Today we listen to the latest release by ChaCha, a vocalist and music producer based in Shanghai who’s built a steady international following since participating in the 2011 Red Bull Music Academy in Madrid. Originally from Guizhou in southwest China, ChaCha launched her music career in high school, singing for rock bands locally before moving to Shanghai and plugging in with the Uprooted Sunshine reggae crew. Her experiences with that group of MCs, DJs and producers at their home base, the now defunct LOgO bar, led her to develop her vocal talents and dub out her sound.
Today, ChaCha is primarily known for her voice, especially collaborations she’s done with more pop-leaning Chinese rappers and hip-hop producers like J-Fever and DJ Wordy. Her latest musical output, however, showcases her dreamier, trippier, weirder side, in the form of a recently released album under her alter ego, Faded Ghost:
Moon Mad, ChaCha’s second release under the Faded Ghost moniker, distills her last five years of extensive touring around the world, and incorporates field recordings she’s done on the road. At the mid-year point, I shortlisted it as one of my favorite China releases of 2017, writing at the time:
On Moon Mad, she’s clearly dipped deeper into the dark side of the psyche, often building tracks out of little more than ghosty field recordings of distant street sounds and brewing weather. When her voice is there at all, it’s abstracted and fed into a chain of delays until it sounds more like a remembered whisper than something being sung. Elsewhere on the album she conjures deep vibes out of barely-there synth pads, an effect she plans to replicate visually with a series of short videos depicting Faded Ghost as a mysterious, shamanic entity haunting a darkly shadowed forest.
I’ve had Moon Mad on pretty frequent rotation since it came out in May, and felt compelled to throw it on again earlier this week, after ChaCha was featured on the BBC radio program The Conversation. In a short audio segment called “Cities After Dark,” she discusses the deep social and cultural stigmas she had to navigate to make it as a musician, despite the protestations of her parents. She told the BBC:
For many years they [didn’t] understand why I’m so obsessed about this. For a long time, I feel like our relationship became really bad, and we stopped talking to each other, I think because they were thinking I’m not a decent girl because I’m working in this nasty area, in the club… But because I tried hard, I got a chance to work with nice musicians, bring myself to another country to do shows, I think little by little they understand what I’m doing.
— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) July 31, 2017
Listen to the full two-minute BBC soundbite here, and check out more of ChaCha’s music on her Soundcloud. If this kind of dark electronica grabs you, dig a little deeper into the catalog of Shanghai-based record label SVBKVLT, which released Moon Mad.
Yin (音, “music”) is a weekly Radii feature that looks at Chinese songs spanning classical to folk to modern experimental, and everything in between. Drop us a line if you have a suggestion: [email protected].
Congratulations to Justin Scholar, the Grand Prize recipient of the Radii Photo Contest! The above winning picture was taken at Hangzhou’s West Lake. Scholar, who is a filmmaker who traveled to China to try his hand at a traditional art form, studied ink painting and calligraphy for half a year — and it shows. “I wanted to convey the nuance and serenity of ink painting in my native art of digital imaging,” he says.
Here’s how one of our three judges appraised Scholar’s submission:
It’s a timeless photo that could have been taken this morning or 500 years ago. The photographer conveys the West Lake’s tranquility and mystique in such a powerful way that you feel as if you’re standing there on the shore observing the shimmering of the water as the gondolas glide by… all done with a subtle nod to China’s ancient art of landscape painting. An extraordinary image.
The First Prize winner is iLkka Jarvilaturi (伊卡), who took the photo below on an undeveloped beach west of Sanya in Hainan province. (Learn more about it here.)
We’ll be posting their work throughout the week, so come back every day to see a new picture.
Thank you to everyone who submitted — the works really were amazing, from a clown in Sanlitun to a lighthouse on the coast, from steam coming off morning baozi to close-ups of bricks… we really wish we could have used everything.
Congratulations again to the winners. We’ll post more details about Jarvilaturi’s photo tomorrow, and show you more work from Scholar on Sunday.
If you’re in China at this exact moment in time, you can’t avoid it.
Freestyle.
