#19: June 2022
#19: June 2022
a look back at thirty-five years of Emil Wakin Chau's debut, the great new drogas album and some singles for the summertime in the best Mandopop of the month
Emil Wakin Chau found a break into the industry through familiarity—forty advertisement jingles in and an executive recognizing the voice of an assistant producer led to his debut album at the largest label in Mandopop, Rock Records. Chau had had his share of setbacks, an independent solo album went unreleased after his original record label went bankrupt and he had almost resigned himself to a behind-the-scenes production role. But on the advice of famous campus folk singer Chyi Yu, Chau started singing advertisement jingles that made him a familiar but anonymous voice among the public. His career jump started through a turn of luck that some high up recognized him leading to the release of his debut album, 1987’s Direction of the Heart.
Given how Chau started and the trends of Mandopop, it’s unsurprising that so much of Chau’s music centres around his voice. Opener and title track, “Direction of the Heart” begins with the gentle pitter-patter of drums, and in perhaps a nod to the car commercial jingle that captured his boss’ attention, the rev of an engine. But when Chau’s voice comes in, everything else momentarily fades to insignificance, the music just the gentle sway of yacht rock to place Chau. His voice—confident but with enough give to be romantic, masculine yet warm and sincere—controlled the music. Importantly, it left listeners with a sense of lingering familiarity thanks to his stints as a jingle singer. Yet for how “Direction of the Heart” buoyed Chau’s voice to the foreground, it still let some intricacies run underneath, playful enough to captivate the attentive listener but never strong enough to distract attention from Chau’s voice. An electric guitar riff might start between the first hook and second verse but as soon as Chau’s voice returns, it fades back. Similarly, the piano keys that dance across the board are just an ornate detail. To listen to “Direction of the Heart” is to cruise alongside Chau and follow his voice in conversation, the rest is just scenery.
Everyone involved seemed to understand that the strength of Chau as an artist was in that familiarity, that there was an amicable intimacy to whatever he sang, be it realizations of eternal love or sad farewells. On the self-composed “You and Me Are an Ancient Promise,” he works with a rather straightforward comparison in fairly simple language: “you and I are an old proverb of life’s melody / ordinary love tells me it’s you who will last forever.” Whatever lay beyond the metaphor didn’t seem to matter. Chau might reference ancient promises and old proverbs but the track makes nothing of history, solely using it as a reference to forever, just holding itself to that temporary moment you have with Chau during the track’s runtime. The words mattered less than the voice, everything easily drifting into the slow dance of its twinkling keys. A track later, Chau captures the inner turmoil of a goodbye without closure. Chau’s voice was, at the time, mature beyond his understanding and while Steve Chow’s lyrics conveyed a complexity that didn’t quite come through in his performance—there’s hardly a distinction between the question of “after we say goodbye, should I forget I once loved you?” and the thought of “my head will be free once again”—his voice still conveyed a familiarity that was incomparable, something that allowed the ambiguity of an open ending.
1987 marked the middle of a transitionary period for Mandopop. Teresa Teng would release her final studio album, I Only Care About You. Mandopop was in the midst of a slow ascent towards becoming the dominant form of Chinese popular music over Cantopop as the leading Hong Kong artists would start gradually retiring in the early 1990s. At the same time, other genres across the Chinese and Taiwanese scenes saw shifts. Campus folk, a genre borne out of the desire to assert Taiwanese cultural identity among young adults, started to decline while Chinese rock was in the midst of forming its on identity. The transitions made Mandopop a melting pot, something you can hear in the makeshift choir of Direction of the Heart closer “Because I Care,” which worked less because of the versatility of each artist but more so because Mandopop had converged into a similar group of ideas. Campus folk singers Chyi Yu and Michelle Pan joined alongside pop singer Cheng Hua Jiuan and Chinese rock singer Chief Zhao without ever really leaving the sound that Chau revolved around on Direction of the Heart for one of the album’s best.
