There I was in a 7-Eleven a week or two ago, buying some shrimp chips and minding my own business. I try to make convenience store ventures brief, as a few minutes of exposure to the pop music they play gradually saps my will to live. But the woman in front of me had a year's worth of unpaid utilities. So I waited.
And thus came about my first full-length encounter with the girl band S.H.E. The song I was subjected to, Chinese Language, has stirred up a bit of controversy of late. It's been accused of brown-nosing Chinese consumers with lyrics like:
How smart are the Chinese people
How beautiful is the Chinese language
and
As kids we practiced English pronunciation and grammar
Now it's their turn to curl their tongues and learn Chinese language.
("Curl their tongues"? To emit that enchanting Beijing rrrrhhh noise, presumably.)
As the "melody" hammered my skull, I managed to drag myself out the door with my last ounce of strength. I awoke some hours later being licked by a stray dog. My chips were gone.
Reporting by the Liberty Times on S.H.E's little ditty was scathing enough to get it barred from S.H.E promotional events, a drastic step for a music industry whose survival depends on whoring artists out for every last scrap of media coverage and endorsing anything from plasma TVs to hemorrhoid cream.
Indeed, at the peak of their marketability, S.H.E had their good girl schtick plastered across everything except ordnance catalogs. According to Wikipedia, S.H.E has endorsed or been spokespeople for 74 products and events. Seventy-four. They have acted in seven TV dramas and hosted two TV shows. Even model Lin Chi-ling (
I'm not so concerned about the political implications. The Chicoms will think S.H.E is just more double agent propaganda. I think everyone is losing sight of the bigger issue.
And that is that, despite the gloss and marketing prowess, S.H.E sucks. I mean, really, really, really sucks. Really. And that means something when you're in the same pot as the likes of Rainie Yang (
In an industry that bases value almost entirely on looks, S.H.E is sub-par. Two of them, Selina and Hebe, are moderately attractive in that "I'm a pasty white, ditzy, anorexic xiaojie who has never worked a day in my life" kind of way, while the purpose of the third, Ella, is to be a goofy backdrop endearing the other two to confused straight boys while giving a dykey frisson to girls who haven't quite surrendered to their heterosexual doom.
Then there's the music. Oh dear. Although many artists cover songs these days, S.H.E concentrates on covering washed-up bands from a couple of years ago, notably the Backstreet Boys, Destiny's Child and Britney Spears. I'm still waiting breathlessly for them to do the Spice Girls' Wannabe.
But there is another misconception. Some criticize S.H.E for selling their souls for red yuan. Ah, how naive to believe that they ever had souls to sell.
When the latest controversy broke, S.H.E seemed genuinely surprised that they had been personally attacked. The music was a corporate decision by the record company, they said, and not their responsibility. While most entertainers, no matter how vapid, would have at least been ashamed to admit that they had no artistic integrity and were merely mindless tools of their employer, S.H.E seems not to understand that the concept of artistic integrity exists at all.
But S.H.E isn't the only band to bow to corporate demands and kiss China's pinky ring. Jay Chou's (
Listen to your mother
Don't ever hurt her
Try to grow up quickly
So that you can protect her.
I worry, friends, I worry. But not just about the China hugging. No, I'm worried about a generation of youth raised on entertainers who tell them to listen to their parents. I'm concerned about a generation that doesn't know how to rock out and break the law. I fear for youths who don't know how to do something as fundamental as stick it to The Man.
What is a rebellious teen supposed to do today with bands like these? Jay is the closest we have to a bad ass, and he's telling us to obey our elders. All the other pretenders blub on TV after getting caught out on drug tests.
Is there no rebellious spirit? Are there no singers with the artistic integrity to tell their labels to shove it? Are they all too nice, too filial and too ke'ai (
Isn't there a critical mass of ke'ai at which all the artists and music are so drenched with manufactured cutsieness that the whole system implodes?
