Karaoke is just part of China, much like it is throughout the rest of Asia. And at some point or another, your friends, coworkers, random homosexual Chinese men (not my story), etc. will invite you to a night of eating, drinking, and oh yeah, singing! Unfortunately, I can not (as of yet) read Chinese characters, so whenever a Chinese song comes up...I quietly sit to the side and hope that I can contribute to the occasional line or two in English.
There is one song that seems to come up every time I go to a karaoke. I only write about it because of its disturbing imagery. Please take a look at it yourself and let me know if you agree with my assessment.
As you can see from the video, we open up with a young man walking towards a lone piano on a concert hall stage. We see him take out his mobile phone to dial someone and then sit down at the piano as the person on the other end begins to listen. It's at this point we fade into a flashback of the same man and a young girl. He's just a young composer struggling to make it, only to have a domineering girlfriend constantly henpecking and criticizing his work.
At one point, he's in the middle of composing his music when she butts in and corrects him! It's from here you can tell he plans to stop this madness, but has yet to create a plan. Later, while watching some silly "chick-flick", she starts sobbing uncontrollably. He suddenly realizes something about this movie is causing her to display actual human emotions, so he leans in to investigate. At this point she attacks his lips with her lips and a 10-second (or so) battle ensues until she's forced to disengage her tongue by some unseen force. Stunned, he notices her nose has started to bleed which is followed by a maniacal laughter on her part.
At this point, he's had enough and takes her to the psychologist for further examination. I'm still not sure why the psychologist would need to check her heart beat and blood pressure, but since I can't read the Chinese characters, I'm just going to have to assume that's how they work here in China. Getting confirmation from the doctor that his girlfriend is in fact human, he sets upon discovering what caused this vulnerability in her otherwise icy exterior to appear.
Apparently she escapes the psycho-ward, as next we see he's invited her to the concert hall to listen to a musical piece he's prepared for her. As he starts to play the first few notes, she collapses onto the floor. Most people would quickly run to the aid of a pretty girl like this, but this guy stares at her crumpled body for a few moments before attempting to help her back up.
It gets a little fuzzy as to what happened here, so I'm going to fill in the gaps for you. Granted, they don't show you any of this, but you can pretty much guess from the context. When she was at the hospital, he realized that the music playing in the movie they had watched earlier had a resonance frequency capable of causing her physical arm and death. As a young composer, he diligently worked to isolate this frequency and incorporated it into his latest masterpiece. Once again, none of this is show. I'm sure all the scientific mumbo-jumbo would have made for a lame music video, so can you blame them for cutting it out?
So we then jump to the hospital, where we find her laying in a bed connected to a vast array of machines. Then again, some of us think she's a little robotic anyway, so maybe this is how she refuels (I don't know!). Regardless, he realizes that his plan has failed, she's still alive. To make this murder succeed, he needs to play her the complete song. So in a somewhat clever move, he puts a mobile phone into her hand and quickly leaves the room.
From here we switch back to the opening scene with him at the piano dialing his phone. A-ha! Now we understand! As she answers his call, he starts into his dainty little dirge of death, hoping to finish what he started...her pre-meditated musically-induced murder. Sure enough, the phone is dropped and we lose her. Ironically, the part of the song that did her in was actually the refrain she "helped" him with earlier in the video. I think the symbolism there offers a lesson for all of us...
So there it ends...and yet this song gets sung every, single time I enter a karaoke. Maybe someday I'll get an explanation as to why so many Chinese men like to sing a song about murdering their girlfriend. Maybe the Western girls have it much easier than the Chinese girls. At least their boyfriends don't want to murder them.
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