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.
It's downloading now. With a description like that, how could I not?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you're kidding about not knowing what that song is, but just in case, it's Tubthumping by Chumbawamba, recently voted oneof the worst songs of the '90's by Rolling Stone readers.
I actually was not kidding about not knowing, although I had definitely heard it before. I just didn't know the title or band. Thank you for letting me know!
ReplyDeleteJust YouTubed it. I see that "Don't cry for me ... next door neighbor" is part of the original. Sort of a let-down. But then I see that Wong changed "Oh, Danny Boy" to "Oh, China Boy," and my sense that this CD is genius is renewed again, like a spider that has been horn-fucked by a super-fupa-toting Islamic gay & lesbian pride day narwhal. The Rolling Stone readers are right, though: The original totally sucks. And not in a good way.
ReplyDeleteAny chance of a re-upload? I lost my external hard drive and am dying to hear this again.
ReplyDelete