The word is everywhere right now. Say “freestyle” aloud on the street and see if any heads turn. Look around you and you’ll find the word in the mouths of young people, or written in huge letters on live-streamed internet talk shows, or used as supporting copy in advertisements for milk-flavored biscuits. How did this happen?
If you’re a regular Radii reader, you’ll know the answer, which we broke down in our look at newcomer hit TV show The Rap of China. The competitive hip hop show’s first episode got more than they expected when celebrity judge Kris Wu stared down the very first contestant and asked him the now-infamous 有freestyle吗? (you got a freestyle?).
The meme took off at lightspeed, with freestyle holding the top trending spot on Weibo for several days. GIFs of Kris Wu asking people if they have freestyles are on every phone screen. On a surface level, it seems simple enough: hip hop is just now beginning to catch on in China, and it’s not hard for a nation to be united by a shared gag on a widely-watched TV show. But there’s more to it than that – freestyle, like so many words before it, has taken on a life of its own; it is no longer contained to the use, meaning, or context, from whence it came. We’ve officially lost control of freestyle.
Over the weekend, some friends and I visited the M50 art district’s outdoor Urban Aesthetics Fair in Shanghai. Glancing at a WeChat ad, I was neither shocked nor excited to find out the fair was loosely freestyle-themed:
You don’t need to read Chinese to see what I’m getting at.
What did surprise me though, was that when we arrived, there was a group of rappers spitting bars with little or no preparation – a performance commonly referred to as a freestyle. It might seem obvious at first, but I was floored to find out the freestyle-themed aesthetics fair had actual freestyles happening. Consider, then, that this is the freestyle I encountered just a few days earlier:
Mosquitos bye bye, going out freestyle, reads the advertisement for mosquito repellant. Pictured are a smiling mother and her child exploring a nature scene, guided by a happy lion, as mosquitos die all around them. Does it have anything to do with improvisational hip hop rhymes over smooth beats? Absolutely not. But to a room full of marketing execs, squinting unknowingly at the top trending Weibo words, it doesn’t matter. Suddenly, everything is freestyle.
The phenomenon of trendy English words being squeezed dry for everything they’re worth is nothing new. In his book Brand New China, scholar Jing Wang writes on a particular example – bourgeois bohemians, or bobos. Author David Brooks coined the term to describe “highly creative folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success.” Little did he know, this is exactly what a rapidly-emerging China craved in 2002. The wealthy elite jumped at the chance to alter the pervasive anti-rich narrative, and the citizens of second-tier cities had a quick framework they could use to emulate the affluent bobos of Shanghai and Beijing. Bobo became number three on the year’s list of top ten internet words, and everyone tried to cash in on the craze, from hastily-erected Bobo Cafes, to luxury apartment complexes (Do you look for something cool about a refrigerator rather than its cooling function when you shop for one? Is it unbearable if your living space does not give you a poetic sense of life? If you answered yes to either question, you’re a prospective bobo, and are qualified for a surprise gift and free tour of the apartment complex). Here’s an ad from that time for a completely normal laptop computer:
Obviously, form follows function when it comes to English buzzwords. The actual meaning and origin of the words is secondary to how they can be used by (or on) a society at large, and there have been countless examples in the years between bobo and freestyle. Someone who’s lived in Shanghai or Beijing in the past few years could probably attest to the amount of concept and lifestyle going around. Concept malls that are just malls, lifestyle bubble tea that’s just bubble tea. In fact, it’s my own belief that the lifestyle craze of the past year or two set the linguistic foundation for freestyle’s ascension to the throne.
The meaning of the words themselves is not important. We’ve learned this lesson from millions of questionable T-shirts, street signs, and restaurant names, but it rings especially true in the context of trending buzzwords. A freestyle is no longer just a freestyle, a bobo not just a bobo. They become more than that, transforming into wings of western identity, which China’s consumer class – young and old – can latch onto and ride to new heights as they continue to discover their own place in a rapidly connecting world.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), earth’s largest military body, turns 90 tomorrow, and the people are celebrating with patriotic blogs posts, ceremonial troop inspections, and, of course, virtual cosplay.
Yes — the latest trend to whip around the Chinese internet is a meme-machine released by People’s Daily, an official government paper, allowing users to create their own PLA mugshot. Simply upload your face then select your imaginary years served to see how you’d look in martial garb dating from 1927 to now.
