You call that a blog entry?
Greetings fam. Returned from a much-needed vacation in China this past Friday night. Caught Kanye lampooning his own ego on SNL the next night (hilarious), then slept for about 26 of the next 34 hours. Now that I’m back at work and feeling like I could use a 6 hour nap, I figured I’d throw an entry up for yalls in honor of Monday.
During my trip, I tried my best to catch up on Chinese music by watching Channel V and MTV. Yeah I know. But during my first trip to China in 2004, those corporate networks gave me the shock of my life, showing me that not all Chinese music sucked. No disrespect to anyone, but I can’t get into Canto-pop, the syrupy emotionless ballads that come from Hong Kong, and for all of my teenage and college years, that was the only Chinese music I ever heard in the States, so I naively wrote all Chinese music off as corny. But if I had actually spent time in China, I would have known the pop music there is way better than the pop music here, we just don’t hear any of it on this side of the Pacific. Thankfully, Hong Kong hits are relegated to a one-hour show on MTV China, and the rest of the time, viewers can watch sunny melodious girl pop, vaguely menacing pop rock, or funky flowlicious pop rap. Or dubbed episodes of “Laguna Beach.”
At one point, I peeped a special on the teen - although 29 years old - idol V.Dubb (née VanNess Wu), formerly of the Taiwanese boy band F4, an LA-born-and-raised singer/rapper/actor/dancer (does anyone affiliated with the entertainment industry in Asia ever only do one thing?) who cuts the sleeves off his t-shirts. I do the same thing! Except his motivation is to show his bulging muscles, and mine is because I don’t like the feeling of cotton against my frail armpits. But it got me thinking about how many Asian pop stars are in fact Asian Americans who had no chance of blowing up stateside, and pursued a career in the motherland. Just off the top, Coco Lee comes to mind, as do the LA Boyz, Tata Young, Tiger JK, and Roscoe Umali.
So what’s the deal? How is it that American mainstream crap music is exported around the world, but decent Asian pop music almost doesn’t exist here? Why did it take an actual trip to China to finally hear Chinese music that wasn’t clone after Canto-pop clone?
Maybe after I conquer my jetlag, I’ll post something more cohesive here. Watch the space!
Last 5 posts by giles
- Haini's Here! Haini's Here! - May 9th, 2008
- Appreciation: DJ Towa Tei - May 5th, 2008
- Playoffs? - May 3rd, 2008
- Are You Ready to Rock? (Band) - April 4th, 2008
- Appreciation: The Visionaries - April 1st, 2008
Tags: Commentary.
Maybe people in the United States are pretty U.S.-centric. Almost to the point of being arrogant?
We have a saying in the academic world, “if it isn’t created here, it can’t be any good.” Maybe that is generally applicable to our society as a whole.
Sometimes that mentality can be good, because then you try to make something that is “better” or “different”. But sometimes that blinds you from the fact that other creative sources may be just as good.
i remember Dennis Miller hosted the MTV awards one year and after they announced winners from MTVs around the world, and Wong Fei (called Faye Wong by the announcer) won, Dennis Miller chuckled and was like, “Faye Wong???”
Whatever. Dennis Miller definitely has proven since then that his opinions on a variety of topics are garbage.
Stay tuned for a Wong Fei-related post later this week.
LA boyz, i remember them. P-A-R-T-Y Party! David Tao is another asian am export, I think he went to UCLA? also a kid i went to high school with in LA was pretty successful in a group called B.A.D. in Taiwan. I wonder if they have a leg up as hip americans.
Are the better chinese artists not getting exported? I suppose what sells the most records gets exported more, and often it’s popilicious.