#41

I still love this song, even after all these years. MS reminded me of it recently, she still listens to it, and so, “inspired” by that, i tried doing a cover of it just this afternoon.

Powered by Podbean.com

Music I’m listening to: Dido’s “Safe Trip Home”

I’ve never been a Dido fan, i don’t even know the name of any her songs save that “White Flag” one, but I did download her recent one. And although there are many nice tunes on it, there is one in particular that sticks out. The song is called “Look No Further” and i suppose that its poignancy, for me, is related to this whole idea of looking further–especially when it comes to relationships. There have been many times when it would have been possible or even wise to settle, and yet I was restless. Hormones, desires, neurotic maximizer tendencies, fear of making mistakes and wasting time–which is nothing but a permutation of the fear of death–what is behind that constant tendency to look for something more, something better, something ideal. Something that will bring us close to some kind of very probably illusory, half-baked notion of what happiness is. This song is the song of someone who has found something and will look no further–and I find solace in knowing that yes, people probably do, on the whole, experience a longer and more fulfilling happiness in this state–but the whole song, and not just the lyrics, is shot through with the consciousness of what one loses in that process. “Everyone I’ll never meet/and friends i won’t know make…”–lyrics like this understand the difficulty in acknowledging the sacrifices that every human being, simply by living in time with his animal condition, must confront everyday. If you think hard enough about it, do you get overwhelmed by sadness? Is it something more than you can bear?　Do you think about things that have past, people who have passed from your life and perhaps from this earth, or do you manage to always maintain that healthy, optimistic attitude of looking towards the future. Have you learned, somewhere, a philosophic tolerance for that transience？Was it something inherent in your genes, in your personality and the way it processes such things, or was it engineered by the formative experienced of childhood or early adulthood?

There is still the tendency of life to not make that choice. However, every moment that you are breathing you are making that choice. The contradictions are enough to tear one apart–therefore, in order not to go mad, all human beings have to firewall their attention so that you act, without thinking too much about the action. I only remark on this because the balance of power, in my life, has always sided with thinking–to the detriment of my overall happiness, i think. Vita contempliva and vita activa–that’s the wrong distinction. Both can be healthy and non-neurotic, depending on how you live them. The neurotic impasse, the block, the rut–those are the things that have to be avoided if you want to live life the right way.

Here are the lyrics to the song:

I might have been a singer
Who sailed around the world
A gambler who wins millions
And spent it all on girls

I might have been a poet
Who walked upon the moon
A scientist who wouldtell the world
I discovered something new

I might have loved a king
Been the one to end a war
A criminal who drink champaign
And never could be caught

But among your books
Among your clothes
Among the noise and fuss

I’ve let it go

I can’t stop and catch my breathe
And Look No further for happiness
And I will not turn again
‘Cause my heart has found its home

Everyone i’ll never meet
And friends I wont now make
The adventures that they could have been
And the risks I’ll never take

but Among Your Books
Among your clothes
Among the noise and fuss

I’ve let it go

I can’t stop and catch my breathe
And Look No further for happiness
And I will not turn again
‘Cause my heart has found its home

Could the Chinese rip off Bon Jovi to sell sneakers?

Sure, why the hell not. Like Frank Yi said they copied his way.

I mean the publicly listed Chinese fashion sportswear company, Xtep, whose recent commercials during the Olympics caught my attention because of the music used. The song is called “It’s My Way” and it doesn’t take a New Jersey-born fan of 1980s hair rock to know that the song is a rip off of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”…I don’t know who the singer of the song is, but you can tell that they are going for the same kind of vocal style as well.

The commercial features some of the hottest youth stars from Taiwan and Hong Kong, including Nicholas Tse, the Twins, Jolin Tsai, and Wilber Pan, most of whom I thoroughly detest. From what I can tell on the commercial, their shoes look like shite too, but nonetheless, they are still a fairly big player in the China sportswear market, where they are still behind Anta and the now household name of Li Ning. And apparently they are also part of the Carlyle Group’s portfolio, which given the affiliations behind that group make me incredibly cynical about the world and reinforce an outlook which could be summarized thus: some shit capitalists are out there making shitty derivative products, and yet there are some powerful and elitist capitalists out there making sure that the former succeed for their mutual benefit.

