Archives For Music

I’ve had experiences with the artists I’d like to see and chasing after them… until finally they come to me. LOL

It happened to me with Bjork, chasing her across Europe — missing her in Finland, Sweden… and later Madrid. Defeated back home, it wasn’t but a few weeks or a few months when Bjork announced she was going to be doing a show in Lima.

Something similar happened to me with the Backstreet Boys.  After a failed Canadian visa for a friend’s wedding, I had already tickets for the BSB show in Vancouver that I ended up giving to my ex-roommate. I was pissed off at the embassy for denying me entry, and barely a month later, I head that BSB was going to play Lima.

For a while now, I had been lamenting not being able to attend many Asian concerts, and when Miyavi announced that he’d be playing in Chile, I thought I could go there. I hadn’t heard from the festival organizers, but today I got word that Miyavi was playing Lima as well.

Well, FUCK YEAH!

How to: Worldwide Tours

June 30, 2011 — 2 Comments

With my excitement over the fact that Miyavi is going to be in Chile, I just thought it’s the perfect time to start off my How To Series. This time around with my frustration of living in a developing country that was never “lucky” enough to be part of the “world,” in that sense, we grew up never believing to be able to EVER see our favorite artists live.

With a globalized world, this is changing — artists and managements are finally realizing the possibilities of other markets. This is even more prominent in the ever elusive, to the western fans, of Asian music. Many of my friends truly grew up watching their favorite idols from afar never imagining that they would ever EVER see them perform, unless they dish an enormous amount of money on a plane ticket all the way to the East.

As the years went by, and the Asians communities began expanding even more and more (as well as in status) in North America, Asian artists began adding small dates in significant cities like Los Angeles (or San Francisco), maybe New York… sometimes they would switch it around to Vancouver or Toronto.

However, adding a few cities in North America to your Asian Tour to make it a “world tour” – However, a World Tour is just not two parts of two continents. Of course, sometimes the amount of cities you get to visit depend on the amount of money you have to set your tour on the road, that’s why you need key cities which will let your fans travel to cities closer to you.

This is where I come:

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Hey, Britney~

Let your body loseeeee control~~~

I wasn’t aware Britney had enough videos to fill a Top10. LOL

Once again, if you were subscribed to the YAM Magazine RSS Feed, you would know about this two-part post with LGBT music videos from around the world.

Also, you probably missed our LGBT Blogathon, didn’t you???

Here’s:

This one turned out to be really awesome, if I may say so myself.

Of course, I have been trying to put this together since last year, LOL – so it’d better be good, right? Though, I know there are some repeat tracks if you’ve followed the blog, I think it’s fair to say that the combination of songs has a nice flow. It’s turned out to be a really moody list~

You can check my previous Chinese Music Playlists [1][2]

[iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PL4603C993E0B0D0BB&hl=en_US”]

  1. Mavis Fan (范曉萱) – I Want Us to Be Together (我要我們在一起)
  2. Waa Wei (魏如萱) – Shangri-La (香格里拉)
  3. Jing Chang (張芸京) – Broken (壞了)
  4. Leehom Wang (王力宏) – Daily Necessities (柴米油鹽醬醋茶)
  5. R-Chord featuring LaLa Hsu (謝和弦 feat. 徐佳瑩) – Under the Willow Tree (柳樹下)
  6. Stefanie Sun (孫燕姿) – Silent All These Years
  7. A-Mei Chang (張惠妹) – What Time Is It Already? (你在看我嗎)
  8. Jing Chang (張芸京) – The Opposite Me (相反的我)
  9. Chris Lee (李宇春) – Lost Heart Crazy (失心瘋)
  10. Dream Girls – Weak (軟弱)
  11. A-Mei Chang (張惠妹) [as AMIT] – After the Sentimental Love of Animals (相愛後動物感傷)*
  12. Stefanie Sun (孫燕姿) – The Kingdom of Fools (愚人的國度)

*Note: There’s some blurred nudity and depictions of sex in that video.

You can check the playlist on YouTube.

I just gotta say this is sooooooooooooo cool.

I actually like the Chinese/Taiwan music industry because so many of their artists combine classical music elements. In the case of 2CELLOS, it’s the other way around! It’s pretty kick ass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSByjqMGtaU

More info here.

