» Music

Best news in a long time…

Due-East — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:11:57 +0000

The news is depressing lately. Well, it’s actually pretty much always depressing. But I just got some great news to offset some of the doom and gloom! After almost 4 years, InLove is finally releasing a new album in July! The singer, Lu, kindly stopped by the site to leave a message about it. Here are her comments (in part) below:

。。。inLove的新專輯將會於七月中推出, 到時會有發佈演出, 場地是香港藝術中心的一個小型演奏廳。

我們都很興奮, 因為已經接近四年沒有推出專輯, 所以今次有點緊張, 但也會盡力做好。希望也能得到Chris你的支持。^－^

最後想說的是, H1N1病情似乎愈來愈嚴重, 敬請大家都要保重身體, 也一起祈禱, 希望病者早日康復, 以及全球病情盡快得到控制。。。

Lu

I’m really excited about this because their first album was awesome. Every song on it had a certain warmth that kept me wanting to listen again and again. If this were the 80s, when all we had were records or cassette tapes, I’d probably be on my 4th or 5th copy of it because I would’ve worn out several copies already from listening so much. Check out the video below for a taste of their sound:

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Check out Neocha.com for Chinese indie music

Due-East — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:46:44 +0000

Are you tired of Chinese popular music? I am. Over all, it stinks. I mean, I’m a huge Jay Chou fan, and I like almost everything Sun Yan Zi and Wang Li Hong put out. But for the most part, Chinese pop music – like pop music everywhere – all sounds the same, and it’s all pretty mediocre. No creativity, no individuality. I really appreciate the traditional Chinese value of putting the group over the individual and not rocking the proverbial boat, but sometimes it just doesn’t work. It absolutely fails when it comes to music. Music is supposed to be creative, so just following along with the crowd definitely doesn’t cut it. Thankfully, in every culture there are always those independent people who like to experiment with new sounds and ideas and create something fresh. (Really, if you haven’t checked out InLove, do it. Yes, Lu, I’m always advertising your music!). I recently came across a post at Lost Laowai reviewing a great site called Neocha (aka “new tea”). I won’t go into what the review says since that would be totally redundant. Just check it out for yourself or head on over to neocha.com to get connected with great (and of course some not-so-great) Chinese indie music.

Hey, Jealousy

Due-East — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:52:03 +0000

You know how when you were a kid you’d have these highly implausible fantasies about totally awesome things happening to you, and no matter how unlikely it actually was that those things would ever happen, somewhere deep down inside you thought they might some day? My fantasy when I was a kid was that I would be at my favorite band’s concert and then for whatever reason my thirteen-year-old mind could come up with, I would get invited up on stage to sing along with or instead of the singer of the band. I used to lie in bed at night and drift off to sleep imagining that kind of thing happening. But in the words of Noel Gallagher of Oasis, “While we’re living, the dreams we have as children fade away.” Reality eventually set in, and I realized that kind of thing doesn’t happen…unless you’re a Sammi Cheng fan in Singapore. Check out the video below:

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Well, it’s pretty close to the fantasy, anyway. My Cantonese is horrible (read: all but nonexistent), but someone in the comments section on Youtube said something about Sammi making fun of the girl for being fat or not sexy (but in a good-natured way?!). Being called fat in front of thousands of people? That’d sting a bit, but it’s a small price to pay for being given the chance to live out a fantasy like that. The next time I’m at a Jay Chou concert (probably never), I’m bringing a poster that says, “Let me on stage to make a fool of myself in front of thousands!” or maybe just “Can I have Landy Wen‘s phone number?”

我爱你, by…some guy on Youtube

Due-East — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:59:10 +0000

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I came across this video on Youtube, and when I first saw that it was a guy with his shirt off singing an original song of his, I thought, “This is gonna be painful to listen to.” But it’s actually a really good song. I really admire people who feel free enough to express their emotions outwardly and are able to channel them in creative ways, so this guy rocks!

It’s [Chinese] indie rock ‘n’ roll for me

Due-East — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:24:29 +0000

Re-TROS (L to R): Hua Dong guitar/vocals; Liu Min, bass/vocals; and Ma Hui, drums.

It was 5:30AM, and I grumbled to myself as I usually do, irritated about how closely morning follows night five of the days of the week. Every day I’m awakened by one NPR correspondent or another talking about one news item or personal interest story or another from around the world. I normally just lie in bed for a good twenty minutes, not paying much attention to what’s actually being said but not wanting to actually get out of bed either. But today was a little different. This morning, Lisa Chow was showcasing China’s latest export: anti-establishment music. Of course, I perked up a bit.