Here’s a vid of the commercial, this one meant for the Olympics in particular:

and here’s the whole song:

A couple of thoughts on that commercial: firstly, it always get my goad when Taiwan and Hong Kong stars shil for mainland based products, just because if you are famous and from those parts of nominally free China, I somehow feel you ought to shil for some better brand–I mean what does it say about you that these shoes cost 150-300 RMB? On the other hand, I know that they’d never be remotely considered for brands like Nike and Adidas, who go for the real top-flight athletes. In that sense, Xtep is smart because they go for the youth demographic, for the fashion sportswear market, sell the image, sell the lifestyle. It’s not and has not been about the specs of the shoes for a long time.

It’s also ironic because the commercials plays on those common Olympic tropes of “1.3 billion people’s dreams and hopes”, which nauseates me to no end, and again, makes me wonder why Taiwanese and HKese stars would go for that. Oh yeah, maybe they are proud of the Olympics, and maybe they are getting paid a fuckload of money. Oh well Peijin, hold your nose and look the other way.

Last thought on this is the Wilbur Pan’s role in the commercial, where he plays the role of a street basketball player—that cheesy layup at the end and his knife across the neck motion—it’s like he’s some bad-boy gangsta baller, but I bet he’s a weakling on the actual basketball court. I doubt he really plays in the streets of anywhere, not even Taipei, where, if you know where to go, there are some ballers wid skeels. Wilbur is basically a pretty boy that likes to appropriate the tropes of hip-hop and b-boy culture to sell his image, which he can then parlay into record sales and concerts, sportswear and soda commercials. There is no need for him to be anything other than what he is. It’s one unified image, and all he’s selling are the various products that help him realize his lifestyle, one which, provided you outfit yourself with the same shit, you can have too.

Unfortunately, that’s another aspect of greater Chinese pop culture that I detest too—and I know that there’s no point in crying about the commercialization of hip-hope or black culture, that’s been the status quo for years and it’s not going to change. It’s just that to me, it’s even more meaningless when it comes from Chinese people. I know pop culture has an easy, lowest common denominator type universality to it, but somehow there’s a very atavistic and inchoate impulse towards Chinese purity that I cannot quite explain. It’s not that everything has to be traditional, it’s more that I was hoping that one day even in the realm of popular culture and lowbrow consumerism, Chinese people might do something that at least strikes people as having one or more iotas of originality.
Li Ning vs. Nike and Adidas, Lenovo vs. Apple, Baidu vs. Google—the west has a head-start and a superior advantage. Mimicry is a form of flattery. I talk of inspiration and originality, while these Chinese brands are locked in a fierce to the death battle for every percentage point of market share they can get.

Not sure what to think from here. Maybe better solution would be to put on some Bon Jovi, which always reliable source of low dosage escapism:

demo of song I wrote during the last few days…

Powered by Podbean.com

Should the Super Voice Girls be Olympic torch-bearers

I’ve had about all that i can take of torch-bearers and Olympics stuff, but this news item caught my eye: it seems that Chinese netizens have been busy debating whether or not Super Voice Girl celebs like Li Yuchun, Zhang Liangying (my personal favorite, the only cutie in the bunch) and He Jie are fit to be torch-bearers. The pro/con arguments are not hard to guess; this article focuses more on the “con” side of it, at least as netizens have argued it. The gist is that these are merely entertainers that are famous for being famous, and maintain that fame with celebrity scandals and the like, whereas the honor of being a torch-bearer has been thus far given to model workers, people of high moral caliber, elites and leaders in various industries and professions, i.e. the kind of people that you would take home to meet your mother.