There are some warning signs. For example, Rainie's ke'ai-ness has peaked. If she becomes any more ke'ai it will destroy her. Witness her latest TV ad in which she hawks some sort of Swiss hot chocolate. As she poses with the package at the end of the clip, she becomes so overcome by her own ke'ai-ness that she squints her eyes and starts puffing her cheeks in and out like a deranged squirrel on crack.
"Hao ke'ai," trilled the xiaojie next to me as I dropped my beverage and recoiled from the screen in horror.
How can Rainie possibly top that? Perhaps for her next endorsement, she will become so ke'ai that she will spontaneously combust. I will then immediately buy whatever product she was peddling.
It would be one thing if China were bombarding us with music about how fantastic China is and how Taiwanese are bumpkins who should do as they're told. But it's depressing for us to willingly export such drivel. How are Taiwanese supposed to resist the Chicoms if they don't even know how to fight The Man right here?
But perhaps all is not lost. That same 7-Eleven is staffed at night by a young man who turns up the Judas Priest and AC/DC during the night shift. I didn't know 7-Eleven muzak receivers could even pick up that channel, but he found it. And he plays it loud. It's against company policy, but he doesn't care.
He'll be damned before he's their corporate tool. Instead of being cheerful, he looks indignant that he has to work this crummy job. He scans my items resentfully. Occasionally he mutters a "Thank you," but he never stoops to yelling "Huanying guanglin!!!" (歡迎光臨, "welcome") at customers.
I smile thinking about how one day he will rip off his name tag, throw it at his manager and tell him precisely where he can stick his lousy job.
Maybe some ass-kicking foreign bands could help. Maybe they could warn everyone about The Man.
But the last major foreign imports that I recall were Olivia ("Stay strong, you can do it") Newton-John and Kenny ("...") G.
Abandon all hope.
Heard or read something particularly objectionable about Taiwan? Johnny wants to know: dearjohnny@taipeitimes.com is the place to reach me, with "Dear Johnny" in the subject line.
US$18.278 billion is a simple dollar figure; one that’s illustrative of the first Trump administration’s defense commitment to Taiwan. But what does Donald Trump care for money? During President Trump’s first term, the US defense department approved gross sales of “defense articles and services” to Taiwan of over US$18 billion. In September, the US-Taiwan Business Council compared Trump’s figure to the other four presidential administrations since 1993: President Clinton approved a total of US$8.702 billion from 1993 through 2000. President George W. Bush approved US$15.614 billion in eight years. This total would have been significantly greater had Taiwan’s Kuomintang-controlled Legislative Yuan been cooperative. During
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in recent days was the focus of the media due to his role in arranging a Chinese “student” group to visit Taiwan. While his team defends the visit as friendly, civilized and apolitical, the general impression is that it was a political stunt orchestrated as part of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, as its members were mainly young communists or university graduates who speak of a future of a unified country. While Ma lived in Taiwan almost his entire life — except during his early childhood in Hong Kong and student years in the US —
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers on Monday unilaterally passed a preliminary review of proposed amendments to the Public Officers Election and Recall Act (公職人員選罷法) in just one minute, while Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators, government officials and the media were locked out. The hasty and discourteous move — the doors of the Internal Administration Committee chamber were locked and sealed with plastic wrap before the preliminary review meeting began — was a great setback for Taiwan’s democracy. Without any legislative discussion or public witnesses, KMT Legislator Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩), the committee’s convener, began the meeting at 9am and announced passage of the
In response to a failure to understand the “good intentions” behind the use of the term “motherland,” a professor from China’s Fudan University recklessly claimed that Taiwan used to be a colony, so all it needs is a “good beating.” Such logic is risible. The Central Plains people in China were once colonized by the Mongolians, the Manchus and other foreign peoples — does that mean they also deserve a “good beating?” According to the professor, having been ruled by the Cheng Dynasty — named after its founder, Ming-loyalist Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) — as the Kingdom of Tungning,
RSS