王若琳 ~~ JOANNA WANG ~~ 琳若王

Taiwanese former child star, part-raised in the USA, she is beloved in her home country for her soulful renditions of classic romantic ballads and songs from the musicals!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI38zamK-Zs

Do you feel the romance? The musical excellence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s_tvnl3teU

So romantic, and soulful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEyESh3pblo

Now, while I have obviously started this thread because of her main career, it is also useful to note that she has used her lucrative and seemingly limitless Sony Music contract to release a small amount of her 'own' material. While I wouldn't really recommend listening to any of this stuff (it isn't romantic or soulful enough), I'm posting it here out of generosity's sake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaEZXexiR9M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CETH-MK7Fqs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew99FiYS9Q0

...culminating in this admittedly rather stylish video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSw2lU1fL7c

Let's hope that, having gotten these silly ideas out of her system, she returns to the music we all know and love the very best. There is no substitute for soulful romance, after all.

I suspect irony in these declarations! However, I will say that this cover from Midnight Cinema is sung with incomparable sweetness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bldwq8IIqE

Well, yes. Her father, a hot-shot Taiwanese producer, harnessed her talent with great care so as to extract maximum sweetness from her voice. He was not to know that she'd rebel against his kindly fatherly harnessing! He was not to know she'd recruit a band of misfits called The Weird Uncles and make music nobody wants to hear. It must have quite gone against his wishes when after twice defying him already she put out the childish electronic pop album Bob Music last year, concerned as it was with finding wonder in something as mundane about everyday life. He must be apoplectic now that The Weird Uncles have just put out House of Bullies, a full-blown spook-rock record. Her influences - Queen, Devo, Cardiacs, videogame soundtracks, Lemon Demon etc - must be of great mortification to the man. What has he raised? This is not the daughter he intended, or that anybody wanted to hear. So you are right to post that video. Let's imagine that she performs such perfect art forever, without the sad distractions that have hurt her poor father so.

It's getting sillier and sillier. Stop it, Joanna.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQl3TZUmzYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrIvO5NsV0U

I've had this on loop for nearly half an hour

lol @ it literally having 10,000x less views than "Let's Start From Here"

Oh no no! Someone has yielded to illegitimate urges! Let's hope he doesn't go on and listen to her later, even more apostatic works!

For some reason when Joanna Wang was first brought up in the Cardiacsy thread, I thought the songs in isolation were kind of irritating but I ended up rather liking this new one.

Your desertion of the cause has been noted, and your details recorded in case of future infractions

(breaking kayfabe here, frogbs you will FLIP when you hear this)

alright I'm gonna get it

new album out 8/8

Aaaaah

Where did you find this exciting news?

facebook

https://www.facebook.com/chickenjoanna/posts/1971533839575530

pretty amusing cover art

btw I totally blanked and forgot that 8/8 was TOMORROW, wonder if it'll be available in the States then

Haha excellent - looks promisingly chaotic!

00:02 and it's on UK Spotify now so hopefully you'll get it too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjXnnEY8mhk

extremely charming that her youtube is filled with stuff like this

will have to check out the new one

Never responded to this after listening because I had been in a stormy mood that day and it irritated me no end. I told imago it was a 2.5 rym rating for me. I’ve just listened to it again and I can’t even recognise my former opinion - it’s great!

I guess I was just thrown by its being more low-key than the previous album, and without a full band. But actually there are all sorts of amazing little touches. There’s some Weezer and Zombies influences in with Cardiacs this time and it’s probably the most well-rounded of her recent albums.

addendum from the other side of the bed: this fucking ruuuuuuules

New 16 minute video for a 3 minute song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoC7fXzt8nM

lol omg, hopefully the same director who did the great videos off the last album

it was, and it was great. the actual use of the song was brilliant

her newer stuff is hell to get a grip on. i know she hates her old stuff and we’re all supposed to turn against it, but ‘lost in paradise/有你的快樂’ and ‘as love begins to mend/因為你愛我’ and ‘lost taipei’ are just bloody delightful. even now you hear them all the time in shops and cafes, partly because taiwan (taipei especially) has an ongoing modern soft jazz fetish.

incidentally (and not entirely on-topic), taiwanese artists’ first albums in this broadish happy-jazz-club genre seem to be better than everything succeeding them, probably (i’m guessing) because the artists get snapped up by labels which want quick sales and a foot in the mainland chinese market. yen-j (嚴爵) and cosmos people (宇宙人) did some incredible work on their first albums (‘thanks your greatness/謝謝你的美好‘ and ‘self-titled/宇宙人同名專輯’ respectively); their newer stuff is fine but the more recent albums have 3–4 obvious singles and a load of filler (‘right now/右腦‘ is a case in point — the opening tracks ‘現在就讓我走’ and ‘你以為’ are magic but nothing like their early jamiroquai-alike stuff, and the rest of the album is pointless).

so where i’m going with this is: i think the best way to find the best taiwanese music is to scour the charts, find the very few decent songs that aren’t shitty fucking ballads, and go all the way back to the earliest stuff in their published catalogues, even if the artist doesn’t like that stuff any more.

But she never liked it, did she? I like the princess-escapes-the-castle narrative, myself.

yeah i admire your dedication to documenting taiwanese pop AA and perhaps one day i'll even give JW's early stuff a proper listen - but this narrative almost never happens, and when it does it never happens this well. you want a grip on the new stuff? it's queen, devo, tmbg, oingo boingo, cardiacs, j-pop, 90s alt-rock and neil cicierega in a glorious technicolour blender. it has a consistent(ly awesome) melodic sensibility and attitude. it's still getting put out by SONY MUSIC for god's sake - what a heist! that's what makes her unique and great imo

that said i would like to check out some of the other artists you've named, so i like that you've written that post and i do not mean to dissuade you

yeah sorry, i wasn't saying her new stuff is crap, just that good-first-album really does seem to be a thing in that place & genre

"her newer stuff is hell for me to get a grip on" would have been better phrasing tbh

says someone named after a song with about 6 billion chord changes ;)

i know right, it’s like i’m crap at understanding music

new video is absolutely infuriating. well done.

ok I laughed out loud when the song actually kicked in. idk if that video is stupid or brilliant but that was pretty funny.

this new album is pretty nice. it doesn't really fit in with her famous stuff or her weird stuff. after seeing the intentionally droll video it begins to make more sense. some of the tunes are really good but for a 19-track album there aren't a lot of them...this thing is barely a half hour

this new album is good! it sort of plays out like a jonathan coulton ep.

yeah it really does square the two sides of the Wang coin, if that makes sense

it's sort of astonishing how good the produced songs are on this.

btw i found this announcement and completely fell for it until i saw the name.

Wang Ruolin has won a prize, apparently for a musician who "insists on the direction of creation and breaks the mainstream, creating new possibilities for female music creation" (or so Google Translate has it). The prizewinning situation sounds very Joanna Wang, too:

The Golden Melody 30 Jury Prize was awarded to the singer Wang Ruolin. This year, the practice of publishing the shortlist in the shortlist was changed. For the first time, the jury chairman Chen Shanni announced the winner at the ceremony. Wang Ruolin said that it is an honor to be able to win prizes when eating in the background and being confused.

oh wow

for the record i’ve listened to ‘modern tragedy’ more than any other album in the past 12 months, it is staggeringly appealing