Movies & Music & Me

I think most of you know that I don't follow pop music or Hollywood movies or whatever is popular in the mainstream pop culture. It's a matter of temperament. My taste in movie is quite particular. I refuse to watch: 1. chick flicks; 2. stupid movies like Jackass (a co-worker played the trailer in the office when I was still in my last job. That was enough to make me feel like I had wasted one precious minute of my life); 3. Hollywood movies with artistic pretensions, which translate into ridiculous plots, weak characterization and self-delusional dialogue and special effects (Think 'Black Swan' - a filmmaker friend played some parts of the movie for me, so that I'd see what he meant by 'There should be a limit to the number of hallucinations one can employ in a movie!') 4. Most mainstream films, really, bombastic with predictable plots and fake emotions...I don't know what else. The last 'Hollywood movie' I liked was The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was a fairly subtle film with solid acting and beautiful cinematography. Seeing a bad movie makes me go 'What a complete waste of time!' and I'd walk out of the cinema when a film is bad enough.

So, yes, I'm usually only into art house films, whatever that means. Independent cinema from Europe and Japan from the 60's to present. I'm partial to avant garde and surrealist cinema, esp. those flicks that were conceived as visual poetry or cinematic renditions of poetry. There're also some really nice films from the Middle East which we get to see at film festivals in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a cool enough place for getting access to world cinema. Jewish film festival. Turkish film festival. German film festival. Fake copies of 60's Italian classics. Fake copies of out-of-print Bulgarian indie film...you name it and we've got it, now and then.

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With music I have a higher 'tolerance' for random stuff because, well, I have a bigger heart for music and I can almost always gauge something for what it is. With most genres--even if it's dance pop or country music, both of which I usually do not like--I can appreciate that a certain infectious dance tune is a winner, or this certain singer writes sharp lyrics and pours his heart out into the acoustic guitar. I started listening to music at 3 or 4, since my parents were big music lovers and always had vinyls lying around the room. In those days I listened to a lot of Japanese music and, ahem, Culture Club (there was a Boy George poster on the wall--my mother was a fan). From there I grew up in 80's pop music, as I managed to stay up late to watch MTVs till midnight (Sting, The Cars which I particularly liked, Black, Michael Jackson...all pretty good stuff). By the time I was 10 I'd learned to sing Roy Orbison, Carpenters, Joan Baez, Roberta Flack, Bread...from this radio program I listened to on Saturday afternoon. My musical upbringing was purely accidental--nobody told me what to listen to. When I heard a song I liked, I remembered the name of the song or the singer, and looked it up in the library. With some recordings, it took me years to find out who the artists were, like this song by Paul Davis. 

How I turned into a rocker in my teens was history. The brief of it was that I saw a few rock bands on Star TV when I was 12 and my world was never the same again. Then I had a drummer boyfriend and I learned to play drums at the age of 15. The guy was quite the package: distant eyes, prominent cheek bones, thick lips, quick-witted and had a wicked sense of humor. We dated briefly and stayed friends for years. After that, a bit of singing and bumbling around with a red wig. Then it was alternative music, classical, soul, blues, jazz...industrial, post-rock, electronica and weed as I hit early 20's. These days I seem to listen to a lot of electronica--like I said last time, not the kiddy type blasting in some pub, it's the grown-up/sophisticated stuff. My taste leans towards the serious side. When I say jazz, I mean John Coltrane, not Pat Metheny.

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The one kind of music I can't listen to--I'm sure there're others, but they're not as popular around town--is...is...I hate to say, R&B. Not the R&B from 50's to 70's, that stuff is great, but the R&B they make nowadays. At an inconspicuous corner at a sidewalk cafe, when I'm about to eat that spoonful of sorbet and feel all bubbly...Here comes Rihanna! (it used to be Beyonce a few years ago) The high-pitched voice and the beats come thumping across the sidewalk. My eyes are almost blinded by the sunlight shinning on the little metallic table, the beats and the singer's voice half-screaming: 'I'm the only girl in the world!' Okay, this music gives you a false adrenaline rush--you can throw yourself into that colorful world where everything is hyped up and you're fine, the world is  a fantasy fan spinning and you'll get through the day just fine because it's unreal. Now please, take this noise away from me. I only listen to music that registers.

For this reason--I think--I was surprisingly gutted when I read about Amy Winehouse's death. I've never been a fan--I don't have any of her albums--though I'd admit to the vaguely guilty pleasure of looking up her MTVs several times when I felt like listening to an 'easy-listening' soulful ballad. She was a true jazz singer, and her voice had more emotion/depth than just about any of her contemporaries. When so many of those pop divas strip down to dance like they're making love to the sand on the beach or the desert, their strained voices reaching over the fences to brace young kids, who go on Youtube to write: '...is so talented!'...when the diva wearing next to nothing launches into a pantomime of grins and dance moves against digitally created backdrops, earning millions of $$$ and fame along the way...Amy Winehouse, who was a talented musician and singer, is gone? It's a sick joke, isn't it?