Now I’m definitely not anti-establishment. I’m not a beatnik or an elitist, and I don’t walk around in “skinny jeans” rejecting everything mainstream and whining about how a formerly cool band sold out when they released a particular album. And I can’t stand the whole “being different for the sake of being different” scene. It’s just not me. But that’s not to say I don’t appreciate creativity and music that doesn’t sound like everything else on the planet. In fact, I rarely listen to mainstream radio because everybody sounds the same. Needless to say, I was pretty happy to hear some non-mainstream Chinese music advertised in a part of the media with such a large audience.

Since I’m not into politics (read: I hate it), this post isn’t focusing so much on the band that was featured on NPR this morning as it is focusing on Chinese indie rock itself. I first got into it when I happened upon the website for Modern Sky (China’s largest independent record label) a few years ago. Although I couldn’t read much Chinese at the time (still can’t), I managed to find a place on the site to sample the music of some of the label’s featured bands. I was impressed. In a culture where standing out from the crowd is discouraged, there was quite a bit of well-written independent music in styles varying from trip-hop to garage rock. Some of it’s really good. So I decided to look around for more Chinese indie music and found bands like Hopscotch (跳房子), InLove, Wang Fu (旺福), and Cold Fairyland, who have a very well-polished sound. And Pixeltoy, My Little Airport, and The Marshmallow Kisses definitely deserve a mention as well. There’s a large variety of great music in just those few bands, and there’s a lot more Chinese indie music that I still haven’t explored, so I’m likely to find a lot more to love.

If you’d like to check out Chinese indie music yourself but are worried you won’t understand any of it because you’re monolingual, you can rest easy. You don’t always have to speak Chinese to appreciate a lot of the indie rock coming out of China; some of the better bands like Hopscotch (跳房子) and My Little Airport actually write a lot of their lyrics in English. You can find their music and lots more on Last.FM. Most of the Chinese bands I listen to are bands I found on that site. It’s actually a great resource for finding new music in any genre.

While NPR is just one media outlet, and the majority of the world has never heard much of today’s independent Chinese music, it’s still encouraging to hear Chinese bands featured in their articles because it could potentially lead a lot of exposure for hard working artists. Who knows where that kind of coverage could lead? Maybe some of these bands will play Nashville some day…yeah, probably not.

Train wrecks and Chinese kisses

Due-East — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:05:23 +0000

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I was surfing Youtube yesterday and came across a great music video by a Chinese singer named Michael Wong (光良). It’s very sweet in its sentiment, and the song is nice, too, if you like romantic ballads. But about 2:45 into the video, there’s a kissing scene so awkward that it almost made me shudder. It’s a really bad kiss. It looks more like two trains colliding or like they’re engaging in some kind of facial shoving contest rather than kissing, and it’s about the most un-romantic thing I’ve ever seen (and I’m not talking about the fact that her nose starts bleeding during their kiss). Some people just aren’t good kissers, I suppose.

But when I think back to all of the Chinese movies I’ve watched over the years, I can’t recall a single good kiss in any of them. Pretty much all of the kisses I’ve seen in Chinese movies are of the clumsy face-crash sort. But I’m not sure why that is. I know that Chinese culture isn’t big on public displays of affection, so maybe it’s just that no matter how good the actors and actresses are, they just can’t get past the cultural taboo of kissing in front of dozens of people when they’re filming a kissing scene. Despite the fact that I haven’t seen one good kiss in a Chinese movie, I tend to highly doubt that an entire culture of people would be bad at kissing. That sounds too much like a generalization or stereotype to make me comfortable. So there has to be some other explanation for this.

I’ve never kissed a Chinese girl, and I’m not Chinese, so I can’t comment on the ugly on-screen kiss phenomenon and whether it reflects real-life kisses. Maybe someone reading this blog can help enlighten me. If you have a good idea as to why all on-screen kisses in Chinese movies stink (or if you know of a good one in a particular movie), let me know by posting a comment.

Spotlight on 旺福 (Wang Fu)

Due-East — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:54:31 +0000

I love this band’s sound so much that I thought I’d introduce my readership [of 4 people] to them. This is 旺福 (Wang Fu/Won Fu), a Taiwanese band whose sound ranges from a sort of big band/swing sound to a 50s/60s rock sound to a modern rock sound to (strangely) a sort of kids-party-songs kind of sound. They’re a lot more versatile than most of the American bands out there these days. And they’re solid musicians, too. A lot of modern bands just stick to straight power chords and 1-4-5 arrangements, but they seem to use lots of jazz chords and make more complicated arrangements. The vast majority of their songs have ridiculously catchy tunes, which is great except when you don’t know the words to the songs and get them stuck in your head. That’s what happens to me all the time, and misery loves company, so I thought I’d introduce them here.

