July 14th, 2008 can’t get no respect
abc can stand for a number of things, one or two of which are racially incorrect for australians, but in the us it means american born chinese.
and here’s one of them in the pool of 3.6 million, miami born and raised jin.
winning seven weeks straight on the tv program freestyle friday, he was signed to the ruff ryders label, who released his first album with his biggest hit so far, learn chinese (”yeah i’m chinese, and what?“). fast forward four years, to five albums released independently, including the cantonese language abc.
jin is in hong kong right now, preparing and publicising the re-release of abc under universal records hk. they are spending enough money promoting him… on one hand he’s selling himself as the real american deal, none of those lameass guys putting on an american accent to rap on some jade girl’s pop song. but he does want to be a “hong kong superstar“, so how does jin make the fickle public think he’s worth noticing, and not just some other jook sing guy?
because they don’t necessarily think highly of you, just because you came from overseas. rightly so, but also unfairly too… my favourite activity is reading youtube comments for the basest sentiments:
香港人鍾意農夫係因為佢地唱出香港人既野. o個位阿Jin可能rap 得好過農夫, 但係我唔係ABC, 我聽完冇同感囉! … 你睇TVB大就係香港人?!
hong kong people like fama because they rap about hong kong people. that guy jin maybe can rap better than fama, but i’m not an ABC, and after i’ve listened to his song i don’t have the same feeling! …you think that you watched TVB (hong kong tv station) growing up makes you a hong kong person?
so compare the homegrown product, 農夫 loong fu (meaning “farmer”, hence the weird homonym ‘fama’) up first before skipping past the ladies trying rhymes on, to jin, excited like a little kid to be on the show he probably watched at home in the states…
same but different, i like fama for their silliness and witty wordplay, as much as i like jin for his hardheadedness and “spit in the wound while it still hurts” social commentary.
some of us still don’t understand the “other” (asia born vs western born) and that’s only within the ethnic chinese circle around the world! if you want people to get you, you speak their language, and that’s cantonese. because some idiots still think this way:
rap乜鬼呀？用全中文呀！扮鬼佬！
what are you rapping about? rap in chinese! trying to be a white guy!
ohhhh, it’s going to take me a long time to decipher some of these comments.
that’s exactly what the song abc is about. good luck to jin on his august 1st album release date…
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