Today Fiona, Ingrid, Alison, Alison's niece and I went to KTV--for a good 4 hours or so. It was fantastic! We had a nice mix of English and Chinese songs going on, accentuated by Ingrid and I popping to our feet whenever an English song came on--felt a bit like a Jack-in-the-box after a while, but in the best possible way that that sentence can exist.
In the course of the day we had plenty of wonderful revelations, as I learned the odd waves in which American music apparently crossed, or didn't cross, the ocean to Taiwan. We had a Taiwanese version of "We Will Rock You," for instance (why change Queen? WHY???), and a Taiwanese version of "Lady Marmalade" (of Moulin Rouge fame), as well as a song called "Rumour Has It" which was definitely not Adele.
And, as always, we had our share or lovely "music videos" which featured young models acting ridiculous while draped across various inanimate objects, including that old stand-by of irony, "Colors of the Wind" featuring a cookie-cutter blond chick on a big white sailboat. Kind of missed the point of the whole Pocahontas thing...and, incidentally, Ingrid and I had quite a bit of fun with the old Disney songs.
The most interesting part to me, though, was that apparently N*Sync, and even Justin Timberlake as a solo artist, completely skipped over Taiwan. I somewhat knew this from last week, when Maggie and Alison and I were talking about the Backstreet Boys (for some reason?) and I mentioned that, back in the day, I was more of an N*Sync fan. (True confessions, right here.) They had never heard of them.
Today, though, as Ingrid and I went a little crazy to "Bye Bye Bye" (because we could, that's why!), I realized that, even if they had missed N*Sync as a band, there was no way they could have missed Justin Timberlake. After all, beside his solo career, he's been in a hefty string of high-profile movies lately--The Social Network comes to mind--and I know from walking past innumerable billboards and posters (heck, I walked past one tonight!) that his two most recent, In Time and Friends with Benefits, have been widely publicized here in Taiwan. Surely mentioning his name would grant instant context to the cheesy 90s throwback songs we were belting.
Nope! Fiona and Alison were still stumped; when Ingrid whipped out her smartphone to get a picture on our side, Alison's niece recognized him and Fiona kind of remembered him from The Social Network, but that was it. Perhaps it's America-centric of me, or maybe it was just the age in which I was raised, but it is still absolutely unfathomable to me to not know Justin Timberlake's name!
In other news, some rather embarrassing footage of me singing and dancing to good ol' N*Sync, Mariah Carey and Avril Lavigne songs (amongst others) may or may not now be in existence...
But they, fortunately for everyone, are not on my camera chip. The following photos, on the other hand, ARE!
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| We were having fun, I promise :) |
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| Yeahhhh KTV! |
Anyway, thanks to my multi-hour belting, my throat is now a little worse for wear...but it was totally worth it! Yet another thing I would say only in Taiwan: karaoke is fun!
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