Has anyone wondered where the Asians are? Outside of what is
\ngenerically known as “world music”, I mean. Seiko Matsuda was just
\nwishful thinking, James Iha doesn’t really count and Vanessa-Mae
\nwas statistically possible with the billions and billions of
\nviolin-playing Asians out there. Some Indian artists are getting
\nrecognition in Europe but aside from that the West has been
\nreluctant to market potential crossovers from pop breeding grounds
\nTaiwan or Japan. I live in Thailand, the nation where all Asian
\nmusic (except we Korean hermits) crosses good-naturedly. The talent
\nis here but the record labels are worried about album covers.<\/p>\n
Anggun (“ANG-goon”) released an all-English album (with
\noccasional Indonesian lyrics for world music effect) which went to
\nnumber one in France. I saw the majorly low-budget video on MTV
\nAsia (to be more accurate, MTV Southeast Asia) loved the track and
\nbought it at… -gasp-… the WESTERN section at Tower
\nRecords!!!<\/p>\n
Right away it’s apparent that Anggun has that falling of so many
\n“English-language” albums, that of asinine lyrics. Poor X-Japan,
\npoor Celine Dion, poor Anggun, but it’s distracting from the
\nattempted moods. It doesn’t help the boredom of so much New Age
\nmusic and Anggun sounds just too second-generation
\nI’m-going-back-to-my-roots-with-my-Pepsi.<\/p>\n
Except in the first track, the title song, where everything fits
\nperfectly. “Snow On The Sahara” has gorgeous vocal (restrained) and
\npercussion (ethereal) texturing creating visual, vital moods. It’s
\nalmost worth buying an entire album for but I’d sooner download the
\nmp3 (whoops… am I allowed to say that here?).<\/p>\n
The album peaks occasionally when the Indonesian influences
\nshine through, like the percussion chorus in “Over Their Walls” but
\nit’s largely overtaken by the rush to Westernize, the LYRICS,
\nsoulless emoting, karaoke production, and pathetic stabs at
\nmulti-culturalism (suddenly and without reason, singing or mumbling
\nsome lyrics in Indonesian). There’s also a terrible cover of David
\nBowie’s “Life On Mars” that I won’t go further into. In the end, it
\nturns out to be just another boring New Age album.<\/p>\n
So Anggun isn’t going to be Asia’s Alec Wek. If she wants to get
\nthat ethnic mix she’s apparently striving for, she needs to ditch
\nthose Australian producers (or wherever they’re from) and get
\nsomeone who won’t make her churn out pseudo-ethnic dirge. Paging
\nKitaro.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":24907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6044],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-36112","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-anggun","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36112"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=36112"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=36112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}