Archive for August, 2009

It’s almost over, Masa

Friday, August 28th, 2009

The “Fish and Masa, together forever” dream has been astoundingly slow to die. After years of rumors that the two were together, and then an impressively extended period of speculation about their breakup, the issue has been run through the wringer and then some. After Fish started dating current beau Tony, a lot of the chatter seemed to quiet down… for a while, at least. But as this article talking about her plans to marry Tony next year reveals, it’s not quite behind them yet.

Fish Leong has announced that she will get married next spring, hopefully her dream wedding on a beach. Within that same, opening sentence, however, you have this: “fans have suggested that former love Masa steal away the bride.” Heh, poor Masa. But I guess this one really isn’t over until the fat lady sings… and where is there a fat lady in Mandopop? Fish does, of course, plan to invite all of Mayday to the wedding, and she has made it clear that she’s expecting big red envelopes (full of cash) from all of them; she noted that she forked over quite a lot when Stone got married. (What about Guanyou?)

As Fish made her announcements at a recent Chengdu concert, fans wished her all the best. Special guest Victor Wong added that for a while, he had actually been the son-in-law of choice for Fish’s father; he’s been worried for two years about making others jealous. He added that he was pretty comfortable grabbing her hand and singing “Clearly in Love with You (明明很愛你)” with Fish because he’d already confirmed that Tony wasn’t in the audience.

At the post-concert party, Fish mentioned that right after her younger brother got married, his wife had a baby, so she’s often calling for updates on her nephew. She loves kids herself, and would hope to have little ones of her own. As for the impact on her career, her manager noted that there’s no cause for alarm; she can still hold concerts if she’s pregnant in the future. In fact, they’ve already planned the name of that tour: “Breathe Through the Pain: The Fish Leong Eight Months Pregnant Tour!” I’m assuming that is not going to be needed for a year or more, though of course one never knows. But congratulations to Fish and Masa – Fish for getting engaged, Masa for seeing at long last an end to this news story.

[Edited to remove duplicate paragraph - thanks Winnie!]

Posted in Fish Leong, Mayday | 16 Comments »

Promises, promises

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Goodness, time flies. I honestly have no idea where this summer went. Or, for that matter, the last ten days. Oh well, in the fast-paced world of Mandopop, who can really keep up?

Ahem.

Recent events in the world of Mayday include last weekend’s Hangzhou concert. I know that my enthusiasm for these concert reports has really dwindled lately, but I’m expecting that to improve somewhat after early October, when I’ll get to see the DNA show live for myself and recharge my Mayday-love. Anyway, Hangzhou. As you can imagine, the band performed 30+ songs – likely a very similar selection of 30+ songs as previous concerts on this tour – to an enthusiastic crowd of 7000 fans.

Given the recent typhoon in Taiwan, many in the crowd held signs to encourage the island (i.e “台灣加油”), and seeing the signs, the band borrowed a few and led their mainland fans in prayer for recovery. Ashin also noted he was very touched by the display of support.

It appeared that the whole audience stood for the whole concert (I’ve never seen this happen on the mainland, so I’m excited to see if my stop will do so). Now, here’s the funny part – the article says that when the band played “old songs” like “Contentment” and “You’re Not Truly Happy,” the whole audience sang along. Erm, old compared to what? The new Ding Dang duet? (More on that in a minute.) Stone told the crowd that Mayday doesn’t like roofs… so next time, the band hoped to play the big outdoor stadium in the city. Monster added that they’d love to play in Hangzhou every year.

You know, they made those same promises to us in Toronto in 2007. And, I expect, to audiences in LA then, too. And yet, there is no news yet on North American tour dates. I realize I live in China now, but I feel for my homeland on this one.

Now, about that new duet. Ashin has teamed up with Ding Dang once again, writing a duet called, I’m guessing, “Fireworks (花火).” You can see the video here; I’ll give you one guess what they are advertising in it (besides Ashin’s atrocious jeans with “Stay Real” emblazoned across the buttocks. No one over age 8 should have just about anything written on their ass. Yes, I’m looking at you, Juicy Couture). As for the song itself, I’d like to go on record with a resounding, “Meh.”

