袁詠琳: The Southern Idol

[Justin]

Hello everyone, just a quick update before I address the title: I have returned from my 20-day long writing hiatus, the duration of which I was busy having my ass handed to me by a Computer Science class.  As it turns out, computers are much much smarter than I am; this class is the first of my life's regrets.  The second of my life's regrets would be taking this class for a grade.  Buuuuuut it could be said that in failing a computer class I am challenging stereotypes, so plus one for progressivism.

"Yay, progressive[ism]~"

Lame jokes/psychological defense mechanisms aside, let's move on to the main topic.  I wanted to focus on 力宏哥 and his musical style for this post, but recently while listening to music, a song came up by a singer I remember discovering a few years back, and I believe she deserves an honorable mention: meet Cindy Yen.

Cindy was born 吳欣雲 to Taiwanese American parents on November 14, 1986, in the quaint town of Houston-goddamned, Texas.  She was brought up solely by her mother since her parents' divorce when she was 12 years old.  During that difficult time, the piano became her "best friend" and she is quoted to have said in an interview, "without piano, there is no me. Piano is my other half, what makes me complete. Everything I bury inside my heart I let out when I play."  Her mother was not originally supportive of her career aspirations, instead encouraging her to focus on higher education; which she promptly completed, graduating from the University of Texas - Austin in 2008.  Yen has an affinity for audiences, winning the titles of Miss Chinatown Houston, and later Miss Chinatown USA.  She was not, however, able to wow the judges of American Idol, who rejected her on two different occasions.  In 2008, she moved to Taiwan in hopes of finding a new audience for her music, but was turned down by many companies who insisted that her R&B heavy style was incompatible with the Chinese language and audiences.  However, her lucky break finally came 2009 from JVR Music, the record label of none other than Taiwanese superstar, Jay Chou.  Eight months after signing with the company, Cindy Yen composed and produced her debut single "畫沙" ("Sand Painting"), which was a duet featuring herself and Chou, and became an instant success.  The song is also the first song sung by Chou that was not written by himself, demonstrating monumental confidence from the singer in Yen's style.

As an R&B fan myself, discovering Cindy Yen back in high school brought a refreshing touch to my music playlist.  In relation to our class topic, Asian Americans in the media, Yen's story really cries out as a testament to Asian America's difficulty in finding notoriety within a style traditionally dominated by African American singers, such as Whitney Houston and Usher: a difficulty reflected in almost every other incarnation of popular American media.  Her rejection from Idol does not necessarily imply that she was given an unfair chance, that the judges of the show did not deem her desirable is simply bad luck.  However, she was equally harshly judged by Taiwanese industry executives, this time with an emphasis on her disharmonious "Western" style.  The outstanding difference between these situations, though, is a prominent company taking a risk signing on "overwhelmingly foreign" talent, which in this case worked out quite well for both parties.

American record labels can take an important lesson from JVR, that "new" or "different" does not directly relate to lost profit.  I know for a fact that there are thousands of potential hit singers, of all backgrounds, waiting to be given their lucky breaks hiding in the American population: evidenced by our AA55 karaoke day..  DAMN, Y'ALL CAN SING.  Make sure to reel them in before they go and make some other company a fortune abroad.