The New Beachhutman Blog

The Boss was feeling rough the other morning. (Yes, I know you may assume I’m The Boss, but I’m not. I cannot tell you how good that is. I have enough to worry about without the Boss stuff as well. Been there, done that, taken the Prozac.)

Anyway, the Boss, out of a sense of duty and obligation had accompanied D to a concert in the Workers Stadium. Apparently the act was this guy, Eason Chan.

Eason typifies what Hong Kong has always done best. He shamelessly copies the west, and reproduces it almost as well, or maybe at times better, and in doing so probably makes more cash than the original inventors. I gather that last night he ran the full gamut, from “Hey Jude” through to “Imagine” and on to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. If you You Tube him, you’ll agree he is a good, very good, copyist.

I bet he doesn’t pay royalties to the songwriters either.BUt that's balanced out by the CDs you buy here - copyright? What copyright?

Anyway, the boss was saying that he had felt too old for that sort of thing, which I found amusing, as I would have gone in his place and I can give him a good 20 years. But I wouldn’t have enjoyed the outdoor arena any more than he and D did, apparently it was “freezing”, which has a different meaning here - last night was 20 degrees. So it’s a good thing he went, even if it did take a hot potful of red-cooked pork to cheer him up at lunch time.

The Chinese feel that music was (almost certainly) invented in China – as indeed was everything else. The inventor is held to be Ling Lun, who made bamboo pipes which imitated the sounds of birds, a sound that is would be good to hear a bit more of today.  In those bygone eras music was also seen as a conveying longevity and harmony, although musicians were oddly regarded as lower than even painters. Considering what we now hear promulgated as Chinese traditional music, that seems only fair. To the musical ear much Chinese “music” seems a pretty appalling racket. In parks at weekends and on street corners at night one can hear an amazing discordance of cymbals, drums, gongs, hollow blocks, fiddles, and wind instruments producing what might best be called “impolite sounds”. One wonders if even using Chinese characters, it would be possible to write a score for the racket.

The noises westerners mostly regard as classical Chinese music are  mainly met in hotels and museums, and are the sort of twinky-twonky plinky-plunky stuff we expect from the sound track of cable TV documentaries about rice paddies and goatherds. It is innocuous in the same way that eating the same yoghurt every meal for a month would be innocuous, that is to say harmless, but incredibly boring.

Buildings provide music in their lifts and foyers from the same charisma-free sound libraries as anywhere else in the world. Such music is more a mechanism for ensuring Chinese noise addicts are not put into withdrawal than a cultural keynote, so often the same sound track is played for a year or more, with ghastly cover versions of well-known western tunes especially popular. At one time Richard Clayderman was the most-played musician in China, and single handedly (if that is appropriate for a pianist) persuaded a million young Chinese to take on the piano, a contest that is clearly a no-score draw at present.

In bars and clubs however western or western type pop and rock music is also gaining ground, and China even has a burgeoning heavy-metal-thrash-house-hip-punk industry pumping out CDs and creating websites for the Hip Youth Of Today, Ba Ba. (Daddy). And alas, also Eason Chan.