Anita Mui | Days of Being Wild

Listen to the "Days of Being Wild"

Get the Bodegapop exclusive Anita Mui mix here.

If you're a fan of Wong Kar-wai, you probably remember the sample song above as the music accompanying the closing credits of his film of the same name. You may not have known (a) the singer, Anita Mui, or (b) that it is a version of Xavier Cugat's "Jungle Drums," but with lyrics.

Mui's rendition wasn't the first time Cugat's song made it into Hong Kong cinema. In 1957, it made an appearance in "Our Sister Hedy" (see the video here). I'm fascinated by the international popularity of Cugat's tune, which strikes me as a case of ersatz "exotica," the likes of which the great music critic David Toop wrote about in his 1999 book Exotica: fabricated soundscapes in a real world, the single most influential bit of music writing on your friendly Bodega proprietor. (See, for instance, this talk.)

Wong Kar-wai, whatever else he does, traffics in a kind of cool, knowing exotica, which is, I would argue, why he was so popular in the United States at the turn of the century. A reasonable person might ask: Why didn't Wong Kar-wai just get Faye Wong to record the song, considering her presence in more than one of his films? Because, I would argue, Anita Mui, among Cantopop singers, was by far the most self- and media-exoticized superstar the genre ever birthed. Often referred to as "The Madonna of the East," a more appropriate reference, had she been around in the 90s and aughts, is Lady Gaga. (A Google image search may give you a quick sense of why I say that.)

I've long wanted to post a mix of Anita Mui's cooler, more dance-y exotica, but I was waiting to find a copy of her last album, the ironically titled I'm So Happy, recorded before her untimely death at age 40 from cervical cancer. Alas, I haven't yet found it and, as I'm not sure when I ever will, I've gone ahead and put together what's here now, which draws heavily from her 1999 album Larger than Life, where she does (in that instance) look more than a bit Madonna-esque.

Anita Mui got her big break in 1982, beating out over 3,000 other contestants in that year's New Talent Awards; she began recording soon after, causing almost immediate controversy with her 1985 hit "Bad Girl," a song that you probably have to understand the lyrics to appreciate (I didn't include it in this mix). When she toured mainland China she held off singing the song until her final night and then reaped the negative-publicity benefits of the shit-storm that followed.

Although I'd appreciated her acting for many years (she was especially terrific in Stanley Kwan's Rouge), I had no idea she was a singer until I found the aforementioned Larger than Life CD in a Hong Kong media store on Bowery and Canal several years ago--from that moment on, I became obsessed with her as a singer, although admittedly, I couldn't stand most of the music I was picking up. What I do like, I've included here. She is, I will say this, unique in Cantopop, not simply because of her hyperexoticized stage presence, but also for her contralto voice--husky, deep, and serious, though (I assume) fairly knowing.

I'd love to know what you think.

Fama | Poon o'da Moon

I was a bit under the weather last week, thus the lack of posting until this morning. As often happens when I take a bit of time off, I received a few comments on older posts, as returning visitors, jonesin' for new product and clearly frustrated by my temporary slothful absence, take digging into their own hands and raid the archives. One of the comments I was most happy to find this week was from regular visitor Craftypants Carol, who wrote an enthusiastic response to a post of Fama's "Wind and Water Rising". Apparently, she loved the album so much, she wrote about Fama on her own blog.

Because Carol's a regular here and because she's fallen so hard for Fama and because, unrepentant completist that I am, I happen to have everything this band has ever put out, I'm posting their now-a-decade-old, long-out-of-print super-rare first album, Poon (or Poem) o'da Moon, from 2002.

Carol and I are hardly Fama's only fans: They were named Most Popular Band in the Jade Solid Gold Best Ten Music Awards Presentation for 2008. How could you not love a Hong Kong hip-hop band who, after Barack Obama was elected 44th President of the United States, temporarily changed their name to O'Fama and released an album called Yes Change We Can, complete with packaging that included Hope posters of both members CKwan and 6Wing and a bonus booklet designed to look like a passport?

Listen to the title song

Get it all here.

Anthony Wong | badtaste ... but i smell good

Listen to the first track

Get it all here.

God, I love this CD. I bought it, for a dollar, in the bin outside the DVD/CD/VCD store at the corner of Bowery and Canal, one of the few of my favorite foreign-media haunts in NYC that is still in business. I bought it, to be totally honest, because I loved the title. I had no idea who the singer was, although he did look oddly familiar ...

It turns out the singer has long been one of my absolute favorite Hong Kong cinema actors. There is no equivalent for this sort of thing in U.S. culture. It's not like Harvey Keitel cut a CD and it happened not to suck. Or, as might be the case here, it sucked in ways previously unimaginable, and sucked so hard and so relentlessly, that it was actually, finally, totally great. (Did I mention how much I love this CD?) Because most Hong Kong actors, from the late Anita Mui to the insanely popular Andy Lau, have singing careers that are every bit as robust as their acting careers. It's just that most of them don't sound in any way, shape or form like this.

Many, possibly even all, of the songs are covers. Wong covers Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" (a super Xtreme crazy fucked up backwards alphabet poetry magnet gay & lesbian Islam double fupa rainbow high point), Nirvana's "All Apologies" and whatever the hell the song is that I don't know the name of in the sample song above. (Someone please let me know. I've been dying to know ... for years, now.) But these are not mere covers. These are Xtreme emu-on-sheep action covers. "Don't cry for me ... next door neighbor," the chorus exhorts in the sample song above. Where the hell did that come from? Where did any of this come from?

I love, love, love, love, love, love, love every moment of this monument to bad taste and good smell. If you get even 7% of the thrill I do listening to it, I'll have done a swell thing posting it here.

I LOVE YOU BOYZ | I WANNA BUY I LOVE YOU BOYZ

Five songs from this CD

Download ten songs from the CD in a single zip file here.

Is that not one of the greatest CD covers of all time? I really don't know how to classify I Love You Boyz. Parody? Hip-hop? Canto pop? They're all of this and more. I superamount hearts with colorful glitter love them, though their CDs are wildly uneven. But some of this stuff sounds like nothing else, unless you listen to a lot of WFMU, maybe. But it's more awesomely, if not stridently, pop. Or, they need a word all their own: Pawp.

Found in Brooklyn's Chinatown at my favorite local CD/video store near the corner of 8th Ave and 53rd Street (which has now become more of a bookstore than a CD/video place, alas). Four bucks. Four bucks!

I remember the day I got this (and a number of other CDs), afterward going up 8th Ave a bit to a Szechuan restaurant, and getting into this whole, complicated discussion with the waitress, who turned out to be the owner/cook's wife. She saw the bag my CDs were in and wanted to see what I'd gotten. So I spilled them all out on the table, she saw this CD, and blurted out: "Oh! Where did you get this?"

"Just down the street. You know that video store at the corner of 53rd?"

"They have it already?"

This led into a whole discussion about Cantopop and Hong Kong and how much she missed being there. At which point she sort of bit her lower lip and explained that she and her husband were, yeah, not actually from Szechuan, but Hong Kong, and had moved to the states--how many years ago, did she say? It must have been a while, because the CD is from 2004. So, if she thought it was amazing that the store had this CD already in 2009--well, you get the picture.

As she talked, I thought about the Robert Sietsma rave review clipping in the window of the place (had he used the word "authentic," and had it been, like several times?), and made a "twist-mouth" face.

Did they have dan-dan noodles? I asked.

She looked at me sheepishly, shook her head and sort of half-shrugged. "We're from Hong Kong," she smiled.


Absurd ILYB comedy routine


Somewhat less absurd ILYB music video