One Day in May…

Since we have the fantastically thorough concert report from V, I’m not even going to attempt to do something similar here. Actually, though, I couldn’t have been that thorough if I wanted to: if I had tried to keep track of the songs they sang, I would have failed. Miserably.

There are probably a few reasons for that. First of all, my copy of Fever finally arrived after a month-long wait on Monday – two days after the concert. Being a well-behaved fan, or perhaps just being of a different generation than the post-90 kids, I don’t download albums unless I can do it legally (and pay for it), and my internet can be a little too intermittent to stream, not to mention few of the streaming sites like macs. So I went into the concert on Saturday not having heard anything but the song “Fever” off the new album. Add that to the fact that I only know a few of the Daylight of Spring songs by name, and the fact that they covered a few songs I’d never heard before, and you’d have a pretty scanty concert report.

So… why haven’t I memorized all of Daylight yet? An interesting question. In part, I have to point back my original concern that four albums in two years is too much even for a band as great as sodagreen. While I enjoyed listening to Daylight, and ended up with a few songs I really like, it’s not Incomparable Beauty. It’s not really trying to be, of course, but there aren’t as many of the songs that just floor you, like “City (城市), “This Day (這天),” or “The Moon Haunts in the Daytime (白日出沒的月球)” did for me. Though of course, I’ve been referring to “Head Home Early (早點回家)” – the English translation there does NOT quite capture the Chinese – as the “expat anthem” all summer, and it will be my first posted translation off this album when I do my next round of posting. I guess you could say I liked the album, but was not bowled over by it. The other reason is that I bought a lot of new music this year, and this album didn’t claw its way to the top of the stack that often.

But luckily, not knowing the two centerpiece albums of the concert in no way impede one’s enjoyment of a sodagreen show. Now, to get the obligatory comparisons out to the way, so we can focus on the show itself:

1. The usual comparison between this year’s Shanghai concert and last year’s. There were lots of little differences – the venue, my seat, the song list – but the biggest noticeable difference was the energy level in the crowd. Last year we sat through the whole concert – much to my dismay, we even sat through “Temporarily Out of Control” when *clearly* we should have been dancing along with A-gong. I think the only times anyone stood was during “Frequency” and the very end of the encore. In part, that was the songlist – I guess no one is going to stand up just to sway along with the music. This year, the Fever album had introduced more fast songs that required more than just a foot tap – more like full body bebopping.

2. The necessary comparison with the Mayday show two weeks ago. First of all, comparisons between these two acts make even less sense to me than the endless Leehom vs. Cowboy Jay debates or the impressively long-lasting arguments over the Shin Band and Mayday. The reason for this is that aside from being two self-composing bands from Taiwan, they don’t have that much in common. Not only do they share a lot of fans, but I’d guess that for many of us, their music appeals to us in different ways. This year, sodagreen had a lot more pizazz, props and the like, more like a Mayday show, though both bands do put performing the music above the rest of it. (Not quite like A-yue - who didn’t so much as change clothes, much less bother with props – but far better than Leehom, who is practically all gimmicks.) But whereas a huge part of sodagreen live is Qingfeng’s on-stage persona and witty banter, Mayday is decidedly not about talk (which tends to be short and trite). And where the Mayday concert is constantly on your feet, pushing toward the front, the sodagreen crowd was slightly better behaved. The good news is that if you like either’s music, you’ll love the live performance. And that’s probably where the comparison should stop.

Now, on to this particular sodagreen concert. The first surprise for me (not apparently having read the Taipei reports that closely) was that the first voice we heard singing was Xinyi, not Qingfeng. She has a lovely voice, and it is clear why she would do so much backup on the albums (truth be told, her voice probably blends better with Qingfeng’s than any of the guys’ voices do). Then, of course, you have Qingfeng with the pink hair and the antlers. The best part of that, I think, is that even if you hadn’t heard about it, hadn’t seen pictures beforehand, if you know Qingfeng, seeing him come out in pink hair and antlers is not a “what the hell…” moment, but just a regular old “ah! Qingfeng!” moment. He could wander onstage in a full-body gorilla suit and you’d just think, “damn, I knew I should have brought a banana.”

The crowd wasn’t on its feet for the whole concert – it was more of a “stand for the fast songs, sit for the slow songs” movement, but that was about right for me. I spent the whole night thinking I was just getting old, because after a while I was desperate for a little rest. As it turns out, I was just getting sick – the cold I caught in Shanghai is still with me now. I think my body did this subconsciously in solidarity with Qingfeng – who I intend to attempt to imitate on Saturday – because he definitely had a cold in Shanghai. I read on the Baidu pages about fans seeing his slim frame shaking with coughs as he turned away from the audience, nobly trying to hide them… but I didn’t see any of that. He sounded a little hoarse, that’s all. And impressively, not remotely off-key, which is a neat trick if his head was in a cloud at the time like mine is now.

