Harlem Yu, Let Me Love My All for Once, 1989
Harlem Yu, Let Me Love My All for Once, 1989
ranking: #48 on 1975-1993 list
He may have named himself after the New York burrough, and he may get credit for bringing western genres to mandopop, but Harlem Yu (庾澄慶) is less the Americanization of Taiwanese pop than somebody who really aimed to push it forward. Pop music from Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have always been heavily inflected by rock and jazz (as well as Chinese opera and Japanese pop), so the fact that Yu gets credit for adapting western sounds for Mandarin seems to me a work of record label publicity. (He’s also often credited as the first to rap in Mandarin.)
Rather, his early albums, such as Let Me Love My All for Once (讓我一次愛個夠), didn’t simply imagine what west+east sounds like, but brought Chinese music up to date with global pop, circa 1989. It’s an eclectic album covering the breadth of what the 80s sounded like, according to MTV. The keyboard fills and pop drama of “Song of the Wharf” (碼頭之歌) is reminiscent of early Babyface. The slow jam “No Choice” (沒有選擇) has that signature 80s saxophone break. “Memory of Loving You” (愛你的記憶) is tinged with Chinese flavor, but its fog-machine atmospherics are straight out of Paul Young. Gloria Estefan would take no issue with the faux-calypso of “Deserted Island” (無人島).
Of course, mimicking tinny synthesizers and power ballad shreds is no guarantee of musical pleasure — and much of Let Me Love My All for Once has that sort of superficial postmodern blah you get from watching VH1 specials. Nothing screams uninspired like the “whoah-ohs” and “higher!” on the wall of thunder “Gliding over the City” (飛翔城市). It’s not all kitsch though. The vocodor intro of “Music All Night” (整晚的音樂) makes way to sunglasses swing bound to rock any rhythm nation. Yu takes home each verse with hard bop swagger, before mellowing out with the slow burn bridge “oh…free flying / oh…together dancing.” Even better might be “Unable to Endure” (無法忍受), which transforms a completely out-of-place electric guitar intro into the hand-clap pop of Elvis Costello at his most jubilantly nostalgic.
It’s not all fun and games though. “Waiting for Tomorrow” (等待明天), with lyrics co-written by the great novelist and screenwriter Wu Nien-jen, is a sensitive, then soaring, ode to seizing the day. The quite-good title track follows roughly the same formula, only it’s a tribute to seizing love. These tracks lend the rest of the hodgepodge album some rare gravity — the kind of sincerity that has allowed Harlem Yu to be both a respected artist and Taiwan’s longest-running pop idol.