A bit boring, kinda long, and, well, I am really over duets in all their forms. I think the only one I’ve really liked in the last three years was A-yue and Tanya Chua on “Yearning Is a Kind of Sickness,” though again, I have a mad crush on A-yue and am not entirely certain that the man ever goes wrong.

Finally, in other news, Fahrenheit has gone on record as realizing that they are not Mayday. Trust me, if you’ve been following the strange career of Fahrenheit at all, this is good news.

Posted in Mandopop, Mayday | 7 Comments »

The Charitable Impulse

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

Last week, August 8, Typhoon Morakot slammed into South Taiwan, flooding villages and killing as estimated 500 people. As always, in the face of human tragedy and grieving, there is hope to be found in the generosity of one’s fellow citizens.

And as always, it is a time to get really catty about the relative amounts of money the Mandopop stars have donated. Now, I’ve never seen this website before, so I’m not sure how credible it is, but it contains a story about the relative amounts contributed to relief efforts by the various artists. It has Jay and Leehom each giving NT$2,000,000 (around US$60,000), with Mayday, Victor Wong and Fish Leong also teaming up to give that much. Then Jolin, Rainie Yang, Stanley Huang, and Show Luo teamed up to give NT $3,000,000.

Sound generous? Sure. But that doesn’t mean people won’t find things to criticize. The article is especially disdainful of the contributions from Jay and Jolin, noting that Jolin can surely afford to do more than be part of that joint gift (I’m not any kind of Jolin fan, but who’s to say she didn’t give the bulk of the funds there? We just don’t know). On Jay, well, it points out two things: one is that just last year he bought a ridiculously expensive sports car (which cost over a million dollars…. US dollars, that is. Wow.); the other is that he gave more than twice that to the Sichuan earthquake fund last year. (Is this trying to stir up some sort of cross-strait animosity? That was a much bigger crisis, I suspect.) Actually, as everyone knows, I never pass up an opportunity to mock Cowboy Jay, but I don’t see one here. If he wants to spend his money on sports cars, he can. I probably won’t like him any more either way, actually.

Ever the class act, in response to grumbling about the size of Jay’s donation, Leehom replied by noting that he has no doubt of Jay’s sincerity with the contribution, and reminding everyone that there’s a long road ahead and there will be plenty more opportunities for everyone to do some good. Mayday and S.H.E agreed (gosh, those are four words I hate seeing together) that what’s important is the spirit of generosity, not comparing numbers. Hear, hear.

Anyway, according to this report, in addition to the group contribution, Ashin’s company StayReal also contributed another NT$500,000, as well as donating 1,000 t-shirts and 3,000 towels to typhoon victims. (The rest of that article is about S.H.E and therefore not worthy of our attention.) (Okay, fine, they donated NT$600,000. Happy?)

I would like to applaud Ashin’s generosity and make a suggestion: maybe it’s time to donate those denim suspenders to a worthy recipient. Just a totally innocent and selfless suggestion.

Posted in Cowboy Jay, Leehom Wang, Mandopop, Mayday | 2 Comments »

And the band played on

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

So, Mayday is still on tour. Not earth-shattering, I know. But if you were looking for Mayday news, you’d have to start there. So, I have yet to come up with specific Beijing news, but I’ve got a report on the concert in Harbin, and seriously, how different could it be? (Oh, how cynical one becomes after three years of Mayday-blogging. Shame on me.)

On August 1st, the band brought its DNA show to the lovely northern Chinese city of Harbin, which so far is the least friendly place I’ve been to in China. Apologies to Northeasterners, but that city seems to have really taken the whole Russian heritage thing too much to heart. Everyone acted like we were standing in the way of them and their vodka bottles and therefore could not help us. And yes, that’s me playing on some gross stereotypes about Russians which are totally unfair because a.) every Russian I’ve ever known personally has been *fantastically* good fun (though most were also rather outstanding drinkers) and b.) it was actually a Russian friend who first introduced me to Mayday, waaaaaaay back in 2002 when I was studying in Taiwan.

