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Feb. 2003
A lot of people have asked me why I listen to the music that I do, or more specifially, why do I listen to Chinese music?! To put it simply: Because it sounds good. But if you've got some time to spare, I'll tell you the story of the evolution of my musical interests, which is mostly accidental.
It's too bad that I never tried to learn to play a musical instrument or even sing, because I am a music junkie. I like to listen to music while I drift off to sleep, and I want to listen to music when I get up in the morning.
When I was a wee lad, we had a handful of radios in the house, but it rarely occurred to me to listen to the radio -- probably because I had plenty of alternative music sources: The family phonograph (or a vinyl record player, for those of you who were born just yesterday) and my big brother's massive tape cassette collection. To this day, I still don't listen to the radio. In fact, I hate listening to the radio. They rarely play music that I like, the broadcasts seem to be the same everyday, even when they're playing the newest songs, and, worst of all, they play the same annoying adverts over and over and over! I swear, radio is less music and more blah blah blah. There was a brief period of time when I enjoyed listening to the morning shows on the way to school, but now I drive a car equipped with a tape player.
Anyways, back to the phonograph, my parents have a large collection of vinyl records, and I remember often listening to them with my sisters, especially the Disney ones. But the one I always liked most was “Loony Tunes” (which had nothing to do with Warner Brothers' Loony Toons) with songs like Ape Call, Witch Doctor, They're coming to to take me away, My Boomerang won't come back, and a bunch of other silly, weird songs.
I later discovered my brother's collection of Dr. Demento tapes, consisting of parodies and other “demented” songs. I loved these because they made me laugh, and “Weird Al” Yankovic instantly became my favorite musician.
Then probably when I was in the seventh grade is when my cousins got a Sega Genesis for christmas. It had already been on the market for a few years, so by this point the game developers knew well how to use the hardware and make great video game music. This is when I fell in love with video game music. Since then, the music has been to me one of the most important aspects of a video game.
Enter the age of Compact Disks. Naturally, my brother bought a CD player and joined one of those CD warehouse clubs. Or two or three. I occasionally listened to a few of his CDs, but I thought I would never get hooked because the things were exspensive (gee, I wonder why) and extremely vulnerable to scratches.
But then one christmas, my parents got me a Sony boombox. It was still a while however, before I started buying CDs. With four older siblings in the house, there was plenty to borrow and no need to go buy music.
I was in high school when a new music genre called “Alternative” emerged. I liked some of it, but I quickly started getting sick of most of it. It was also about this time that I got sick of listening to the radio. I needed an alternative to Alternative.
I had begun taking German in seventh grade, and continued all the way through high school, so a logical alternative would have been German music. But the only thing I could find was a couple of German beer festival albums. At first I didn't like them, and I never appreciated them until years later, after spending time at the German Red Cross in Aachen with old people who sang those same songs. But that's another story.
I did find something else, however. I think it was probably the '96-'97 school year. I was at Media Play with my cousin, Buduski, looking at CDs. I decided to look through the soundtrack section and I came across Best of Best - Pioneer Animation Theme Songs -- a Japanese cartoon soundtrack. It had been years since I had last seen any (Americanized) Anime, and I was vaguely aware of Sailor Moon thanks to “Sailor Moon Doom” and a beta version of “Sailor Moon Quake,” but I remembered watching Robotech when I was little, and how much I loved that show. So I bought the CD, for novelty.
When Buduski and I got back to his house, I put Best of Best into the CD player and expected to hear a bunch of weird Japanese songs, but surprisingly they were all in English. Even more surprisingly, I found that I really liked some of the songs. Buduski, too.
I soon began renting Anime from which this soundtrack came from, starting with “Tenchi~Muyo!,” and I awakened the Anime enthusiest in me. I really liked Tenchi~Muyo!, so I went and looked for the soundtrack.
After I found both of the OVA soundtracks and the Tenchi Universe soundtrack, which were mostly Japanese songs, I had officially become a J-Pop fan. I got Buduski hooked on J-Pop too, and I started buying any Anime soundtrack I could find, whether I'd seen the show or not. I even bribed Buduski into buying that bright, pink Sailor Moon CD for me. 
One Japanese song that I really liked was Glass Moon from the Video Girl Ai soundtrack (Vol. 1), sung by Mayumi Sudo. I wanted to hear more songs with her voice, so I searched the Internet, but even to this day, all I ever find about “Mayumi Sudo” is information about this album.
