#20: July 2022
#20: July 2022
the best Mandopop of the month from The Chairs' dreamy indie-pop to freewheeling Chengdu rap to romantic statements of R&B and indie-rock
The failure of Jay Chou’s fifteenth studio album, Greatest Works of Art, is in its inability to understand that the sun has long gone down—the style he crafted is completely associated with early 2000s nostalgia, something he refuses to acknowledge. Those who like “Greatest Works of Art” like it for how it embodies Jay Chou, how it pulls every lame trick in his book: rapping over classical music, pretentious lyrics about works of art that are really about nothing, and pulling magic tricks on unsuspecting people in the foreign city of Paris. “A decade of madness. The king of music. I don’t need any framing. No frame will hold my notes. My music is futurism,” he raps on its bridge. If Chou had any understanding of his own legacy, he’d understand how untrue all of that is. A decade of madness is more like a decade of embarrassing decline and his music has never represented anything other than nostalgia and the past. Greatest Works of Art refuses to adapt, the chance of a graceful exit forgone for a once bright legacy artist.
Jay Chou’s influence on Mandopop, his legacy within it, will likely remain centred on those first five years of output. His debut in 2000, self-titled Jay, while not the first to do it, was notable for popularizing the combination of Western musical ideas with Chinese music, its R&B and hip-hop elements seemed to cement the foundation for the developing trends at the time. Today’s hip-hop much more noticeably pulls from the West—you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone doing the same style of Chou’s classical rap, instead pulling from trap, boom bap, cloud rap, and more—but Chou’s experiments with those elements allowed rap and hip-hop to develop further into the mainstream in Taiwan. The early 2000s also saw him pioneer a certain style of zhongguo feng music that remains an essential marker of the 2000s on albums like Ye Hui Mei and Common Jasmin Orange. Artists calling Chou an influence are wide-ranging: Nine Chen’s latest album Ten Thousand Times has ballads that sound completely indebted to Chou, while Losty of electronic label Cyber Made has previously idolized Chou on Instagram. Too many others count him as a musical inspiration.
Jay Chou was the musical prodigy. He composed all his work, balancing the complexity of his ideas with the simplicity that Mandopop desire. At the same time, Vincent Fang and Vivian Hsu became household names for their lyrical contributions. As much as Jay was praised for its compositions and its ability to blend Western and Chinese genres, it gets away with so much because Chou was this young artist. The off-pitch runs of “Adorable Lady” were somehow charmingly earnest, the mumbled vocalizations of “Starry Mood” were sweetly shy—when Fang gave up on the lyricism of “Perfectionism,” having Chou repeat his name to fill the space to the end, it was delightfully likeable. Stupid and corny, yes, but agreeable nonetheless. Greatest Works of Art sounds like it never grew out of the young adulthood of Jay despite all signs pointing to the opposite. The autotune on “Still Wandering” attempts to mesh with the current scene but its autotune ends up compounding with his mumbled vocals to create an unintelligible mess while “You Are the Firework I Missed” sounds like a weathered version of an early ballad, a midlife crisis presented with little self-awareness. The youthful spirit of Jay has long been missing, despite the fact that Greatest Works of Art thinks it’s front and centre.
Greatest Works of Art ranges from forgettable to barely listenable, though the presence of four years’ worth of singles makes that clear without listening to the rest. Pre-release ballads “If You Don’t Love Me, It’s Fine” and “Won’t Cry” with Mayday’s Ashin are a slog to get through are a desperately, sappy slog to get through while “Mojito” sounds like an embarrassing attempt to capitalize on the global potential of “Despacito,” which, unfortunately, JJ Lin got to first.
While Greatest Works of Art feels like another unsurprisingly bland work in Chou’s catalog, there’s something about how it does end up encapsulating parts of his legacy. “Cold Hearted,” despite the way it meanders is a pleasant example of that zhongguo feng style he helped pioneer, the lilting melody pairing rather nicely with his age, especially where that fact of aging is either ignored or used to reminisce on long-ended relationships elsewhere. For all its corniness, its title track proves the singularity of Jay Chou. Few artists would dare to attempt that sort of classical rap or even dream of such a weird grandstanding piano section. It’s impressive, perhaps not for the actual song but in how it feels immediately like Jay Chou. His return here is impossible to confuse for another artist—for better or worse, despite his influence, no one’s ever dared to replicate Jay Chou.
