Zhou Xun and Li Yuchun, who would’ve imagined this pair?
Not content with just directing her own MV’s, Li Yuchun wants to begin shooting for others. Her first project, a part of her new album , includes taking photos of others who are “cool.” That includes actress Zhou Xun and musicians Piao Shu and Zhang Yadong. So she’s not that exciting of a photographer, but whoever is shooting her shooting other people is amazing. Watch the beautiful extras MV below of Zhou Xun and Li Yuchun.
While searching for when Hopscotch lead singer/actress Tian Yuan was going to release her latest album because last I head it was supposed to be this “summer”, I came across the fact that she recently went to Kobe University to talk about 80s generations authors in China. She studied at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, (the one that Happy Camp host He Jiong teaches Arabic at) and she’s put out books both in English and Chinese including Double Mono, which was recently translated and released in Japanese.
Instead of talking about the good albums that have been released, I’m going to talk about one that was a disappointment, because it was one of the ones I was most looking forward to this summer. I love Red Songs. It doesn’t really matter in my opinion that they were “Red” propaganda, nor is it fair to the people who worked on them to ignore them as such. Especially those pre-Cultural Revolution, because I think some of China’s finest composers came out during that time, including my favorite Chinese composer of all time, Lei Zhenbang who was just genius.
Then eeMedia began releasing songs from this album one by one on Sohu’s website. And one by one my excited died. This album just sucked, largely due to poor song choice and bad producing by Zhang Yadong. That’s right, Zhang Yadong produced this album and he sucked at it.
Someone commented in an earlier post there were many artists in Taiwan that spoke English in contrast to China. I think partly that is because their established music industry allows TW Americans musicians to try their luck with reasonable expectations of success. However as China’s market gets bigger, more Chinese Americans may want to do the same thing. One of the first could be be Chloé Wang (汪可盈) , a teenage singing phenomenon hailing from Chicago, U.S.A. born to a Chinese father with Shanghai roots and an American mother. She’s been recording in Beijing and has already performed in Chengdu as seen in the video below.
Poster for "That Night, We Make Music"
One of the bigger record labels in China for indie/folk/rock, Thirteenth Month, has taken one of the first steps into branching out into the stage, in “That Night, We Make Music”, a rock stage drama that is an outlet for their frustrations. On April 22nd they held a press conference where everything was set up as a funeral to express their outlook on the current music industry.
Who cares if we get eliminated every round? We
One of the biggest criticism of Super Girls was that it lets out singers with little or no training and shoots them to fame. Hunan TV’s new program aims to change that. “jie jie gao sheng/mix-box,” a spin off of the word “going up a step everytime,”is a competition between (somewhat) new artists from different recording companies every week. The show will serve as a platform for companies to showcase its already trained artists.
Jiayou! Little Caterpillar by Japanese-Chinese group Caffe In
How do Faye Wong, an undisputed diva of Asia, and Chris Li Yuchun, the controversial and popular “Asia’s Hero” relate to each other?
In a recent TV show, Zhang Yadong, one of the most distinguished music producers in China, and the man most associated with both’s music, made the following comment comparing the two artists:
Those singers that everyone thinks is great, I really don’t see how great they are. Artists need their own style. Chris Li Yuchun is very similar to Faye Wong in many ways, especially in their unique musical personalities.
Zhang Yadong released the first Chinese album that features a producer rather than a singer last month. In the album, released on the internet only and titled “Ni Liu/flowing backwards,” Faye Wong sings song “I love you,” the theme song of a movie of the same name. This is her first new song in over five years.
I love you – Faye Wong
Long Kuan is another one of those female singer songwriters who has been making the world more beautiful with her voice and her music, and in this case more literally. After three years of absence from the music scene she is releasing an single promoting environmental protection, called “Queen of Lohas”. LOHAS (Lifestyle Of Health And Sustainability) is a demographic that refers to the market of those who support sustainable living, “green” ecological initiatives, a growing demographic in China.
It’s been a while since I talked about music that wasn’t boybands, vocal groups, whatever you’d like to call them so when I saw this article I grabbed at the chance to translate even though Super VC is not one of my favorite Chinese indie rock bands. But they are getting quite popular in China’s rock scene, and were at the Modern Sky Music Festival earlier this fall along with some of the bigger players. They have a pleasing, soothing sound and this major release two years in the making, with 7 MVs (can they really be called indie anymore?) will no doubt please their fans.
Article about the release, MVs and more Beatles-like pictures below.