Hard to tell how much of this is patriotism and how much is an inbuilt quirk of the bizarre, hyperspeed evolution of China’s viral visual culture. A bit of both, to be sure. One Weibo user named Tao posted a gallery of her own face in 11 different historical periods with the rousing couplet, “爱国青年韬上线，庆祝中国人民解放军建军90周年” (“Patriotic youth Tao goes online, celebrating the PLA’s 90th anniversary”… it rhymes in Chinese). Many people in my WeChat feed seem to be jumping on the bandwagon for no other reason than it’s a novel departure from the by-now tame Meitu fare of rabbit ears and gigantic eyes.
Anyway: PLA yourself right here if you’re feeling nostalgic, patriotic, or generally curious.
Surprisingly, I’m not having a stroke. The above is my rough transcription of what happens when I finish streaming, set down my phone, and try to do some writing. Or rather – to bring this into a realm everyone can identify with – a rough transcription of what every human on the planet has experienced every single time they’ve ever tried to do anything productive for nearly a decade now.
(Speaking of productive, here’s how I’m doing in terms of fans…)
Unfortunately, trying to rise through the Yingke ranks pretty much requires allowing notifications to stay on – capitalizing on the success of a new video (i.e. streaming when there’s a flood of new potential fans already on my page) means needing to know when an unusual spike in comments or messages is happening. Turning off notifications would be like if the card-counting guys in “21” didn’t actually watch the dealer, but rather just glanced at the table once every 10 minutes or so. Pile on the standard suite of texts, emails, fb messages, tweets, snapchats, etc. and my phone starts to feel less like a miracle machine of the future and more like the anchor that’s dragging me down to my watery grave.
Suddenly those crazy social media *cleanses* don’t seem so insane.
Of course, going cold turkey isn’t really an option. My incessantly buzzing phone is the thing allowing me to stay connected with my friends and family back home. Being able to read and respond to messages in real time is the only way I was able to spend last week sitting on the beach 7,000 miles away from anyone I work for. And submitting myself to the increasingly unmanageable flood of messages and comments on Yingke is why I’m being given this platform to routinely talk your digital ears off.
It’s not just that I think that fighting the good fight against notifications and social media distractions is a lost cause; rather, I’m starting to think it’s not a good fight. That’s right – I’ve had a little column on a brand new website for seven weeks, and I’m already meandering off-topic to offer unqualified life advice. Now’s your chance to pull the ripcord.
Still here? All righty then.
Sometimes it seems to me that our big smart monkey brains are mostly good for tricking ourselves. For example, 8 am Taylor knows that alcohol is poison and that his body is terrible at dealing with hangovers; yet 10:47 pm Taylor is always convinced that another shot of tequila is a great plan. He’ll drink a bunch of water, eat some food, and go for a 5 am run that will banish whatever little fuzziness he’s feeling. Everything will be fine! Similarly, 3 am Taylor always gets really into the idea that 2-hour blocks of sleep are optimal for productivity and thus it would actually be irresponsible to not watch another episode of House of Cards.
My point is, we use the twisted remains of logic to convince ourselves that we can have the good without the bad. By mentally separating benefits and side effects, we stop allowing them to exist as simultaneous results of a single action. And while with something like drinking or staying up late, the link is so obvious that only our caveman brains deny it, we seem to exist in a much more cognitive dissonance-y state when it comes to our poor beleaguered phones. At the end of the day, all those buzzing notifications exist to tell us things we want to know via services we can’t imagine living without – the distractions are part of a package deal that makes us the luckiest living things in the history of this planet.
Last week – just to be utterly and contemptibly pretentious – I was in Nepal, which has to be at least top 10 in terms of places cited as ideals of “getting away” from the irritations of modernity. It’s got Himalayas, yaks, monks, temples, cool street markets everywhere, and the kind of poverty that looks exotic rather than depressing with the proper Snapchat filter. But you know what else it’s got? Low life expectancy. Limited access to safe drinking water. High illiteracy rates. Regular headlines about kids drowning in sewage drains because the roads are so awful.
