By Stephen Lawson
Anybody up for the big Air Supply concert? I thought not. Anybody remember the last time they heard anyone ask that question? Well, someone no doubt was asking it recently in Hong Kong, in some language.
Like soft-rock asylum-seeker Lobo, who still gets paid to sing “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo,” but only to Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. who are nostalgic for early ‘70s Armed Forces Radio, Air Supply apparently has found a niche big enough that they can’t hear the people outside laughing. Big enough, in fact, to nearly fill a 6,000-seat hall at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre -- twice.
In a way, it makes sense that the group that brought us such hits as (skip this part if you don’t want to be reminded) the tearful “All Out of Love” and (OK, that was enough) is still popular here. Their songs were much like those still produced by Hong Kong’s biggest artists. I have read that there is a wide variety of music produced here in Cantonese, the local language, but the style that dominates the charts is Cantopop, which generally ranges from sappy ballads, to power ballads, to sappy power ballads with a dance beat. It resembles the bread and rolls here: Soft, white, bland, and unsatisfying.
Cantopop is almost always sung by individual artists, who are casually called by their English first names (“Eason,” “Aaron,” “Cecilia”) and who in most cases are also actors. Many are better actors than singers, even those who first gained fame in music. Cantopop superstar Leon Lai, for example, gave a performance as deep as Hong Kong’s harbor in the 1994 film “Comrades, Almost a Love Story,” which made it all the more painful to watch him cavorting on a powerboat in a bad music video that came out last summer.
In stores, the Chinese CDs usually are organized with pleasing simplicity into two categories: guys and girls. From there it gets more difficult, because instead of alphabetical order – those easy-to-remember first names are, after all, only adopted names – the CDs are organized by the artists’ Chinese family names, in order of the number of strokes in the character. To narrow it down further, you need to know the order of the strokes, and then move on to the given name (which comes second, this being China), and so on. Fortunately, clerks are patient with foreigners who speak Chinese like a toddler.
All this is making it more difficult for me to find the album I really want, which is not only by a whole group (sometimes in the male section, sometimes tucked off in a little “groups” section) but also comes from all the way over in Taiwan, a two-hour plane ride away.
The group is Wu Yue Tian, which is easy to remember because it’s a literal translation of an English name (May Day) and the characters are pretty elementary.
Ladies and gentlemen, May Day rocks. It’s a real band. They have a lead singer, two guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer. Great melodies, real beats, and poetic lyrics, which I’m laboriously translating. Even their power ballads are better than most.
I know this from their first album and their concert VCD (video CD). Their second album came out in December, but strangely, there is no sign of it here. I only know about it because I saw it at an online store, YesAsia.com, which, ironically, is in San Francisco.
I scour the record stores. They have stacks of overstocked Leslie Cheung compilations, but no new May Day. Yet in the meantime, I am hearing other things that catch my ear. Mandarin-language pop from Taiwan and the mainland is catching on here, and with good reason. I’m biased, because unlike with Cantopop, I can actually understand some of the words. But Mandopop also has a richer variety of styles, and to me, artists like May Day and mainland singer Na Ying sound more genuine.
The record stores are pushing this trend and playing a lot of the new artists. So, between scanning the racks, reading characters, and trying to make out the words to the blaring music, I’m learning a little by record-shopping. It’s great to be able to use a new language in a setting that’s fun and familiar.
Strangely familiar, sometimes. One night at the big HMV store in Tsimshatsui I heard an artist rapping over samples of a great old song. I finally figured out what I was listening to: rap, in Mandarin, to the tune of Southern outlaw rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd’s classic “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Copyright © 2000 Stephen Lawson