Lee Hom's " Forever 1st Day " Album Diary

89/06/09~89/06/15 @Part 2

Dear Friends,

A week has gone by...it felt like an hour. I'm writing to you from my hotel room in Beijing, and I'm pretty excited because I just won the MTV's Best Male Artist of the Year award! What's more, I got to meet Alanis Morisette backstage and talk with her about her music. And yes, I gave her a signed copy of "Forever's First Day"...hope she likes it! By now, many of you have heard my new album in its entirety, I must say I've been receiving a lot of interesting and intelligent feedback from your e- mails. Thank you for taking time out of your busy lives to write me, I'm just sorry I can't write back more often.

Today's letter is a continuation of last week's effort to discuss the album, "Forever's First Day" in a little more depth than has been presented (or misrepresented) in the media. Last week I talked about it's first concept, "Time in the New Millenium". This week I want to talk about "the Development of a More Internationally Recognizable Chinese Pop Sound".

1) What does this mean?
2) Why do I think this is important?
3) How did I incorporate these concepts into the new album?

Simply put, I want people from all over the world who don't even speak Chinese to be able to listen to a song and say, "Hey, that sounds like a Chinese pop song!" Based on my own experiences and past studies in ethnomusicology, Chinese music DOES have it's own identity and soul, the trick is to take these characteristics and translate them into the pop music style. (Now I'm writing to you from my hotel in Shanghai!)

Today's media, which is the way the public perceives things, is becoming more and more unified. Huge multinational internet conglomerates like CNN or AOL etc, give us the news, tell us what are the best movies, recommend restaurants, and let us communicate globally with great ease. There is no doubt that media and technology has made the world smaller, but in a sense it also sways the public opinion in countless arenas. We learn what they think is important for us to know. At worst, this has lead to people not thinking for themselves, and simply following public opinion. Will different cultures eventually fuse into one? Maybe, I don't know.

However, I think as the world gets smaller it has never been more important for different people to maintain and be proud of our differences. It would be a shame if an American pop
artist were to travel to Asia and find that our pop music sounds the same as theirs, just with Chinese lyrics. Remember, it is our differences that entice us to travel, and keep us curiously studying other cultures. It is these differences that add spice and mystery to our lives.

There are many attempts to include a more internationally recognizable Chinese pop music sound in this new album. Some of these techniques are subtle and some ae blatant. The most obvious example is of course, "Descendants of the Dragon", a traditional Chinese song presented with an international production. The scale used in the melody is a simple five-note (B flat minor pentatonic, a scale characteristic of traditional Chinese music. Because of the simple nature of the melody I was able to change the chords quite a bit, especially in the B1 and B2 sections, "I was raised at the giant foot of the dragon...", and "Though I've never seen the beauty of the Yangtze River..."

In the song, "City of Pleasure", I also tried to incorporat many elements of Chinese music and Chinese culture, without being too obnoxiously literal. Actually, I had a lot of fun creating this song. The melody in the verses is again, strictly five-note (Eb pentatonic) and uses call and response devices to enhance the melody's simplicity. But the real fun was in making the arrangement, and it's this kind of detail which is not audible in a casual listening of the song that impells me to write about the album much in the way that classical composers write about their pieces. First off, the song begins with the sound of hitting ping-pong balls, which I recorded with Janet Jackson's drum programmer Alex Richbourg. I figured Ping-Pong, a Chinese game that has been embraced by the entire world, added a different dimension to this song, and also could serve as a great percussion snare sound! In the middle section of this song, I also sampled a section of a Sony Playstation Kung-fu fighting game because Kung-fu is also an internationally embraced aspect of Asian culture. Plus, the game just sounded great in the track. "City of Pleasure" also features instruments such as the gu zhen and er hu to give it even more of a Chinese flavor. However, the singing style and funky drum grooves played by Alex definitely make this dance track an international sounding song.

love always, Homeboy