Wait, where were we?

The DNA tour stop in Harbin was an unforgettable evening for local fans, who jumped, sang and cheered along with the band, an unusual sight for Harbin concert goers. (See? It’s a weird place.) (Lovely ice palaces in winter, though.) They sang songs like “Loneliness Terminator,” “Star of Perseverance” (I feel like I haven’t typed that one in so long that I actually had to think for a minute what the English name was), “Life is Troubled Times” (totally arbitrary English name given by me), “Love-ing” (I am so ready for this song to be off the playlist already), and even Fish Leong’s “Swallowtail Butterfly” and “Can’t Hear,” though how are they really Fish’s when Ashin wrote them?

As the article notes, their own songs, others’ songs, new songs, old songs, played live they all became Mayday songs, and it seemed like each one was sung by the 10,000-strong crowd in unison. (This reporter has a bit more flair than most of the concert reports do. I wonder if she is secretly working on a novel.) With three encores, the three and a half hour concert became a little piece of Mayday and Harbin concert history.

Now looking back to Beijing, the best I can do is this (I forget that the papers only leave the stories up for a few weeks. This really should teach me to stay on top of things, though I still don’t always. Ever. Whatever.) But that only reminds us about the Mass Mutual Mercuries Life ads, which I did manage to write about somehow.

Now, I have on the schedule that they performed in Kaohsiung on August 8, but I’m skeptical about that because a search for news containing “Mayday” and “Kaohsiung” does not seem to turn anything up. I did, however, find a funny story from Victor Wong’s Taipei concert last month. Guanyou attended, but as he wandered into the stadium some fans apparently mistook him for the performing artists and asked why he isn’t on stage yet. The amused Victor Wong heard the story, and teasingly asked Guanyou if he could give him a ride home from the concert, because “I hear you don’t have a car right now.” Heh.

I went looking for the concert schedule on the Mayday or B’in Music websites and naturally could not find it (this was my greatest pet peeve during the Jump! tour as well), but I did notice one thing worth mentioning: how cool is it that B’in Music is organizing and promoting the Tizzy Bac concert in Taipei this October? Love that.

Edited to add: I just noticed, while typing up another news item, that the big typhoon was on August 8, so even if there was a Mayday concert scheduled for Kaohsiung, it would have been cancelled anyway.

Posted in Mayday | 5 Comments »

Just a little (more) Superbanding

Monday, August 10th, 2009

So, remember that Superband album I supposedly bought on my way out of China in June? Yeah, it was not so much a real Superband album as it was a dodgy set of random songs from each of the four guys’ previous careers that was being sold like a real album in the normally reliable Xinhua bookstore. I confess I suspect that the publisher did not have full copyright to publish this either, though of course it is China, so who knows. But still, quite annoying.

Here’s good news, though, for everyone (like me) so excited about a REAL Superband album that you’ve taken to inadvertently buying knock-offs, the guys still promise the album is coming. And soonish, though I’m still not sure if there’s a date set. In the meantime, they’ll be interviewed on Sina on the 11th. I just learned they’re going to be continuing the tour when I get back to China in September… I might just need to see them live one more time. You know, just to get the full experience.

Posted in Chang Chen-yue (A-yue) | 21 Comments »

Cowboy Jay as Kato?

Monday, August 10th, 2009

So everyone is talking about it: Jay Chou has been selected to play Kato to Seth Rogan’s Green Hornet in the film of the same name. There’s talk about how impressive he was in The Golden Flower (to Americans, supposedly, as he sure didn’t impress Asian critics), blah, blah, blah. But it seems to me that the producers of this film need to be asking themselves a few inconvenient questions: Why pick a guy who doesn’t do martial arts (and who has pretty famous back problems, remember those? The reason he couldn’t do military service?) to play a role once made famous by Bruce Lee? Why pick a guy who cannot act as anything other than a version of Jay Chou – quiet, brooding star – in anything?