Chau embodied exactly what classic Mandopop was: simple love songs that were lyrically direct with sparse yet starry arrangements. Chau layered his voice atop those common arrangements on Direction of the Heart, yet still managed to playfully bend genres. Unlike the militant sound of what should have been his debut, the music here was much more porous, allowing him to weave elements of other genres around his ballads. Common sounds of the time kept the tracks familiar: synths that made the ballads more romantic, fade-outs that kept them timeless. But Chau would also pull from popular music from both within and outside of the Sinosphere. Elements of campus folk were apparently underneath tracks like “An Unsent Letter” and “The Feeling of Going Home,” but Western influences were subtly apparent as well, like the experimental influence of yacht rock on the title track or the influence of power-pop on something like “Endless Love.”
Chau was one of the top stars of Mandopop through until 1999. He’d continue making the music people wanted to hear—those elegant lovestruck ballads—by a voice they wanted to hear, easily releasing fourteen Mandarin, six Cantonese, and four English albums within ten years of his debut. But by 1999 as R&B and hip-hop influences became more popular, Chau’s music seemed to stagnate and his output diminished. For the most part, he’d keep down his own path, putting out music that appealed to the older generation albeit in a less frequent manner. On his latest album, The Younger Me, released in 2019, Chau shows something of an evolution, singing songs about aging and tending towards a more acoustic sound, yet he sticks to the ballad. He’d challenge himself with the supergroup SuperBand alongside producer Jonathan Lee, campus folk/Chinese rock singer Lo Ta-yu, and the singer-songwriter Ayal Komod, but for the most part his music remained similar to what he displayed on his debut, the same straightforward ballads. Chau remains the same familiar voice, this time, rather than the one you’ve heard sing a hundred commercial jingles, the one you’ve heard sing a million love songs.
You can find Direction of the Heart on streaming here (Apple Music // Spotify). For the rest of this month’s issue, I’m back with some favourites from last year with the great new drogas album and singles from Julia Wu and Shi Shi, as well as some newer faces with singles from Lala Hsu and Pink Fun.
Albums
drogas - teardrop,saidmyname.
Taiwanese label Cyber Made is primed as the premiere hub for Mandarin hyperpop, its artists meeting at this intersection of electronic music, hip-hop and rap, and emo. Browsing their social media demonstrates the same sort of Gen Z mentality found in any of these scenes: Q&As, insider news, even seeking feedback on whether their followers want to see them pursue more of that downcast emo-rap or the dynamic hyperpop style. There’s a casual openness that allows Cyber Made’s followers to feel like they’re part of some conversation. The front of their work may demonstrate an amateurishness, with performances soundtracked by computers rather than full bands and anime music videos in place of proper visualizers, but they make up for it in their willingness to experiment across genres. It’s no wonder that independent Taiwanese magazine Hackzine describes Cyber Made as the future.
In last year’s profile of the up-and-coming label, Hackzine pulled at the influences of Cyber Made: visuals that draw from cyber futurism, video game melodies, and autotuned vocals. While that all sounds like the future, the two debut studio albums from its two most popular artists, Losty and drogas represent opposing modern-day viewpoints of Gen Z. From earlier this year, Losty’s All Is Lost is nihilistic chaos, a demonstration of just how wide-reaching Cyber Made really is, with a wide range of guest verses and production that engaged with the kind of genre-hopping central to the idea of hyperpop. In just a short stretch, Losty jumps from sickly sweet high-pitched cloud rap to throbbing-bass clubby dance music to the mechanistic whir of metal on metal in full-bodied hyperpop to a pop-punk love song.
