#46: Winter Moisturizer
looking back on one of the greatest rap albums in Taiwanese history, Soft Lipa's 'Lotion,' as we wrap up on this year's newsletter
We made it again this year: twelve issues dedicated to Mandarin music. This year, I started a blog, really because a) I liked the format, and b) I liked the idea of not having to run on a set schedule. It’s called sino sounds and it’s about the best Chinese albums, delving more into their context than just their content. It’s something I wanted to do for a while, but didn’t really push myself to start until February’s issue on Na Ying’s Totally Giving Up—only a couple of albums here (and today’s will also go up sometime later), but I’m hopeful it’ll grow. For next year, I’ve got a couple of things I’m really excited to put out, but we’ll same them for next year.
This month we go back fifteen years. Soft Lipa’s Lotion is perhaps the most important rap album of Taiwan’s history and for the singles section, I picked a couple of things from then. Lists are all that are left, hopefully with Mando singles next Tuesday, Canto singles next Thursday, and Mando albums the Tuesday following. It’s been a real pleasure, thanks again for reading.
Soft Lipa - Lotion
In the early ‘00s, Taiwan had begun experimenting with hip-hop: fold a hip-hop beat into the mix! introduce a rap verse into your otherwise pop/R&B tune! Being an artist who could rap—or even just kick it with the rappers—was proof of artistic versatility, of willingness to experiment. But being a rapper was another matter, a separate category of entertainer, one who seemed to hold lesser value that that of the artist. Thus far, only one group had really succeeded in bringing rap into the Taiwanese mainstream. L.A. Boyz—comprised of siblings Jeff and Stanley Huang alongside cousin Steven Lin—were a California-raised trio who combined high-energy dance beats with raps written entirely in English. This solidified them as a curious western import, ABCs (American-born Chinese) who brought back to Taiwan the experience of being the foreign Asian in America. It’d be about a decade before a pair of albums would bring rap into the Taiwanese mainstream as a standalone genre.
Before that though, Taiwan would have another import in Song Yueting. Born in Taiwan, Song was sent abroad as a student and later died of cancer in California. Among his things was a tape recorded with some tracks he had recorded, which his mother and brother released as Life’s a Struggle, a lo-fi mixtape influenced by West Coast hip-hop. The title track saw the kid writing a hell of a biography: a largely absent mother busy with work, an abusive father, a couple months in the American prison system, and a whole lot of pain—he was posthumously awarded Best Lyricist at the Golden Melody Awards (GMAs). One of the first rappers to be recognized by the mainstream, Song was something of a curio, the tragedy and American-influence seemed to define his artistry.
More influential to the mainstream was MC HotDog, whose music was notably filled with vulgar lyrics. The rapper himself seemed to note that American hip-hop was all about “streets, fighting, gangs, drugs”—it was a display of violence and the crassness could be attributed to western influences that could be divorced from the Taiwanese identity at the core of his music. His debut album, Wake Up, was awarded Best Mandarin Album, beating out pop heavyweight Jolin Tsai and indie darlings like Deserts Chang and sodagreen. “Welcome to Our Party” is one of the most immediate showcases of its American influences, directly under the lineage of Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” But perhaps the better part of its positive critical reception had to do with its framing as transcending whatever the audience thought hip-hop was: “hip-hop is just hip-hop,” noted co-producer Vikung Ruljadeng, “but Wake Up is hip-hop contaminated with rock.”
Soft Lipa’s debut album, Lotion, was then hip-hop that the Taiwanese audience could take pride in, without having to attribute so much of it as western. He was a contrast to the self-indulgent and showy MC HotDog—ironic considering that Soft Lipa was first inspired by an old demo by MC HotDog. Soft Lipa would form a rap trio Bamboo Gang with RPG and GoRDoN in high school, then go on to sign with then-rising hip-hop label KAO!INC in his final year of college, first as a beat-maker and arranger, then as a solo artist when label head Delafat saw potential in his soft-spoken style. “Smoggy,” one of Soft Lipa’s earliest singles, wasn’t far off from MC HotDog’s style: “the smoke fills the air and we start having fun,” he raps with sardonic edge, attempting to add bite to his mild-mannered voice. The music video pairs it with imagery that borders on cliche, as the rapper brings out a crew to front for the cameras and kisses a model all over, cigarettes in hand, for what resembles behind-the-scenes footage.
But Lotion is something else. Soft Lipa no longer presents himself as the caricature of American hip-hop that many had created, he steps out of the MC HotDog influence. Softer tongue, softer beats, his music is something as a salve. On the intro “Keyword,” he sets up a beat that could easily slot into one of those “lofi hip-hop beats to relax/study to” playlists and layers a pretty, elegant piano arpeggio above it. “Smoggy” appears on the album in remixed form, his rapping lighter and the jazziness of the instrumental more readily apparent. No longer is he a hedonistic cynic. He’s funny without being derisive on “Shh! Bamboo Holla” and for “Nostalgia,” he paints the scenery of his hometown in a way you might expect to see in a folk song: “that hometown, that scene / seaside sunset, the school’s brick wall / the excitement of the pitch-black parking lot / snacks of your youth / standing in line / a couple holding hands, happily getting wet in the rain.”
