and today many singers and groups in Spain do perform and record the same songs. ... Including the International Brigade ones. (Unfortunately I can't track it down, so this may not be true to any extent at all, but I have read a remark somewhere [possibly in someone's liner notes?] that after the death of Franco, young people in Spain rediscovered these songs specifically through Pete Seeger's recordings...!)

So you can find the Catalan "Quartet Brossa" singing the Italian Bella Ciao:

Or the evidently Spanish-speaking "Coro Popular Jabalón" doing their best American English in the soldiers-complaint song "Quartermaster Store":

On the same album they have a song in Basque:

And so on and so on.

(You may have noticed Spain's minority languages, including Catalan and Basque, making a good showing here: that's no accident, those were evidently quite republican areas, as will not surprise you if you know anything about Franco's language policy.)

Anyway those are the main historical reasons I'm aware of why music from and about Spanish Civil War is so multilingual. Obviously my original claim that "almost nobody is ever singing in their native language" had an element of hyperbole - the Americans do sing songs in English (as do the Irish), the Spanish in Spanish, the Germans in German, and of course the Catalans in Catalan. But if you look for Spanish Civil War music, many of the "standards" you'll find are International Brigades songs, many others are Catalan as well as Spanish, so no matter what your native language is you will have plenty of songs that aren't in it.

And apparently you sing them anyway. Because, at least for the people making these records, it seems it's not about where you're from, or even whether your accent is any good, it's about standing side by side.

Steph broke up with Tim but luckily there's another Wayne and single and ready to mingle

This conversation would not exist if it was a bi flag or a pan flag or an ace flag

Aight here’s a trans woman who’s narrative is thematically linked with her transness in a way that enriches both her story, her characterization, and the story around her who doesn’t ever mention that she’s trans (but y’know she has a trans flag in her room in the background subtly like you asked)

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

Wow thanks for the ingot man let me just inspect the quality real quick

Dude come on

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.