While I had the search engine at my fingertips, I decided “what the heck,” and looked up another singer: Noriko Sakai. Not for any special reason, but because she was at the top of the list in the CD booklet. Well, the search turned up a Noriko Sakai MP3 site. I downloaded a few songs from her album Work out Fine, and I loved them! I had accidently become a Noriko Sakai fan, and she is still my favorite Japanese singer.
Along the search for more Noriko Sakai MP3, I stumbled upon a site called “Kwan's Corner.” He had posted music by a group called Music Active Experience, or “MAX” for short, which was closer to mainstream J-Pop than music from Anime soundtracks was. I thought the cover photo just looked silly, even more so with the album title “Maximum Groove.” Despite my growing love of J-Pop, I skeptically thought this group was going to sound silly, but I thought I'd still give them a chance. So I downloaded the song “Only One,” and I was blown away.
This marked to beginning of my brief J-Pop MP3 binge (before the internet started to suck). I also found songs by Puffy (!), Black Biscuits, and Glay just to name a few others that stood out.
By this time, my ears were well tuned to the sound of the Japanese tongue. True, I didn't understand the meanings of the words, but I understood the words themselves. (That is, instead of just hearing “blah blah blah,” I could actually repeat what I heard.) I love the way Japanese rolls off the tongue.
So you could probably imagine why I was so confused when I downloaded four songs by some “Shino Lin” from a J-Pop site. At first, I didn't realized they weren't Japanese; I thought maybe the reason they sounded so not-quite Japanese was because I just wasn't listening closely enough. The songs were labeled “Annoying,” “Her Tears,” “Blind Cinderella,” and “So What?” so there wasn't any romanizaton to divulge their origin.
I also downloaded a few songs by Kira Kira Bishojo, who, linguistically, sounded just like Shino Lin. The name was Japanese, but once again, the songs didn't sound Japanese.
I eventually came to the conclusion that Shino Lin and Kira Kira Bishojo were likely Chinese, but I think it was actually only suspicion in my mind, until I started teaching myself Mandarin in 2000, but that's getting ahead of the story.
It was in late 1998 that I discovered Shino. I absolutely loved her music, especially the song labeled “Annoying.” So searched the Internet for more Shino Lin, but I couldn't find any information about her.
Then in the spring of 1999, I turned in my papers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and in July I was called to go on a mission to Germany. I left my CDs (and my computer) home and spent the next two years in Germany. That was the end of my MP3 binge.
In my first area, Solingen, there was a Thai Asia shop two doors down from McDonald's. Being a Japan-freak, I wasn't really interested in non-Japanese Asian culture, but I thought it would be interesting to hear music from other languages, too, so I bought a Thai CD. (And a year later I met a half-Thai/half-German family in Leverkusen who gave me another Thai CD.  )
One of my later areas was Köln (aka Cologne), where I spent seven months of the year 2000, from spring to fall. Köln is a huge city, with a huge Catholic cathredral right next to the train station. Tourists come from all over the world to see the cathredral, including Japan.
I thought this would be a good time to start learning Japanese, since I could try talking to the tourists, so I bought a Langenscheidts book & tape. I felt comfortable with my German at this point, and since the book was German-to-Japanese, Japanese study was likely to also increase my German.
While I was learning Japanese, I would always greet the other missionaries in Japanese, and Elder Pratt soon picked up “ohayou,” which he liked to say regardless of the time of day.
After a couple of months of learning Japanese, I was in a book store waiting for Elder Metzner, when a book called “Chinese in 24 Hours” happened to catch my eye. I laughed and thought to myself, “Yeah, right, learn Chinese.” But then it occured to me that I had met many more Chinese students than Japanese tourists. Plus, the tourists were always just passing through, while the students were there to stay, so I had a better chance of meeting someone that I could practice speaking Chinese with. So I bought the book (and later a Langenscheidts book & tape for Chinese).
I quickly found that Chinese isn't as hard as I'd imagined it to be. In some ways, I think it's easier than Japanese. But I think what I really liked about Chinese, after learning a complicated language like German, was the simplicity of the language. There's basically just one word for “I / me,” and the verb is always the same, regardless of plurality, perspective, or level of respect. (It was hard to learn the many ways to say “the” in German!)
