With their latest single, I can definitely say “the brilliant green” is back!

You’ll be seeing the next stop on the Britney comeback train wreck and some of the best music videos not being shown on MTV at the VMA’s tonight but you won’t see one of my favorite videos of the year produced by a friend…

Do you own a cool ironic hipster t-shirt? Well, you don’t have ones as cool as in this video.

I was going to put up the new Rip Slyme video which has to be one of the most interesting single take videos I’ve ever seen but it’s a wee bit gratuitous.

Wanted to post a music video every Monday for a while now but I keep forgetting, so I’ll try to post one when I can remember.

Here’s Yuna Ito, another singer from the US that went overseas for a music career, with a video filmed in her home state of Hawaii.

Try finding this song the next time you’re at your local Noraebang…

Haven’t seen it yet but SFIFF showed the documentary/mockumentary on the culture of popular music in the Hong Kong entertainment industry, The Heavenly Kings. The title is a play on the 4 males singers in the 80s that were dubbed the Heavenly Sky Kings because they were the hottest selling artists in Hong Kong for the longest time. So Daniel Wu came up with the idea to create a fake boy band and film the happenings as the band got going. The Hong Kong music industry is an interesting beast since everything seems packaged and glossy while it’s so difficult for indie artists to develop. It’s a subject I’ve always wanted to approach and it’s great that someone from inside the industry like Daniel Wu to make a comment on the pre-packaging of music idols without fear of reprisal.

Daniel Wu Interview

The irony of the performance or rather the non-performance of the faux boy band, Alive, at the Hong Kong Film Awards is pretty cool though it might have been lost or ignored by some of the audience.

Get more info on Daniel Wu’s new blog, courtesy of the awesome Giant Robot guys.

Daniel Wu’s blog

And the website that was the front for the whole concept has become a sort of a social network for Chinese and Chinese Americans in entertainment.  Under the artists, you’ll see some filmmakers and actors who have been part of films shown at the DC APA Film Festival in years past. Sweet!

alive not dead

I admired Nicholas Tse for doing something other than typical Canto-pop when he burst onto the music scene in Hong Kong. Don’t follow much Chinese music now but he’s apparently been through a lot of drama lately. In the following podcast, he gives an interview (in English) about his trials and tribulations. For someone who’s been scrutinized by the Hong Kong paparazzi, he’s fairly candid, but still seems to hold back a little on certain topics.

Nicholas Tse Interview

You can’t feel too bad for him since he was given an opportunity to do something he’s passionate about and make a living out of it, but he does approach the topic of the music industry that I want to expand upon. In America, the film industry is fairly bad when it comes to representation of Asian Americans but the music industry is as bad, if not worse. The prospects for Nicholas to get signed with a major label and get the company to give him the push to get airplay in America would be nearly nil. For many Asian Americans who want to pursue a career in music, they inevitably have to go overseas to try to enter a market that doesn’t have established prejudices and may give them a chance, however small.

Monie Love (had a crush on her back in the day) was fired from a Philly radio station a while back for stating that hip hop was dead. While I can’t endorse a blanket statement like that, I do agree that today’s hip hop is overly commercialized and not what it used to be. And if you look at the numbers, hip hop is falling off.

Now there’s new evidence to contribute to the argument…