Fellow filmheads will no doubt be familiar with these legendary words from Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” The question is, does the same hold true for music?
There’s such an amorphous quality about music that film inevitably doesn’t have. Music, for one, can’t really be subtitled (though that Spotify feature does come pretty close). People also listen to music for a number of different reasons; for some people, understanding the lyrics of a song they’re listening to is integral to their musical experience.
But I’d argue that music, for so long and for so many, has been so valuable because of its intangible quality. And we as humans are hardwired to value it.
A Harvard Medicine article highlights just how deep that hardwiring goes: apparently, music “lights up nearly all of the brain—including the hippocampus and amygdala, which activate emotional responses to music through memory; the limbic system, which governs pleasure, motivation, and reward; and the body’s motor system.” This is why babies clap along to Baby Mozart (fundamental, in my opinion) or why your uncle won’t stop breaking out into dance whenever Pharell’s “Happy” plays, despite him clearly possessing no dancing abilities.
As one researcher tells Harvard Medical, it’s this wiring of the brain to enjoy music that means it “ends up being encoded as a rich experience.”
“We seem to be very much tuned for music,” says another researcher, who is especially passionate about the power of music to heal. “It resonates with us in some important way.”
Whether you’ve listened to one or a hundred songs that aren’t in English, I’d like to challenge you with this series: open your mind (and ears) to the even wider range of gorgeous songwriting that comes from all around the world. Maybe you’ll find something that resonates with you. And hopefully, as the kids say, I’ll put you on.
Deep Dives into International Music: A Series
1/?: Deserts Chang – Games We Play
(I would like to preface this review by saying that I do not know any Mandarin. How, then, will I speak on the critically acclaimed lyricism of Deserts? By scrapping together translations from long-dead blogs and Tumblr archives and, as an absolute last resort and reluctant crutch…Google Translate.)
Taiwanese songwriter and singer Deserts Chang is as elusive an artist as she is beloved. She’s slipped in and out of the public eye as of late; both her old blog and website are gone and can only be accessed through the dusty pages of the Wayback Machine. She’s changed her stage name often enough that I struggled to choose which one I should refer to her as in this review, but I’ve settled on just Deserts, which is probably her most iconic name and the one I feel the most nostalgic towards.
Deserts was already riding on a wave of popularity by the time she released Games We Play (瘋狂的陽光) in 2012. Her 2006 debut album, My Life Will…, was such a hit that her song, “Baobei”, continues to be a classic in the indie Asian music sphere, and it’s worth noting that “Baobei” was written when she was only thirteen.
But her lyricism has clearly only grown from there. Games We Play is, in my opinion, her most sonically and lyrically cohesive album.
When I first started listening to Deserts, there was a song I latched on immediately to despite not understanding any of its lyrics, probably because it’s one of her characteristically visceral, emotional songs—coincidentally, it happens to be in this album.
In Mandarin, the song is called “兩者”; the English title is “Significant Others,” but “兩者” literally means both, or two, things. And in many ways, this song is made up of twos: it’s Deserts’ characteristic blend of soft folk and alternative rock; the chorus is made up of two harmonizing melody lines; and the song itself can be divided into two halves, the gentle buildup and the resulting coming undone. This is reflected in its music video, which Deserts wrote and directed herself in honor of her two closest friends, who star in it as symbolic twin selves. There’s just a sense of catharsis when you reach the last chorus of the song after the smaller peaks of buildup and release, accompanied by cymbals that almost feel like the crash of a peaking wave.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any human-made translation of these lyrics anywhere, so I’ve had to rely on the incredibly insufficient machine translation, but Deserts’ poetry-like style still seeps through even then: “The awake lover before sinking grieves in a century of love,” she sings, “the sleeping lover, after a kiss, enjoys the loneliness that falls like a dream.” Again, the concept of twos.
Thankfully there are a couple different human translations out there of “玫瑰色的你,” or “Rose-Colored Glasses.” One such translation by user In My Melody found that Deserts, as she often does, references a poem she likes: “wǎng liǔ àn huā míng shān qióng shuǐ jìn qū,” which the user translates as “towards an end that’s either bright or dead” but comes originally from a poem called “Touring Shanxi Village” by Lu You. The full line from the poem goes: “Over numerous mountains and streams, I had my doubts that I could find the road. / Then out of the shade of the willows, came bright flowers and another village.” The user explains that “shān qióng shuǐ jìn” literally means “the end of hills and rivers.” It’s this kind of poetic depth that carries this song along. Perhaps my favorite verse from this song is “How much tenderness do you have to possess to never let on your sadness?”
“Rose-Colored Glasses” is arguably the most influential song on the album, considering that it was permanently banned in mainland China due to Deserts dedicating it to social activists. The hints of advocacy are there if you look for them: “You’re not holding a magic flute; all you have is a rugged flag / You’re waving it like a crown; you play games and, unafraid of getting dirty… / You look exhausted but you have yet to stop…”
This social advocacy is a theme that underlines many songs of Deserts’, who has always been unapologetically proud of her Taiwanese national identity in the face of backlash, but it’s perhaps most evident in “Rose-Colored Glasses” because it’s part of an album that touches on her experiences over the span of three years, between the release of her last album (2009) and Games We Play (2012).
Deserts touches on this length of time as well as her warring thoughts on aging and destiny in “如何” (“Through Our Lives”): “The flow of time, as soft as silk, can even burn oneself / Youth has been left far behind, the moveable river / How to forgive the process that causes the loss of time…” It’s far more acoustic than some of her other songs, relying on a very contemplative string of piano chords and a few guitar strums here and there, which help to bring her lyrics into clearer focus. Even her voice is a little more mellow here, like she’s really reflecting on those three years and more.
These three songs stand out the most to me in terms of lyricism and sound, but because the album is so cohesive it’s easy to play all of it on shuffle and fall into the profound, reflective state that Deserts usually leaves me with. It’s the album that made me fall in love with Deserts and has never failed to evoke emotion in me no matter how many times I listen to it, so maybe the saying that music transcends language really is true.
(As a send-off, below I’ve listed the songs on Games We Play in order. On Spotify the English titles aren’t available, so I usually refer to this list when looking for a specific song to play.)
- 玫瑰色的你: Rose Colored Glasses
- 疯狂的阳光: Lunatic’s Sunbath
- 蓝天白云: Sky Inside the Eyewall
- 兩者: Significant Others
- 如何: Through Our Lives
- 危险的，是: Threat
- triste
- 我想你要走了: You Were Here with Me
- 艳火: Yan Huo
- 日子: Fleeting Days
If you’re interested in lovely acoustic/indie songwriting from around the world, feel free to check out my playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4gICGwngwJUvBXL8KUGh8Z?si=3839b8db55f54474