The nineteen-year-old drogas presents the opposing viewpoint, expressing despair in response to tragedy. Where his two guest verses on All Is Lost brought that chaos, here he churns out something much more despondent, dragging Losty down with him. “silence” finds the pair collaborating once again but is more in line with last year’s “How Can I?” “Tears already filled my eye sockets / broke my heart, the wounds are so painful they can’t be scabbed over.” drogas sings on the chorus. Losty’s thrown into the same shattered mental state, opening his verse with a high-pitched wail: “I kill myself every night!” The bleakness of it is met with autotuned melodies and screams of torture that only occasionally escape through its dense layers of vocal production.
teardrop,saidmyname. understands it’s over yet bleeds itself into a constant state of confusion over the fact, swinging between the darkness offered on “silence” and the terrifying prospect of leaving that space spurred on by the lead single and first real track, “trying to get out.” While drogas makes a decision on the chorus—“baby you told me to wait / I cannot waste any more time now”—his verses can’t help but linger. One moment he pleas, “just let me dance with you again,” a few later he angrily rebuffs, “please don’t touch me, you are a liar.”
That confusion comes as a sort of ugliness that overtakes its simplicity. While the beats are comprised of simple computerized loops or, in some cases like “loversong,” circular melodies on acoustic guitar, drogas prevents them from settling with harsh noises—the autotune that blankets his performances or the static that comes from each song being ripped apart. teardrop,saidmyname. is always trying to prevent drogas from surrendering to the beaten path, its tracks edging towards something larger in their final moments. “trying to get out” opens the door at the end in a muted explosion of light as its drum pattern fights with the digital static, while “blankness” skitters off into a set of whispery raps. “i’m a liar,i’m sorry.” breaks off into screams before it pulls back into emptiness, the same way Losty’s scream is subsumed by the static on “silence.” drogas only really reaches release on the most hyperpop leaning track “shinigami,” in a flurry of vocal melodies, electric guitar riffs, and programmed synths that find him at his most vocally focused, laughing at his previous dependence on a lover.
It’s easy to mistake teardrop,saidmyname. as a quarantine album. Its music feels confined to a blurry state of cloud rap that wants release and the wasted feeling of isolation comes through clearly on “quiver,” where the acoustic strum turns into something almost shoegaze in its darkness. But “trying to get out” attempts to wrestle itself out of the lingering torment of another rather than to seek some destination. There’s a ghostliness to its other voices, like how a high-pitched voice may act as a response to the other part of its melody or how the spliced fragments of film quotes feel attached to something missing in a relationship. Between “trying to get out” and “blankness,” the plea from Notting Hill—“I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”—hangs on the last part of the phrase, like a question of whether drogas made a mistake somewhere. On the back half, the quotes from Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar bleed into the background of “i’m a liar,i’m sorry.,” which feels more like a retroactive punishment on his part than anything fond.
For all his torment, drogas sees some form of independence on “loversong,” severing every relationship to stand on his own. “Please leave my room, I don’t need your company.” teardrop,saidmyname. constantly wrestles with the after-effects of a horrible break. Sometimes, drogas drowns all over again like on “silence,” screaming in agony, wanting to bleed every drop out of himself. Sometimes he finds peace in the form of a monotonous future: “dad, mom, I’ve already grown up / although I still love to play / but I know it’s time to stop,” staring at something a little bleak but hopeful in his own ability to care for himself for once.
Find it on streaming here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “trying to go out” // “i’m a liar,i’m sorry” // “shinigami” // “silence (feat. Losty)”
Singles
Julia Wu - “Retail Therapy”
Julia Wu has this knack for writing songs that sound like they were never made for anyone else to hear. The voice mail that couldn’t go through on the opener of last year’s 2622, “感情都有期限,” the drunk voice note left on her phone on “5 AM,” the diary entry of “星海”—they’re a mistake, a warning, and a sentimental reminder to call her mother, things that feel like they never meant to leave her possession. But “Retail Therapy” is meant for someone else to hear, that’s clear through the way it strays away from the lush arrangements of 2622 for something more commercial, a clinking department store beat with just a dreamy reprieve on the bridge. She aims at a soon-to-be ex-lover with scorn: “miss me when I’m gone, you don’t understand how to cherish / should’ve kissed me more, now you’ve missed your chance” and on the pre-chorus, parrots back words on the edge of disbelief: “calm down? who’re you saying that to?” In the process of Julia Wu broadcasting every taunt on the speaker system, she makes its central reminder to take a break and prioritize herself one for anyone else with a loser of an ex. Despite that, she still manages to enjoy some of its me-time for herself, silencing notifications and ignoring friends to savour what’s left for herself in the pleasure of the words “retail therapy” over its plinky beat, stretching out the words with delight.