But2: it also seemed to me to have the kind of vibrant energy of a place that’s quickly joining the 21st century. There’s cell phone stores advertising 4g coverage and sim cards on every block – and advertisements for modern schools and online classes every ten feet or so. The overwhelming chaotic flood of traffic throws up a level of dust and smog near the roads that makes Beijing seem tranquil by comparison, and yet I can’t imagine the Nepalese would prefer to give up all the cars and motorcycles in exchange for peace and quiet – similarly, I doubt an increasing number of buzzing phones has convinced anyone that wifi and social media have brought a plague upon their nation just yet.
To be clear, my point isn’t “the third world exists, therefore our first-world problems are irrelevant and in fact you should feel guilty for worrying about them.” It’s not “you don’t get to complain about being distracted by social media because you’re lucky enough to have access to social media.” My point is that when we upgrade our lives, we upgrade our problems as well. People in the developed world don’t generally have to worry about clean drinking water or civil wars (knock on wood) or figuring out how their child will learn to read. Instead, most of us feel like we’re being pulled in a million directions at once by things that are somehow simultaneously of critical importance and utter irrelevance. To borrow a phrase from Zits (that’s the witty cartoon strip, not the skin problem), it’s like being nibbled to death by ducks.
All the lifestyle/productivity blogs and books and YouTube channels tell us that we would be billionaire CEOs of massively disruptive tech startups with our second book on the way if we could just stop being distracted by social media (and start every day with butter-filled coffee). And I’m not judging – I’m an unapologetic consumer of everything Tim Ferriss puts out, after all – but for the purposes of live streaming, limiting my social media consumption or not checking my phone every few minutes aren’t viable options. And I don’t think feeling guilty about what a horrible millennial I am every time I experience a notification-fueled hit of dopamine is a great way to live my life.
But, I’m not disputing the distractive powers of a constantly buzzing phone. I understand that every time I open my email or Facebook or Yingke, whatever I’m doing loses momentum as my brain switches gears. Believe me, I’d love to get this column sent in on time for once. [Editor’s note: We’d all love that, Taylor.]
So do I have a point here? If I do, it’s probably buried in the marble and requires a more thoughtful sculptor than myself to carve it out. Mostly, I just hope I’m building towards a more interesting/less hackneyed conclusion than “balance and moderation in all things is the optimal approach.” What I think I’m clawing my way towards here is that minimizing the negative side effects of notifications and social media and such should probably start with a greater level of acceptance – or at least less outright hostility. That doesn’t mean don’t try to carve some distraction-free time out of your day. By all means we should attempt to maximize our productivity and try to find focus and calm in this crazy modern world and blah blah blah. But personally, I’m finding that the *focus* that comes from ordering myself to turn off my phone and attempting to meditate my way through the next thousand words or few chapters or whatever is, at best, a forced calm.
If there’s a thesis statement here, it’s this: rather than resenting our many modern distractions, I think we should try to take them as a pleasant reminder that we have so many interesting opportunities and pursuits to be distracted from and so many entertaining diversions to be distracted by. So – to end on what is just objectively terrible advice – check that Twitter notification, take a sip of your bulletproof coffee, breath, and get back to whatever ever-so-important thing you were doing. I’m gonna go reply to a few hundred comments asking why the foreigner is on Yingke.
[Editor’s note: the fact that you’re late again with this column means readers can probably ignore everything you just said, right?]
For China, Donald Trump is one of the most dramatic and unusual US presidents in recent memory. His bold statements — sorry, Twitter posts — and capacity for courting controversy have made him popular fodder for the Chinese media. What do people in China think as they watch this American political tragicomedy unfold across the Pacific?
On our podcast today, we have invited Kiki Zhao, a former researcher for the Financial Times and New York Times Beijing bureaus. Zhao has reported on a variety of topics in China, including politics, business, foreign policy, social issues, and many others. She recently moved on from her journalism career and is headed to New Haven in August to pursue a Master’s at Yale University’s East Asian Studies.
This episode was recorded a few months ago when Zhao was still working for the New York Times. She explained to us the thinking behind her organization’s so-called “failing” coverage of Trump, and shared her personal observations on what her Chinese friends, including friends from the Chinese Christian community, thinks about the Trump phenomenon.