I must have spent at least four months learning Chinese. Everybody thought I was crazy. But I kept it up . . . until my mission president told me to knock it off and just worry about speaking German. 
Anyways, every time I got transferred to a new area, I kept an eye out for Asia shops, hoping to find one that sold J-Pop CDs. I never found another one that sold music until my last area, Aachen. There I bought a Vietnamese CD, Loan Châu - Nu Hôn Thiêt Tha, and a couple of Chinese CDs, Leon Lai - Perhaps... and a Teresa Teng compilation album.
Now, there happen to be a lot of Turkish people in Germany. Given the current reproductive rates of the Germans, with two children constituting a very large family, I think the Turkish are going to inherit Germany. Anyways, large Turkish population equals cars driving by with loud Turkish music. My colleague, Elder Moxley, and I were both approaching the end of our missions, and we were determined to buy some of that Turkish music (for novelty) before returning to the States.
We went about, one Wedensday, looking for a Turkish music shop, but we found a Persian shop instead. I bought Noosh Afarin - Haft Darya and Silhoutte - Beauty and the Beat. A week later, we finally found a Turkish shop and I bought a cool album by Yurtseven Kardesler.
Well, I got a good taste of Middle-Eastern music (albeit by performers from California and Germany), but obviously it didn't stick as well as East Asian music. And I bought German music too, of course. My Swiss colleague, Koch, had recommended die Ärzte to me after I told him about Weird Al.
When I returned home to the United States in July 2001, the first thing I did when I walked into my bedroom was to put on my Ranma ½ Theme Song Collection and listen to Little * Date and Platonic Tsuranuite.
Over the two years in Germany, I had sent all the CDs home to the States without ever listening to them. (I didn't have a CD player anyways.) But after I got home and listened them, I found that I especially liked the Chinese music. That, combined with my reunion with Shino's music and my new interest in the Chinese language, renewed my burning quest to find more of Shino's music. But the first couple of times that I searched the Internet in 2001 still yielded nothing. (This is when I decided that the Internet officially sucked. I'll have to write a page about the many reasons why.)
In December of 2001, my brother-in-law introduced me to Google's image search engine. I decided one day to do an image search for MAX. One of the results was a CD product page at YesAsia.com, a Californa-based company that sells Asian entertainment!
For some reason, I couldn't find anything “Shino” at YesAsia until March 2002. But finally, there it was: Shino's first album! Just in time too; I think I got the last one! And now, less than a year later, I have all five of her albums.
I had already started ordering Chinese music through YesAsia in January, and have continued to on an almost monthly basis. At first, I just picked some CDs (and movies, too) from the front page. I liked what I heard, so I'd buy more albums by that particular singer, or I'd try albums from actors whose movies I'd seen. (It seems that nearly every Chinese singer wants to be an actor, and nearly every Chinese actor wants to be a singer.) I also browsed the special sales, which is how I decided to give Korean music a try and ended up a die-hard JuJu Club fan after listening to the album Fun Fun.
It's funny that the rip-off music industry feels that MP3 has only hurt them. If it hadn't been for that one MP3 of Shino Lin's  (Annoyed) altering the course of my musical interests, I wouldn't have spent hundreds of dollars on music CDs over the last year. (Maybe I would have bought a new computer instead!) I now have a few Korean albums, a handful of (non-U.S.) Japanese albums, and a hell of a lot of Chinese albums!
I think the underlying interest I have in East Asian culture must be the weirdness of it. Reaching back to my musical roots, I say once again that “Weird Al” Yankovic, the king of parody, is one of my favorite music artists. Because of Weird Al, I always liked being the weird kid while growing up. I liked weird stuff. And what can be weirder and stranger to Western culture than Eastern culture?
The funny thing though, once you get know something strange and unfamiliar, it really isn't at all strange anymore. Eastern culture doesn't seem strange to me anymore, except for those occasions when I take a step back and realize that I'm a white guy of European descent, driving down a road in the middle of Utah while trying to sing along with Jackie Chan. I am so weird.
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Songs and albums are the property of their respective artists and distributors |
Robotech ©1985-2003 Harmony Gold USA, Inc. |
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This page ©2003-2004 Wally Waffles
2004 年 7 月 17 日
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