By Stephen Lawson
Weeks after moving to a strange land, where dark winter clouds and high-rise buildings cast everything in an endless twilight, I heard a sound that brightened my day. Those readers who received my first newsletter, Daan Taats, may remember how I walked into a Hong Kong record store and discovered the world in a set of headphones: a Mandarin rap to the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” The song not only brought echoes of home and teen-age memories of the golden age of Southern rock, it also suggested that the distance between where I found myself and where I had come from wasn’t as great, culturally, as it seemed.
I later learned that the artist, David Tao, was born in Taiwan but went to college at UCLA. There’s a distinctly American sound to some of his songs and a Mandopop (soft Mandarin pop) style in others. He sprinkles English in with his Mandarin and even manages a realistic (or is it real?) Southern American accent -- in both languages.
Last weekend, here in San Francisco, I saw Bobby Banduria (aka Kevin Camia) a Filipino-American who leads a rock band playing a banduria, a 14-stringed mandolin-like instrument normally used in Filipino folk music. Only it’s an electric banduria, which he rigged with two thumbnail-sized pickups designed for a violin. Kevin says it’s the only electric banduria he knows of, and I’m inclined to believe him. He played it like an electrified acoustic guitar, but it has a glistening sound all its own. He sang in English and worked a mean distortion pedal, backed up a Filipino-American rhythm section.
We live in frightening times. Lately we have been warned of a coming clash of civilizations. Part of the theory is that Western culture’s world domination is threatened by Asian societies that appear modern but are fundamentally alien to the West. The alarmists ignore what a lot of people know from experience: Asian and Western cultures have already clashed in pop culture, and it rocked -- in a good way. David Tao and Bobby Banduria are just two voices of a new world where languages stream across borders and a string of influences links artists around the planet.
Music isn’t the only area where this positive interchange is happening. You can find 150 cultural border-crossers on Saturday morning TV. That’s how many basic creatures there are in the Japanese cartoon Pokemon. The show, and its associated games, have become a way of life for many American kids. Meanwhile, the Japanese style of animation it reflects has been a big influence on rave and hip-hop art, not to mention video games.
These cultural transfers are not just a recent phenomenon. Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, a popular art form that originated in the 18th century, were a big influence on Impressionists in the West. The artists were intrigued by the way Ukiyo-e artists used colors to impart the feeling of a scene rather than simply represent it realistically.
Action movie auteur John Woo has carried trans-Pacific exchanges both directions. Inspired by Western action filmmakers, such as “The Wild Bunch” director Sam Peckinpah, he combined a whip-smart film style with Chinese elements. The result was a series of Hong Kong gangster epics that substituted Beretta pistols and principled hit men for the swords and honor-bound warriors of Chinese swordplay novels and films from the early 20th century. This blend revitalized Hong Kong’s film industry and eventually drew the attention of Hollywood, so Woo now brings the acrobatics of swordplay back to America in movies such as “Face/Off” and “Mission: Impossible II,” helping to raise the standard of this country’s action films.
However, for sheer variety, Asian pop music may be the best example of cross-Pacific cultural trade. Asians have embraced just about every style of the rock era and in the process made their own mark. Last year I went to the Spring Scream music festival, held every year in a beach town in Taiwan. For four nights, independent acts from around East Asia played all over the map: punk, folk, electronica, R&B, hip-hop, frat-house rock, and something a friend told me was “death metal.” It sounded pretty alive to me. Some of the music was a little ragged, but most of it just leaped off the stage.
As hard as Asians can rock, though, their greatest contribution has been to carry on the catchy, melodic tradition of Western pop most associated with the Beatles. From the British Invasion through sing-along early Seventies ballads, to the Power Pop of the late Seventies and early Eighties, that line lives on in Asia. Some of it, like Hong Kong’s interminable Cantopop ballads, is like a candy bar left out in the tropical heat. But as an American born at the height of Beatlemania, I find a lot in Asian pop that speaks to me – and to my friends around the same age.
I have nothing against the hip-hop, electronica, and heavy-metal-influenced rock out there today, but I don’t get it. I do get Mayday, which was Taiwan’s most popular band until some of its members were drafted last year. They had progressed from a first album of “Last Train to Clarksville”-style love ditties to an elegantly orchestrated second album in the vein of “Abbey Road” and on their third album gave those classic sounds a contemporary shimmer. Likewise, Mr. Children, like many Japanese groups, has a strange name but a familiar sound, the hard-candy Power Pop sound of acts like The Knack and early Elvis Costello. The Filipino band Siakol has been thrashing out old-fashioned garage rock since the mid-Nineties. And even readers of a certain age may be forgiven for not recognizing “The Place I Want to Go,” one of the great middle-of-the-road ballads of the early Seventies. It was written and recorded in 2001, in Mandarin, by Malaysian-born Taiwanese superstar Michael Wang. Some of this music is available at Yesasia.com.
Every time one of my contemporaries catches on to artists like these, I can’t deny my dream. I’m convinced that if Asian pop could just overcome the language barrier, or the laziness of aging music fans, or fear of the unfamiliar, these acts could make it big here. At that moment, anyway, the chasm doesn’t seem wide at all. After all, Spanish-language artists have already made it into America’s mainstream.
But first we have to stop thinking about foreign cultures in Sputnik terms, as rising threats, and think instead of Telstar, the first satellite sent up to beam live TV around the world. British record producer Joe Meek was so inspired by Telstar’s launch in the summer of 1962 that he made up a happy tune about it and had The Tornadoes play it as an instrumental on a clavioline (an early synthesizer) and an electric guitar.
A few years ago in a Beijing hotel I heard “Telstar” played on violin and grand piano, a typical modern Chinese arrangement that would be considered ostentatious in the West. It was a cold night in late autumn, and the song echoed through the nearly empty lobby, a slow and wistful sound. It was a long way from that chirpy future, but far more lyrical. And lyricism, and beauty, is more important than ever these days.
Copyright © 2002 Stephen Lawson