For this month’s issue, I’ve got the new album by The Chairs as well a couple of singles by BOSS X, Vast & Hazy & Chih Siou, Erika, and INTO1. I’m really happy I got a chance to write about Akini Jing & Chace’s “Blessing” on Pitchfork, otherwise probably would have written something about their great new collaborative album, which you can find on Apple Music and Spotify here.
Albums
The Chairs - Shangri-La Is Calling
When Shangri-La first appears in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, it’s described as this mystical valley, a utopia of a paradise where its inhabitants enjoy immortality. Lost Horizon might present Shangri-La’s existence as fact but the reality is that it’s merely one of the many beautiful places of Asia, a valley given a vaguely Asian-sounding name and mythical properties, likely built on the myths of Asian people and exoticized for effect. Any search for its location in promise of peace, love, or purpose would be completely fruitless unless that purpose was to see the beauty of Asia.
The Chairs ruminate on Shangri-La Is Calling on whether or not to take part in that search, to abandon a fine and easy life in search of something more beautiful, chancing on the impossible that it could actually exist. Their normal is upended and as impossible as Shangri-La’s existence might be, it seems even more unlikely that the current situation will hold much longer. On “另一個答案” (“The Other Answer”), the vocalist unintentionally reveals a boredom, writing vague character sketches and putting the onus to keep a romance alive completely on a partner. “Persuade me,” they open over the acoustic guitar strum before unburdening themselves on the chorus, “if you want me, just don’t become my past.” It’s an impossible request made to an easily replaceable character, the pause meant to make it sound like an ultimatum even though it has no meaning. Expanding on their request remains just as abstract: “let me see how talented you are, can you see through the uncovered sweetness and words of the camellia petals?” Shangri-La Is Calling falls into a trance-like state over something not quite content, of having everything but still wanting what comes next.
The one-sided conversation of “The Other Answer” exists because The Chairs have only one foot in the door. Its production occupies a space of easy liquid dream-pop with the exception of that acoustic guitar strum. Easily the most grounded of the three-piece’s work here, the rest of Shangri-La Is Calling drifts into a soupy dream. Crashing cymbals mesh directly into the twinkling electronic lines of opener “Lonestar,” while its vocals are ghostly, singing to a void. “Aphrodite” skitters off into a reverie of soft coos as the electric guitar solo playfully winds around the group and “輕聲細語” (“Speak Softly”) floats adrift gentle water, the guitar line stirring towards its end, the roundness of the Taiwanese language like a buoy.
Like the adventure of finding Shangri-La, The Chairs find comfort in the idea of a destination, that in itself seeming to be their purpose. “也許是你拯救了我” (“Maybe It’s You Who Saved Me”) finds a saviour in the abstract void. There’s no character attached to the “you,” instead just soft murmurs about time and the sky disappearing as the instrumental wraps around them. Its saxophone sets them in the same setting of Shangri-La, the comfort of a misty shroud as the band embraces a secluded meditation on a mountaintop retreat, its setting fading to blankness as it stretches. Shangri-La Is Calling tends to disappear into obscure territory like the sudden jump into the psychedelic influences of “獵戶座的腰帶” (“Orion’s Belt”) as the group finds themselves being called home, even when the title track could only hear the instruction to run. From the start, “Lonestar” doesn’t seem to know what it’s singing to. A real person with feelings and emotions? An object to hold? An empty nebula? On Shangri-La Is Calling, The Chairs only recognize these dreamy landscapes as an escape from fine and easy, a blank world that could maybe offer them inner peace, greater love, and a sense of purpose.
Find it on streaming here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “Our Place” // “Lonestar” // “Aphrodite” // “也許是你拯救了我”
Singles
Erika - “2Romantic”
“Wrote a song about falling in love as it was happening in real time. And with the person I was falling in love with,” Erika says about “2Romantic.” Over the romanttic guitar strum and beat, Erika comforts a lover, her heart fluttering even as she can’t quite understand how it all came together. At times, the instrumental seems to fade as if it needs a reason to understand why she’s fallen so deep. Erika pushes all those doubts out of her mind on the sparkly gospel-tinged bridge, doing her best to just share in the intimate space of a lover. Its visualizer is a reconstruction of that intimacy, a collection of bare polaroid shots cycled on screen. “Don’t guess, a kiss is enough to understand, hold me tight, don’t let go,” she sings, a warm embrace to dissipate the doubts.