Technorati Tags: super voice girls, li yuchun, he jie, zhang liangying, singers, vocalist, pop star, pop, rock, music, culture, fame, celebs, chinese, china, contest, torch, olympics, beijing, 2008

Portishead’s Third

Portishead’s latest album isn’t really trippy or hoppy. Pehraps I’ve just been out of the loop since their first album was released ages ago (haven’t followed them closely since, though I did like that album quite much); but they deifnitely have evolved into something differenet altogether. In this album the massive trip-hop machinery behind vocalist Beth Gibbon toned down, throwing her voice out front and center. There aren’t many effects on her voice in these tracks, which reveals a voice that, while still eerily beautiful in the way that made their name, reveals a bit more frailty, which is, for the most part, good.

Overall, I found the album to be decent, but nothing that blew me away, but then again, we’re all a bit older and more cynical than we were when “Dummy” came out, aren’t we? What follows are just brief and desultory notes on individual tracks in the album.

“Magic Doors” is a song that really annoys me. It just doesn’t feel very well put together. There’s just too much going on in the background, and it all sounds quite tinny, like someone just threw a bunch of loops on the computer and then said “ok, now just sing over this.”

The only thing remotely trip-hop about “Threads” is the beat, but the drums and guitar make it more of an art-rock type of song. I found it a bit repetitive; again, somehow the music seemed to fight with Beth Gibbon’s voice.

“We Carry On” is another track with atmospheric distorted guitar…layered over machine-esque electronica. Again, I felt the music was fighting with Beth Gibbon’s voice…or perhaps they were just operating in different spaces. I love rock music but I found the guitars a bit too distorted and abrasive at the end of the track, where the same riff is played repeatedly. There is something Bjork-esque about the beats in the track, which I liked, but of course you only really hear that beat when the guitars are done upstaging everyone else.

“Deep Water” is mostly mandolin and Gibbon on vocals. It’s short–1:35–but sweet, and sits in the middle of the album and provides a little intermission from the rest of the album.

“Machine Gun” sure lives up to its name–the beats recall machine gun fire, which is cool for about the first 30 seconds of the song, after which it gets a bit annoying. That said, I love the vocals on this track, it hearkens back to “Dummy” era Portishead; you don’t know what she’s saying exactly, but the voice takes you somewhere very Christian–I don’t knwo what makes me say this, but her voice belongs ot that of a Saint–there is something very ethereal and otherwordly about it, it takes you into a confessional zone, where you are tormented by searing, private pains that other people cannot see.

“Small” is a cool track, mosty vocals and cello, but it gets boring rather quickly because there isn’t much by way of contours. It starts out in this particular zone and stays there until the middle of the song when it gets trip-hoppy (and here I mean trip-hoppy in the way that Portishead helped define). There are no vocals during this part, and although some people might like the whole trippy instrumental thing, I confess that part of me kept impatiently waiting for Gibbon to start singing again.

Gibbon doesn’t start singing until over two and half minutes into “Silence”, but when she does, it’s trademark Portishead–confessional mutterings and secret pleas, some sort of haunting and inexplicable pain.

“Hunter” is even more trademark trip-hop. The creepy and punchy beats are captivating and cinematic. That’s one thing that I always loved about this music–it is always the soundtrack to some peculiar scene in the movie where the protagonist is in some harem or drug den, a place where fantasy, fear, and neurosis burst through the mental floodgates and even if they emerge into sunlight on the other end, life is subtly changed by the experience. A secret is formed, and there is no going back.

“Rip” is a more emotionally engaging track than the rest.

“Plastic” is even better. Gibbon’s voice reaches a nice crescendo at the end of each chorus, showing a bit of the range that we don’t normally hear when she’s in quiet confessional mode. The guitars that begin the verses are nice, they are vaguely sinister in a Radiohead kind of way. Then the trip-hop beats kick in.

Autumn Dewilde’s book on Elliott Smith

Amazon.com: Elliott Smith: Books: Autumn de Wilde,Beck Hansen,Chris Walla via kwout

My Jango Jukebox

http://www.Jango.com