Adventures in Chinese Videos...
I've been here for a while... and i tend to leave MTV (or the local equivalent Vgongshe) up in the background...
First off - a LOT of interesting influences... i hear C&W ballads, weird jpop-styled crap with girl bands dressed disturbingly young (not that chinese girls dont look too damned young to begin with), and odd stuff with very odd 'engrish' from time to time.
But here's the stuff that stands out - and my version of what's going on.
黃義達 - 完整演出 -- Yida... Chinese Emo music (as far as i can tell) - without the screaming or the my chemical romance makeup.
非你莫属 - TANK -- a popular song about a female stalker / chinese princess type who ends traps some poor guy into breaking her arm and doing whatever she wants. (he'd better watch out... there's usually a really big shoe budget involved in those...)
小情歌 - 苏打绿 -- a sad country chord progression ballad about a girl who has some sort of odd mirrormask problem with her walls - with lots of poison gas and blood raining from the skies and people who rip their hearts out of their chests... at least... that's what it looks like...
拥抱的问号 - 袁泉 -- Another country ballad - by another pretty chinese girl (damn but there are a lot of those) with one of those smoky jazz voices that would probably hold up in a more interesting musical style.
就算没有明天 - 孙俪/黄晓明 -- Hong-Kong Gangster Powerballad... think John Wu meets Michael Bolton. PC Load Letter my left nut.
on edit - one more
黑涩会美眉_-_晴天娃娃 -- ok - if theres one you gotta watch... the disturbing story of a group of 4 chinese lesbian cheerleaders and their attempt to get one of their coven pregnant by a very tall basketball player... or something like that.
I cant find some of the stuff i see in heavy rotation... hard to do when you dont speak the language... but you get the idea. It's pretty soft... even the harder stuff is soft... (never gets more aggressive than a Verve-esque guitar sound and guys with their collars turned up). I want to see Chinese punk - but oddly enough - that's one thing you dont see on the streets here... i dont think i've seen a single kid with attitude.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
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3 comments:
the chinese punks are out there!! one of my fellow grad students back in CA wrote her dissertation about chinese rock music (actually i have no idea if she ever finished it - but that was the subject, at any rate). one of the chapters was explicitly about punk in china. it was kind of interesting although she was insufferably self-important so it made it hard for me to read the stuff seriously.
well, i'm not terribly surprised... Beijing is huge - and i stayed in the booming financial district (and my understanding is that Shanghai is a bit more dynamic in a lot of ways). I missed Go!Go!7188 when they blew through austin last week - i'm a little pissed about that. I really like them. *sigh*
hmm. i can't remember where she was staying when she was studying chinese punk, but i do recall that it was somewhere...unusual. i.e. not beijing (or even shanghai, i don't think, although i'm not 100% certain).
btw re: zombies in memphis - we're totally letting the city in on the plan in advance, so as to avoid any boston-style stupidity. or so we hope.
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