Vietnamese rap: yes, you can listen without knowing everything

Suboi[1]Ref. 1Suboi en.wikipedia.org rapped for Barack Obama[2]Ref. 2Barack Obama en.wikipedia.org during his visit to Vietnam in 2016, and I'll bet one of those names got your attention faster than the other.

That's the problem with opening there. An American reader recognizes the president, watches his reaction, and somehow the musician becomes the person who did a thing near somebody famous. The exchange happened, the video is public, and TIME reported it[3]Ref. 3TIME reported it time.com. I'd rather listen to her records.

Suboi and Đen Vâu[4]Ref. 4Đen Vâu en.wikipedia.org, often written Den Vau without the diacritics, are useful names for an English-speaking listener to start with. I wouldn't make them opposing teams, though, or expect two accessible artists to explain an entire country's hip-hop. That's a looooong way to stretch two names.

Den's delivery makes me listen to the space around a line. I enjoy hearing somebody rap fast, but I'm not keeping a damned scoreboard. Sometimes a phrase lands plainly and grabs me, sometimes he leaves me waiting for the next thought. I like hearing a familiar word arrive somewhere I wasn't expecting it too.

That's how I listen. I can notice a pause without catching the local reference, and I can't judge all the writing the way a native speaker would. I can tell you something caught my ear even when I don't know every reason it works. I'm allowed to enjoy it without promoting myself to expert halfway through the verse.

I like listening once without reading, then bringing up the original lyric and a translation. A short phrase may need several English words, or a compact rhyme turns into an explanation. I can't blame the rapper for that flat English paragraph. The translation may have delivered the subject and lost the timing that made it music.

Then I'll play it again, especially once I've figured out what one line is doing.