This is pretty good stuff…

First contender of Breakthrough MV of 2011~

You can get more info on Cold Mailman over YAM Magazine ;P

I love when I do long and weird titles. xD

I don’t want to offend anyone — I know I’m doing my generalization, but let’s be honest~ I haven’t been into the American commercial pop scene since… I left Britney, and I left her circa her Toxic days too.

Even though people say I’m a music snob (I don’t know why…), I really like my easy-to-digest commercial pop of pretty idols that I can worship,  catchy music, and dance routines. I was big on the dancing, and I’m not talking about jiggly butt dances or Waka Waka stuff — as you know, I prefer my Shakira in her Donde Estan los Ladrones days… — I’m talking about sync dancing that gets you pumped, all the UMPH from the Nsync and Britney days of late 90s and very early 2000s.

I gave a try to the Katy Perrys, the Jonas Bros, the Justin Biebers (yes, yes I did.) — by the time Ke$ha was out, I had already given up. I didn’t even try Miley because her voice exasperates me, so I wouldn’t be able to stand her singing voice.

And then Kpop happened.

Maybe it was because I saw these Asian faces looking back at me — then again, maybe it isn’t — or maybe they put something in my kimchi (though I’m pretty sure I started eating kimchi after my Kpop thing), maybe it’s because they’re just better… who knows, but there’s something so VERY fascinating about the way Kpop is spreading.

We’ve been looking how it’s grown over the past 2 or 3 years into a phenomenon. I wonder how big is going to get, I want to see it get big… but not only Kpop, of course — other types of Asian music. I want to see how Kpopers get famous, Cpopers, — okay, not Jpopers, but definitely Jrockers, and the Taiwan music scene, and the indie Japanese scene~

So obviously, I made a playlist prompted from the Kahi post I did a day or two ago.

These are songs from from the Kpop industry that just stuck out. It’s a bit thin on the earlier years [the playlist is ordered by year], but it begins getting pretty heavy in 2008. I tried picking just songs that are dance pop and not ballads just to keep the list in check — at the moment it has 30 tracks, that I hope will expand into more songs as the months and years go by~

[iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLDD96E58EC50B1F36&hl=en_US”]

Here’s the YouTube link.

If you have any suggestions as to what it’s missing, comment away.

*EDIT*

Must include MVs (so songs released as singles), not older than late 90s.
Also… song must work as MV too. So no awesome songs but tacky videos. Sorry.

Now tell me, how did you get into Kpop?

Needle heels should be banned from choreographed music videos.
on Meisa Kuroki dancing with heels.

I’ll eat my words by the end of this post, don’t worry.

As you all know, I’m a late K-pop bloomer. Since everyone around me seems to be into Kpop, I don’t keep an eye on it because I don’t feel like I need to… I just wait for my friends to tell me what to watch. LOL

It is in my search for Glee + Kpop posts (because I want to see how much audience would be into it… not many), I ended up on the video posted on a celebrity gossip website, that shall remain nameless, of After School’s Let’s Step Up MV.

They described it as Glee Korean style — which is not. As you know I love Celtic music, hence I also have a fascination with Riverdance, and tap dance. Let’s Step Up blew my mind. LOL Are you kidding me? Glossy pop music mixed with tap, mixed with Riverdance? I love it.

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I was watching CCTV a couple of few days ago, when I saw the most awesome performance of the song Legend (传奇), which is sung by Faye Wong (I’m pretty sure she’s the original singer) in a beautiful way as well [1][2].

But this performance by Henan Opera singer Xiao Xiangyu (小香玉) literally brought tears to my eyes. I wasn’t able to get her name the first time I watched the show, but they repeated it last night and I wrote it down.

I managed to find a video with English subtitles. [CCTV looks better but it goes wrong after minute 15 or something – stuck on the freeze frame even when the audio continues]

[iframe src=”https://open.iqiyi.com/developer/player_js/coopPlayerIndex.html?vid=17928efefd8ba611dc8cac707ba8e835&tvId=2062401009&accessToken=2.f22860a2479ad60d8da7697274de9346&appKey=3955c3425820435e86d0f4cdfe56f5e7&appId=1368&height=100%&width=100%” width=”100%” height=”480″]

There’s even a bit of a funny part when they mention Jay Chou’s singing style. LOL They talk about the importance of Mulan in their national history, and discuss how Disney’s Mulan fell in love and there was a happy ending.

If you really want to skip all the show [Legend is about 20min. into the show], you can watch Xiao Xiangyu’s performance of Legend, but it doesn’t have subs and the quality is not the best.