They have 2 albums, 同名专辑 (Tong Ming Zhuan Ji) and 旺福志 (Wang Fu Zhi). Both are excellent, and while I think 同名专辑 has more good songs on it, 旺福志 is well worth buying. If I can find some good mp3s of their songs, I’ll post them. Until then, try watching the video below. You’ll notice the singer in the picture (in the turquoise) isn’t the same girl singing in the video. The girl in the video has left the band because she and the guitarist broke up (or at least that’s what I’ve heard).

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Sometimes you find great music in bizarre places…

Due-East — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:37:46 +0000

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Ok, this one technically isn’t Chinese-related since the piano isn’t a Chinese instrument and there are no lyrics to this song, but I don’t care because it’s a great piano piece that happens to be in a Chinese movie, and I’m rather in love with the piano as an instrument. In fact, if it were possible to marry a piano, I probably would.

It’s a scene from a Chinese movie called 十分爱 (which is nothing like its English title. The Chinese means “complete love” or something similar, but the English title is “Love Is Not All Around”). I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I probably will, even though Kozo at LoveHKFilm.com gave it a crappy review. The actor playing the piece is also a musician/singer, so he may have written it himself. Anyway, the piece is very moving, but short. I wish there were more to it.

A rare moment when reality TV is worth a darn

Due-East — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:37:10 +0000

My friend who’s also learning Chinese sent me these two videos a few minutes ago, and I thought I’d post links to them here mainly because it’s amazing how much difference it can make when a singer is truly passionate about a song. Now, I’m a big fan of Stefanie Sun (孙燕姿) over all, but this amateur from a Taiwanese version of American Idol blows her out of the water with his version.

Here’s the original version of the song, with a video that appears to be about an obsessive, wannabe-Riverdancer fan of hers getting dumped by her boyfriend for being a weirdo:

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And here’s Yang Zong Wei’s (杨宗纬) version. He puts his all into the vocals here, I think, as is evident by the emotional response of the audience. Whether you like the song or style of music or not, you have to admire the performance. Just try to ignore the fact that he looks like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone while he sings.

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Update: Aska Yang didn’t win the competition from the video here (he dropped out after it was found out he lied about his age), but he did get a record deal out of it. His debut album’s songs were “…meh…” nothing special, but hopefully he’ll pick better songs or get better writers for his next album.

Avril Lavigne: killing my opinion of Canadians since 2007.

Due-East — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:36:18 +0000

I can’t believe we’re exporting this garbage to other countries.

I came across a video on YouTube earlier that really grates on my nerves. It’s Avril Lavigne trying to sing her song “Girlfriend” in Chinese, and it’s bad. Really bad. Her accent is kind of almost good, but at the same time still really, really bad. There are other videos of her covering the song in other languages, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch any of them because this one was just too painful. She obviously couldn’t sing the lines all in one take, so they had to perform some [not-so] creative editing to get her words to fit with the song, and the result is a really choppy vocal “performance” in which she sounds like a drunk, stuttering computer. Did I mention that it’s bad? Now, Chinese isn’t the easiest language to speak, but it’s not hard to sing in Chinese because you don’t have to worry about tones. I just can’t believe that someone would actually sign-off on this version of the song and say, “Yep, that’s what I want people to hear from me in that foreign country.”

Normally I would be much kinder about this kind of thing in the interests of building people up and being positive, but the song’s vulgar, too, so I feel justified totally bashing it. Any song that says “mother f***ing” in it shouldn’t be translated in any way into any other language. Granted, only the chorus of the song is actually sung in Chinese, but that doesn’t make it any less crappy to send it overseas. Couldn’t they have picked a non-profanity-spewing song to dub into other languages? I just think it’s really, really trashy for your one foray into a foreign culture to come along with that phrase. And she’s married, anyway, so why does she need to sing a stupid song like this?

Should you choose to watch the video, you can safely stop at about 25 seconds and see what I’m talking about before any English (and then profanity) comes in…that is, if you can make it that far before it grates on your nerves so much that you stab pencils into your ears.

Link to crappy video. Feel free not to watch it.