What color is love
if sadness is blue ?
What color is joy
if depression is gray?
What color is the sky
if the oceans are blue?
I say the sky is also blue
because they fell in love
Yu Quan’s Leaf 叶子 has one of their most simple yet beautiful lyrics. The lyrics were written by member Hu Haiquan for a friend who cannot see. Li Yifeng also covered it with a different monologue while he was under Hu Haiquan’s company.
The MV’s kind of boring, but here’s Yu Quan singing it live with the X-Fire boys:
Yu Quan shows that (imo) the most over-covered song in Chinese music can still sound cool if you do it right, and that you’re never too old to be sexy in a Elvis outfit.
Also, this cover last week is already a top contender for best lives of the year: Continue reading
Finalists from both seasons of I Am A Singer return to the stage to duel it out, with a surprise twist.
Have I just not been paying attention all this time, or are those sponsored beverages a lot more prominent in this episode? I don’t even know what they are. But I want to drink them.
This special episode pit the finalists of the first I Am A Singer 我是歌手 season against the recently concluded second season finalists. Season one finalist Huang Qishan, who appeared in last week’s finale, was absent in this episode and was instead replaced by Laure Shang. (Oh, I’m sure she had a very good reason for not being there.)
Just to note, some performances have not been uploaded onto HunanTV’s official YouTube channel. We’ll try and work our way around that.
The format differed slightly from previous I Am A Singer episodes. Instead of the usual free-for-all sing-off, season one and season two singers were paired together and went head-to-head in solo rounds. Some match ups were good. Some could have been better. The show started with a good one. Continue reading
Happy New Year!! What’s a new year celebration without a few good concerts? Lets begin with the always energetic and youthful Hunan TV New Year Concert. Hosted by Happy Camp and Day Day Up MCs (as usual), this year’s concert should really be called a family concert since almost everyone are affiliated with HNTV in someway.
idarklight‘s favorite performance might be the cuteness overload from Zhang Liang and Tian Tian, but my favorite performance of the night has to be the special rendition of Ylvis’s The Fox by Superboy 2013. Performed by Bai Jugang 白举纲, Jia Shengqiang 贾盛强, Ning Huanyu 宁恒宇, Rao Wei 饶威. Supergirl 2011 (Fu Mengni 付梦妮, Hong Chen 洪辰, Liu Meihan 刘美含, Zu Miaoling 苏妙玲) also joined the quartet at the end.
The full concert is available on HNTV’s Official Youtube Channel, below at a few highlight acts from the night.
Continue reading
Here to make Monday a little easier =)
Another brand new year is almost upon us… which means a brand new Take Happiness Home (把乐带回家) microfilm, AKA Pepsi Annual Cpop All-Star New Year Commercial. You can watch the touching microfilm from previous two years here and here. Below is the theme song for this year’s microfilm, featuring Harlem Yu (庾澄庆), Huang Xiaoming (黄晓明), Ai Fei (艾菲), and Pepsi’s newest spokesperson Momo Wu (吴莫愁).
I just want to take a small poll of Music Monday. I know there aren’t many cpop focused sites out there and Cfensi mostly concentrate on mainland entertainment. But since TW and HK cpop is a huge part of cpop, would you guys like me to cover some TW and HK cpop in next year’s Music Monday? I don’t follow HK music scene at all (mostly because I don’t speak Cantonese), but if you guys want I can look into it once in a while…
“Future music is for sharing, not for selling; Future music is no longer a commodity, but an accompaniment, everything in life can be used as a vehicle for music.” – Yufan
For their latest album 再生 Recyclable, duo Yu Quan decided to release their album on flashdrives instead of in CD form for their 15th anniversary.
“The market for CD albums have degenerated to its limit, and we can’t just sit here and wait. Very few people buy CD’s to listen to now, and everyone’s listening to songs online, but the quality of digital music online is too low. As musicians, since we’ve spent so much time and energy at the studio, we want to spread higher-qualitied digital music,” Quan said to Sina. The music, along with lyrics and photos, fill up 3 GB of the data.
Interestingly enough, attending their press conference were the heads of China’s two biggest Internet entertainment sources and probably violators of intellectual property – Tudou and Youku. While digital release has been done before, with Li Yuchun releasing her last album digitally, this is the first time a major Chinese artist chose to put the digital release in a more physical form. What do you think, is this going to be the start of a new trend?
The album is available legally for preview on Xiami. Also watch the pair with Deng Chao and Liu Yifei on Happy Camp this week here.
Not going to lie, this is so far my favorite competition of the year so far.
The kids version of the Voice, with the four judges (Yu Quan, Aska Yang, and Chen Ming) pressing a button to build a “rainbow bridge” for the kids they want, and then the kids picking the one they want as a coach. In addition to lots of adorable kids, great singing, the interaction between the coaches are also extremely cute. Some highlight performances of the show far. “Singing with Kids” airs on Golden Eagle Cartoon every Sunday. You may also catches glimpses of the performances on Taiwan’s CTV, which has been airing the show through “news clips” in a similar fashion as “I am Singer.”
Wang Ruizhuo is no doubt one of the teachers’ favorites. Aska Yang has already proclaimed her to be a future queen of music. Listen to her cover of a true queen, Stephanie Sun’s “Dreams never fall.”
How wonderful
To be able to go where we want to go
to reach one’s dream before nightfalll
Warmth flows from this song by singers Yu Quan, Tan Weiwei and Xiaojuan on the simple but wonderful things in life. Translations of the Xiaoke-penned lyrics below the cut, and video below from fountainpark723@YouTube.
安妮hautelab: 錯踪複雜的關係
Eddie Peng‘s manager posted an incriminating photo of the complicated relationship between the three leads of A Wedding Invitation (分手合约). Eddie and Jiang Jinfu may have cordially welcomed the “male lead” Bai Baihe on Weibo, but behind her back…
Mondays are always hard…
Lets turn this Monday into a “Good Day” with Jane Zhang.
Continue reading