“Who knew rap could be so literary and pure?” went the reviews. Soft Lipa’s poetic rhymes and jazzy instrumentals left him to be perceived as the sophisticated answer to rap’s increasingly gaudy underground. It wasn’t that he didn’t have those same pleasures. On “Hot Bath,” he raps, “my thoughts are also pornographic, I think about sexual things / in the painting, bubbles fly in the sky / naked men and women chase each other.” But he shoves the thought down on the next line, content to just soak in the tub, or at least, make you believe that’s all he had going on. “Hot Bath” is playful in other ways, with a sample of a shower, a gleeful xylophone melody. Elsewhere, it’s important to note how his references weren’t just traditional, that they were Chinese. Like MC HotDog, who took pride in the local girls, Soft Lipa took pleasure in the local scenery. “Nostalgia” references “passing through Lukang leads to the happiness of the past,” and the sample of ‘70s pop singer Yin Xia’s “兰花草” (“Orchid”), makes his reverence of Taiwan clear. He works a sample of Chinese singer Chang Loo’s 1954 hit “給我一個吻” (“Give Me a Kiss”) into interlude “Give You a Kiss” and if I’m not mistaken, the cadence and intonation of how he raps, “after hearing this, you’ll be conquered by me,” on “Hit the Rhyme” have to be a reference to Na Ying’s “Conquer.”
Novelty often comes up in talking about Soft Lipa’s work. Moonlight, his third album, was well-received by the mainstream, who were impressed with the novelty of a rapper performing over instrumentals by Japanese jazz fusion group JABBERLOOP, even when the underground rap scene reportedly rejected it as “too commercialized” and “not hip-hop enough.” His seventh album, Home Cookin—produced after the birth of his daughter; the physical edition-exclusive interludes help to better convey its domestic bliss—won Best Mandarin Album at the GMAs, with critics fascinated by the novelty of it being produced at home. It’s there in the marketing for Lotion as well. The idea that, once again, it is not enough to be a great rap album, but it must transcend any common perceptions of rap—KAO!INC marketed it to suggest its lyrics were fine prose rather than rap verses, as if the latter weren’t just a different art form, but a lesser one at that. Soft Lipa let Lotion speak for itself, and on the mild beat of the title track, he contends in a soft-spoken voice: “pure hip-hop shines with a beautiful light.”
Listen here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “Smoggy” // “Bear” // “Lotion” // “Encounter”
Eason Chan - “心的距离”
Reportedly, Eason Chan lost to David Tao at the 21st Golden Melody Awards for Best Mandarin Male Singer because his vocal performance on 上五樓的快活 (Fifth Floor Happiness) didn’t fully demonstrate all his capabilities. Sure, you can feel that here on “心的距离” (“Distance of the Heart”)—that ‘00s pop-rock warble is not his strong suit—but the song gets its dizzying heartbreak across in its brokenness. The pressure changes and creates the guitar bends as the distress hits Chan from out of nowhere. He sings about forgetting, as if he’s trying to pinpoint where it all went wrong, but nothing comes up. “Every time I step back, I miss a little bit of your world,” he sings, as if closing the gap could do anything—it’s a fearful statement when you consider how often he sings about the edge.
Mrs. This - “立場”
The indie pop band are exemplary blueprints of the kind of quirkiness that was going around between the late ‘00s and the early ‘10s: switching between quirked-up outfits and old-fashioned cosplay, they perform this strange, uncomfortable interpretive dance. Mrs. This are the type of band you might say “march to the beat of their own drum,” the tempo of “立場” (“Standpoint”) changing as they wish. Not particularly fast at any point, it does make it feel like they’re moving in slow motion. They’re living in a bubble: “I don’t want to listen to what you say / you can’t listen to what I say,” the pair of vocalists denounce. It’s the perfect example of this period’s hipster dream.
Huang Yali - “戀愛絕句選”
Huang Yali is the rock star. Or at least Theo Chou needs you to see her that way. The arrangement is so light that it both her voice and, if the music video is to be believed, her guitar performance at the only things that rise to the forefront. Chen Xuesheng’s lyrics on “戀愛絕句選” (“Selected Love Quatrains”) are poetic: “deep in the mountains, the water meets the clouds / a secret peach blossom spring / I fantasize it’s the place you say you love me,” she sings. These poetic verses may sound ill-fitting to the pop-rock instrumental, but then there’s the final accusation, pointed and sharp, as she waits: “you need to be smarter,” she calls, egging him on to finally make one of these scenarios happen.
Extra Listening
babyMINT have their first mini album coming. I think it’s really fun that HIM Entertainment hired AF and now they have a girl group with a song called “(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ▄︻┻┳━ ·.`.`.`.” Check out their new song “BB Gals of the Galaxy” below.
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.