PINK FUN - “PFF”
The three groups produced from Taiwan’s DD52 occupy different spaces: winners G.O.F merge traditional elements with electropop while HUR go for something futuristically cool, synthpop that occasionally takes its bold aspirations into hyperpop territory. PINK FUN are then left for the cutesy side of Mandopop. “PFF” is the B-side to last month’s “KYA,” an ode to friendship in the smaller things, a song for the girls who stay up late talking about nothing with you all night. “KYA” may have mixed influences of disco with its slap house but “PFF” recalls the straightforward sugary dance-pop of the early 2000s, not sacrificing an ounce of the rush despite replacing a crush for a friend.
see also: BONBON GIRLS 303 - “Me & My Girls”
Lala Hsu - “Like a Star”
Lala Hsu goes full force on the opener of her latest album GEI, before she eventually settles into a set of plaintive ballads (although last year’s “None of the Above,” one of its weirder and better tracks, deservedly won Best Production at the Golden Melody Awards). Hsu deems it as a sort of East-meets-West track, merging city-pop influences with a house beat, the resurgence of both genres as of late making it very much on trend. She understands both genres here, placing the house beat in the foreground and using the city-pop influence as a sort of decoration. “Like a Star” plays it straight, adapting a sample of the melody of The Stylistics’ “Can’t Give You Anything (But My Love)”—popularized in the East through another sample used by Takuya Kimura on “I Can Give You Gatsby” for a hair wax advertisement—over the deep thrum of its house beat. “Use my method to shine, I’ve already got a halo and freedom,” she sings and it’s not until right before that that the glamour of city pop kicks into gear with a leading trumpet solo. “Follow me, talk about me, love me,” she sings at its end. Hsu’s already a star but never has a track shone a light on her so brightly.
Find GEI on streaming here (although “Like a Star” appears to unfortunately be region-locked): Apple Music // Spotify
Shi Shi - “jagi (feat. KIRE)”
Shi Shi and KIRE first collaborated last month on the tragic sad girl R&B of “Sun.” The two romanticized the role of the tragic protagonist, Romeo as a hero whose destiny was foretold rather than someone who made a reckless move, Icarus as someone who sacrificed his life for beauty rather than someone who got caught in their overconfidence. Over the drum fills of the lowkey R&B of “Sun,” the two see their blind devotion as necessary even as they recognize the way it evades logic. Nothing was more tragic or more beautiful than Shi Shi running up the pre-chorus in her higher register: “your existence is adoring but also harmful, I burned myself loving you.”
“jagi” comes as a prequel, a love song that captures the moment attraction turns to devotion. The same smoothness that was so captivating in “Sun” returns but its instrumental is more lively, soaking in the light where “Sun” fell to the ocean. Here, Shi Shi sees no end to the relationship, “we’re like a drama, one or two episodes aren’t enough” and on the chorus, “you don’t have to rush, take your time.” Shi Shi, born in South Korea, mentions taking inspiration from K-pop, perhaps in the worldliness of “jagi” (Korean for “dear”) and how it merges its different sections. “jagi” finds the pair singing in a mixture of Mandarin, Korean, and English, sometimes switching in the middle of line all over that flat reggaeton beat. That beat moves fluidly across, subtly under Shi Shi’s smooth verse and pre-chorus, adding a third clap under KIRE’s half-rapped verse, amping up on the chorus. It washes it all in the past with dreamy washes, strings, and Shi Shi’s breathy coos buried in the mix. The pair spend the entirety of the music video in a state of “almost,” lingering inches away from a kiss, flirting over its beat—“jagi” is that moment in the sun the pair previously lingered on, a beautiful moment that seemed to last forever.
see also: DAZI - “Save My Love 4 U”
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.