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Post by piggyammo on Sept 1, 2018 17:57:13 GMT -5
hey guys, I recently made a cover of Yellow by Coldplay but from the soundtrack of the movie Crazy Rich Asians! The version of the song is purely in mandarin but the video I made has both english and mandarin! please let me know what you think
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Post by mystoryisgory on Sept 15, 2018 18:38:55 GMT -5
Little late but piggyammo I really loved your cover, especially your incorporation of the Mandarin lyrics! Being Asian-American, the Katherine Ho cover of Yellow (henceforth referred to as 流星, as the translated lyrics are so different from the original it's fair to say that it's a different song entirely that only shares the melody of Yelllow) really hit me in the feels when I first saw Crazy Rich Asians. Mandarin is not my first language, nor do my parents speak it at home, nor can I speak it competently (I can read far better than I can speak), yet it felt as much like a breakthrough to hear a tune so familiar to me translated into a language so ingrained with my identity as an Asian that it resonated with me in a way that almost no music ever does. Because, contained within Katherine Ho's performance of 流星, is a reflection of me as an Asian-American, just as much as the character of Rachel Chu does. The director of CRA put it best when he said he included translations of well-known English songs into Asian languages like Mandarin and Cantonese because it encapsulated the awkward Asian-American blend of two cultures that results from growing up in the USA, with the perfect balance between familiarity (through the melody) and the foreign (through the words). Whenever I hear 流星, I feel the roots of my own identity crisis come to the fore, the societal pressure to conform, and the struggle to preserve my heritage and prevent my cultural identity from being erased within me. And yet, because Katherine Ho changed the structure of the song, making what was originally a short coda of what TheEscapist nicely calls "bittersweet ecstasy" into a cathartic climax of unfiltered euphoria (it even starts with the word "幸福"), what was originally a very bittersweet tune becomes a triumphant anthem. Because that's what it is, and what CRA is. A triumph. For us, as Asian-Americans.
I know that most on here won't fully understand what I'm saying here (most people on this forum are white), but I know you will, piggyammo. We'll see things they'll never see.
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