On one of the fast songs – see, I already don’t know which one, though it think it was “Flying Fish (飛魚)” – A-gong and Jiakai abandoned their instruments and did a bit of the high-energy, low-skill dancing for which A-gong is so very famous. My favorite part of that, I think, was the competing air guitar and air violin. I do love a good air violin performance. Later in the concert, A-gong did an extended solo dance. It was clearly choreographed, as they had a video behind him of three black silhouettes doing the same dance moves. It was fun, though maybe not quite as fun as the more unpredictable dancing on the old “Temporarily Out of Control (暫時失控)” (whoops, I thought I wasn’t going to make any more comparisons). Of course, none of this is to say that A-gong wasn’t as manic as always.

Actually, that leads me to the one aspect of the concert I was less enthusiastic about, where I think I’m probably in the minority. There were two videos with some of the guys cross-dressing as each other’s girlfriends – Xiao Wei and Ah Fu as Snow White and an imperial concubine (Jiakai’s women) and Jiakai as Lady Lulu (Xiao Wei’s girlfriend) – and while I applaud the idea (silliness, amusement, and random cross-dressing almost always make for a good time), even if they were offering cover for a costume change, they went on a bit too long. The first one was necessarily funnier than the second, which just repeated the same schtick. I’d rather leave it to just one of these, and then if they need to buy a little time for a rest or a costume change later, show behind-the-scenes footage of the band recording or rehearsing, to be honest.

Now, let’s turn for a bit to the concert news. This report cracks me up – it’s all pretty standard stuff, except for the line that claims they sang a song called “Me (我)” with a fast rap in the middle. Right. Um, having fully admitted I don’t know the two latest albums that well, I’m still pretty sure we didn’t hear Qingfeng rap. On a song called “Me.” Which sounds oddly like it might be a line from a report on a Mayday concert. Hmmm, more dodgy sourcing, or was someone playing a mean trick on our intrepid reporter? We’ll never know. [Update: Akira tells me they were referencing the previous song, "我要你的愛" with that line, though I must maintain that a.) Qingfeng did not rap and b.) it still sounds like a line from a Mayday concert report.]

I take issue with this report’s reference to the fans that filled the venue as “post-80″ (born after 1980) and “post-90″ – hey, some of us were “post-70,” and well, if not proud of it, at least not yet likely to deny it. I otherwise agree with the writer that whatever doubts you come in with – it all goes away when you hear them play, especially when they play the live concert arrangements that so deftly combine classical music and modern pop. This writer is also quite impressed with Qingfeng’s sick self even attempting to sing “Take Me With You (帶我走),” the song he wrote for Rainie Yang, because of course to even record it Rainie had to take extra voice lessons so that she’d have power behind the high notes. While I make my bid for sainthood by staying away from that one, it’s notable that even congested Qingfeng managed to hit them.

The songs V and I didn’t recognize (that I thought had a “70s” feel) were in fact old Shanghai songs – “Night Shanghai (夜上海)” and “I Need Your Love (我要你的爱),” the latter of which turned into a massive crowd participation activity. I, of course, spent those songs vaguely unsure if they were covers or off the new album. I have got to be better prepared next time.

Near the end of the concert, when my energy was flagging, I sat down and listened to part of “It’s My Sea (是我的海)” without any of the visual stimulation going on on stage. As fun as all the rest of that is – and there is no doubt at all that Qingfeng gets a kick out of running around in his all-white suit being “Qing-cai,” i.e. “Leafy Greens,” instead of Qingfeng, interviewing the band, joking with the crowd (“I’m Radish!” someone yells, and somewhere along the line the rest of us became “Steamed Bread”) – the songs are what you go to a sodagreen concert to hear, and on that – the simple, soaring music that completely fills you up – the band once again delivered.

Finally, I have two random, not-really-concert-related observations about sodagreen I’d like to make. The first is a theory: I’m wondering if the push to get out four albums in two years under this ambitious Vivaldi Project is an attempt to make an impact and put out a lot of material before they go into a forced hiatus for military service. Unless something has drastically changed that I don’t know about, A-gong, A-fu, Xiao Wei, and Jiakai are all eligible to serve. Ideally, they’d serve all at once (so the band only has to do one hiatus, not to or more), so this project buys time for the students to finish up so they can all go in at once, and leaves fans with a lot to chew on while they’re gone.

The second is a musing. When polling people I know in Nanjing about sodagreen, the most common reaction is that they don’t listen to them because Qingfeng sounds too much like a woman. But one of the most popular singers in China is Li Yuchun, who is androgynous-bordering-on-masculine. Why is it okay for a girl to sound like a guy, but bad for a guy to sound like a girl? I have my own suspicions about the answer, of course, but I’ve been amazed by how consistent it is. And that led me to the other half of the musing, which is to wonder if any significant proportion of the young girls at the concert last night are in love with Qingfeng (the way Mayday concerts seem to always have a certain proportion of fans who are convinced Ashin is the only man for them). Jiakai is the heartthrob in the band – though after the live show, I’d say that Xiao Wei in do-rag and completely absorbed in his drumming is giving him a run for his money, no matter how much Qingfeng teases him about his weight. Anyway, it’s a unique dynamic, in the Mandopop world, for the lead singer of the band not to be the heartthrob, if indeed he’s not (he’s not for me, obviously; my heart belongs to A-yue). Anyway, that didn’t really have a point, it was just an observation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Sodagreen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.