I discovered Mayday back in 1999. The “Blue Three” really were something special. So much personality and positive energy. Each album was more polished than the last, but still had Mayday’s distinctive flavor. “Time Machine” was a bit different, not as innocent, but it was the pinnacle of their artistic achievement.

Since then — to me — it’s just been flashes of genius amid a sort of grand dullness. I think “Time Machine” was probably the turning point. During the “Blue Three” period, they were racing against time before they’d be called away to the Army. During the Army period, they spent time apart, did different things and were probably anxious to get back together and make music again. You could hear that on the album, and it was full of fresh ideas.

But what then? There was no race against time, no anticipation of getting back together, just a future of stardom stretched out before them. With Stone and Guanyou becoming fathers and so on, who could expect them to reject easy stardom and concentrate on making risky music?

And yet, lacking a source of energy and newness, what could make their music compelling to us?

I feel sorry for them, knowing how powerful their mission once was, and maybe searching for what will make it meaningful for them again.

whoever whatever.

What’s most impt is for the song to have been there for you and with you tru a period of time or tru an impt experience in your life, that’s wads important, vital and valuable.

When we become fans, we judge and judge much more critically than everyone else.
I agree with the part of us being disappointed with them, cause they can’t keep up to OUR expectations. But we just keep forgetting that their lives are progressing at a difference pace from ours, and before we’ve entered the stage of life, they have, already.

We caught the shadows of their life at different parts that matched ours.
How can we expect them to grow, mature and live at the same pace as we do?

If you or you or you or you, think this particular tune is only catchy, meaningless or plain commercial, think again, it might had been important to someone else, you know?

If the song doesn’t hit you as hard as how “the apple” or “feng kuang shi jie” did, it does not mean it will not hit you as hard when you’re also in the same phrase of life as they are now – fathers, family and all.

“Catchyness” is something you might find in a Fahrenheit song. It doesn’t really define “good music.”

i haven’t heard too many of mayday’s earlier works, but from born to love onwards, i have loved every single song mayday has sung. and from the few earlier mayday songs i have heard a distinctive difference in the arrangements and timbre in that it is much more simpler, that does not mean that mayday’s current music is all that bad. good or not is up to you to decide according to your own tastes and preferences, but is the music so bad that you don’t want to listen to them anymore?

on top of that i don’t totally agree on the bit of repetitiveness mentioned everywhere and in the comments. surely if you listen to a barrage of songs sung by the same artist, then surely you will hear similarities, especially if the artist sings a particular genre of music. this can be applied to any artist, not only mayday. jay chou anyone? and on the lyrics side of things, there’s only so much you can write that expresses love, different phases and views of love etc, in some sort of way. all the love songs that i have listened to refer to the same motifs of ‘missing you’, ‘protecting you’, ‘loving you’, ‘thinking of you’ etc etc with symbolisms of ‘heaven’, ‘angels’, ‘fairy tales’ etc etc. what else do you expect from lyrics that relate to love? do you really want to listen to something totally new and bizarre like as in andrew marvell’s “vegetable love”?

i think not

this article is definitely interesting to read, but i cannot agree with the essence of it. the article says something along the lines of mayday singing the “hearts of people” (i don’t even know how to express this in english properly), but do people listen to music just because of this? i sure don’t. i listen to music which catches my attention through the melody, and that mayday’s music does. when i’m bored or in a lecture or whenever, some mayday tune will spiral around my conscience. that is why i listen to their music, their catchyness and nice rhythms.

music is music after all. you can’t expect too much.

I think the most courage I managed to get together recently was to try those shrimp-favored fries. A Chinese friend had them and I said I’d never tried them, and he offered them, so I had to accept. Blueberry potato chips actually don’t sound so bad, but I suppose kimchi would be more like pizza flavor and probably safer. (If you have a picture of the packaging, would you show me so I can fangirl all over it? )

Oh, but speaking of both Jay and celebrity endorsements, I’m sitting here eating “Korean Kimchee Flavor” potato chips with Jay’s face on the package. It was either this or the blueberry, and I still need to work up the courage to try blueberry-flavored potato chips.

that said, i have to agree that recently their music is starting to sound slightly repetitive. But being that they are a big band, this is inevitable. Just look at their good friends, GLAY, in japan. That band is several times larger than mayday in terms of fanbase, and recently their music is starting to disappear/grow old too. >.

I think the difference with people like Fahrenheit and S.H.E and a lot of the other pop acts is that they never existed for any reason other than crass commercialism. There’s no betrayal of an ideal (real or imagined) – they were never about music, but always about image and sales, sales, sales. Mayday is different for some of us, I think, because it seemed like they were once about something more.

Just writing pop music (like the Beatles or U2) isn’t by itself a horrible thing (I happen to like pop music), nor is taking on a lot of advertisements if the music doesn’t suffer. If it does, you have to wonder what makes them different from groups like Fahrenheit. It’s not unlike the standard I hold for Jay, hobielover – all of my Jay bashing in the last year comes because he is not living up to my expectations for him. (And, well, because he dressed up as a cowboy. It’s almost too easy…) But when I go back and listen to Mayday’s earlier music (or even more recent work, like Ashin’s “Eternal Summer” from 2006), I’m reminded that yes, I am a superfan. And then I get excited and hopeful for the new material.

There’s another issue here that the author didn’t mention, but that was the whole Mandarin/Taiwanese issue. To what extent do we believe Ashin when he says they just haven’t had melodies suited to Taiwanese lyrics, and to what extent is the mainland market the major issue?

and btw, weren’t The Beattles also a pop group? =o