Even more importantly, does it matter that Jay can’t actually speak anything recognizable to international audiences as standard English? I mean, Kato isn’t supposed to be some Mandarin-speaking dude that the Green Hornet just magically understands, right? (especially since the character has been in the past described as Japanese, Filipino and Korean, but never actually Chinese.) Am I forgetting some critical part of this story?

Finally, can we just all take a minute to mourn how breathtakingly awful the Mandopop album Jay will inevitably insist on putting out in the middle of filming is going to be? (He’s going to write Green Hornet themed songs, isn’t he? I shudder at the very thought.)

Netizens in Asia are asking another obvious question, which is why the director didn’t look for an Asian American actor – you know, one who can actually act and/or speak the language – to play the role. Someone like Leehom, maybe. Well, all I can say is if this is the sort of decision-making that is going into the movie, Leehom should consider himself lucky to have nothing to do with it, as it does not bode well.

Posted in Cowboy Jay, Leehom Wang | 3 Comments »

A long lost band resurfaces

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

According to this, Fusion – yes, Fusion! Remember them? – is back in action after an unusually long retreat from the limelight for an aspiring Mandopop act.

Their sophomore album, which I swear we first heard about ages and ages ago, is now finally almost done (no actual release date given yet, though). In preparation for the new round of publicity, the band is back to making public appearances. They’ve got an appearance at Shanghai’s Daning Shopping Complex’s summer music festival this coming Saturday (August 8 ) at 7, and this promises to be only the beginning.

Posted in Fusion Band | 5 Comments »

I mourn.

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

It’s the return of the suspenders. There was a long reprieve there, but they are back in full force. And from the angle of this picture, the “fat pants” theory is not looking like it holds much water.

Anyway, Ashin is sporting the hated trousers at a fan event in Singapore, where the band is promoting its August concerts and celebrating Guanyou’s birthday. With lots of games and activities, the laughter was abundant.

For Guanyou’s birthday, fans prepared a blank cake, so the other four could add designs to suit him. Naturally, the band added a big red car to the cake. In spite of the teasing, Guanyou’s birthday wishes included good things for the tour, for his family, and the health of all the members of the band. The band also warned Guanyou about choosing his friends more carefully, and said he’s taught them a great deal about this, including the need to select band members more carefully…. But in all seriousness, the other guys are worried and sorry for Guanyou’s troubles.

They played another game where fans wrote down their wishes, and the band members had to fulfill them. Stone drew one that requested seeing the band dance. And let’s just stop right there. I am so NOT getting this latest fan meme. Have these people not seen Mayday dance before? It is not pretty. Not pretty at all. And really, more embarrassing than funny. Enough with the dancing already! There are enough boybands in the Mandopop world without trying to add Mayday to the set! But back to the story. So the rest of the band started humming “DNA” so Stone could dance.

Mayday’s concert appeal has long had the ability to win them new fans, and as a testament to this, they’ve have four nights of concerts in Taipei in September, and two in Singapore in August. (I’m just realizing now that I missed the concert reports on Beijing. I’ll poke around for them in the next day or so and see if any are still up!)

In other news, about a week ago the band was the special guest at a Beyond concert in Hong Kong. Ashin brushed off his painfully bad Cantonese to sing “Lover (情人)” with the band, and both groups together performed “Tenderness” and “Missing You (想你).” In an interview, Monster noted that Beyond is Mayday’s idol, and joining them on stage was like a dream come true. Mayday will continue to learn from Beyond. With respect to Mayday’s Cantonese, Monster apologized, saying the band has no real gift for languages, but they did their best. Mayday hopes to see Beyond do a full concert in Taipei arena some day soon, and also hopes to get Beyond back for their own Taipei concert.

Posted in Mayday | 1 Comment »