Vast & Hazy & Chih Siou - “Please Make Me Stay”
“Please Make Me Stay” is a hook-up that lingers too long, the feeling of being drawn to a stranger who somehow feels inescapable. Its vocalists, first Vast & Hazy’s Ka Ka, then Chih Siou, the androgynous singer-songwriter, open in gentle whispers, cautious on its acoustic guitar.”Please Make Me Stay” grows into a grand swirl of anxiety: warm brass, heavy drum hits, their wailing voices all turn into a wall of noise. “I know you never belonged to me,” the pair harmonize and if they can’t your warmth, perhaps the best gift they can give is to let you forget them in their anguish, to bear the burden of the suffering while you find someone right.
see also: Wu Qingfeng - “The Egg of Columbus (feat. Robin Guthrie)”
INTO1 - “Born to Fly”
For the lead-in to their special summer album, INTO1 distance themselves from the dark posturing of everything they’ve grown accustomed to, launching into bright youthful pop-rock. Each member holds the melody for a brief moment but treats it like their own story, they don’t quite flow into the next but are seamlessly stitched together, a patchwork collection of miniature lessons in youth. Even then, “Born to Fly” keeps circling back to its opening rush, those attention-grabbing drum hits and that electric guitar riff, the cool breeze of the wind in their face.
BOSS X - “LIFE”
I’ve realized I’ve neglected the Chinese rap scene a bit throughout the newsletter—that’s not on purpose but just a poor oversight on my part. My bad. While both China and Taiwan have definitely seen rap carve a space in the mainstream, unlike Taiwan, Chinese rap seems more averse to being in the mainstream, less incline to play with the straightforward pop tropes and seems bent on staying siloed off despite its rising popularity. Opposed to artists like E.SO or songs like “21 Homeboyz,” Chinese rappers like ICECRAZ, Gali, and Ty., stay firmly within the lines of hip-hop and often play it darker.
The rap scene is practically centred on two cities in Sichuan: Chengdu and the municipality of Chongqing. The rise of rap in the later half of the 2010s was due to two things: i) the government seeing it as having the same potential as mainstream pop music for their, uh, government purposes and thus no longer stifling its creation; and ii) The Rap of China, a show that linked rap and television. It’s led to the promotion of trap and other mainstream hip-hop genres into the mainstream, as well as let experimental hip-hop have greater freedom, such as last year’s great 宝藏山中 by Treasure Hill & L1STALLDO. At the same time, rap is growing outside of Sichuan: J-Fever and others are tackling conscious rap in Beijing, while Shenzhen-based AR1 has quickly become one of China’s best rappers.
Most of China’s biggest rappers are tied up on the national stage, on the All Stars season of The Rap of China but BOSS X is making music that’s entirely localized to Chengdu. References to food and drinks help place the locale but are completely unnecessary as BOSS X takes advantage of the relaxed nature of Sichuanese to rap these short and animated yet flexible lines. His off-the-cuff freewheeling flow has a maniacal quality that cares little about meter, even less about beat. He sputters nonsense, keeping track of time not through its sparse trap beat and pointed drums but through fluctuations of his body fat: twenty percent at the start, dropping to five percent at the start of its wonderful glide of a second verse. “LIFE” feels almost like an attempt to emulate what Michigan rappers like Teejayx6 and Kasher Quon were doing on “Dynamic Duo,” to get everything so wrong it turns into being right—BOSS X is so resistant to its simple beat, so resistant to the chaos of Chengdu, instead firing off a rap that feels unending. Yet as a virtue of its dialect it comes off feeling overly familiar, lines spouted off like he’s greeting a friendly face, a wonderful introduction to Chengdu’s vibrant rap scene.
see also: Psy.P - “Go Now” // Kafe.Hu - “APEDT MOFOKS” // Damnshine - “喷子”
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.
You know how every year, you put together a list and realize you forgot something? AR’s P.M. didn’t come to non-Chinese streaming until November 30, 2021 and I didn’t notice until some time in January. Again, my bad. It’s perhaps the best rap album of last year and would have been somewhere on the albums list. Maybe it’ll go on this year’s list. I haven’t decided yet. Listen to it anyway, there’s a reference to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” before Stranger Things 4 even came out and a song that reminds me of Britney Spears.