Listen to the theme song of the 1997 blockbuster Titanic (now back on a screen near you, but without Kate Winslet's 3D boobs) played on the guzheng. more ›

Korean folk song Arirang as performed by North Korea's National Symphony Orchestra. more ›

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A group of young accordion players from Pyongyang's Kum Song School perform Take On Me by A-ha as part of a multi-genre project that opens next week at Barents Spektakel, an arts festival in Norway. Seriously, now. What would the Dear Leader think as he looks down on this from wherever he is now in socialist paradise? more ›

English translation with thanks to China Digital Times. Click the "CC" button if you do not see the captions. more ›

Yesterday, we saw a full-page advertisement in Apple Daily Hong Kong that has raised tensions between Hong Kongers and mainlanders to a fever pitch. The truth is, "anti-locust" sentiment had been simmering below the surface for a long while in the city, way before the recent Dolce & Gabbanna protests and the Kong Qingdong hoopla. The swarming, migratory insect has been used as a label for the people from the mainland that have come to crowd the streets of Hong Kong and are perceived to deplete the scarce resources of the city, leaving poorer locals to fall through the cracks. Last year, the above song "Locust World" went viral in Hong Kong as its lyrics struck a chord with what locals felt they've had to put up with in the onslaught of a "mainland invasion". It's now available with English subtitles thanks to Youtuber iloathelilyallen. more ›

Taiwan's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party has released a new music video urging voters to show up at the polls to vote for Taiwan's future.Lyrics after the jump... more ›

NMA's latest music video, "No girls born in China anymore", a country-style ode to the one-child policy. more ›

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Beijing-based singer-songwriter Chuanzi (川子), aka Jiang Yachuan (姜亚川) has come up with what is probably the first song to be written in response to the Wenzhou train collision. The protagonist is a young red song-singing journalism student who dreams of working with CCTV, but later perishes in a train crash without a trace. more ›

Not sure how we missed this, but Feichang Fresh, supposedly China's hottest laowai boyband, has this catchy little love song for Beijing that went pretty big after airing on CCTV in May. The boyband was formed by a group of foreign students at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. Check out the English translation of the song here. Also check out another of their songs here.
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Taiwanese musician Shara Lin (林逸欣) has burned up the internets lately with this Youtube video that gained 1.5 million views in just four days: more ›

The song Over the Crowd is by SIG, from newly-launched Shanghai-grown indie label PAUSE: MUSIC. Read our interview with PAUSE: MUSIC here. more ›

Shanghaiist would like to wish all our readers a happy new year and a fabulous 2011! Enjoy this amazing song 《忐忑》"Perturbed" performed by up-and-coming Guizhou singer Gong Linna (龚琳娜) at Hunan TV's 2011 countdown show. The song was composed by renowned German ethnomusicologist Robert Zollitsch, who also happens to be her husband. Zollitsch is widely respected as an expert in Chinese classical music and is better known here as 老锣 (Lao Luo, or "Old Gong").
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Theme song of the Singapore pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, featuring Singaporean pop-stars A-do (阿杜), Tanya Chua (蔡健雅), Stephanie Sun (孫燕姿) and JJ Lin (林俊傑)
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After seeing this video and reading the story behind it on ChinaHush, we have to admit we don't understand China's censorship methods at all. This video was originally a music video from popular Taiwanese pop stars S.H.E. called "Zhong Guo Hua," or Chinese Language: instead of praising the merits of China's history and rise like the original, this version lays waste to all of the advances of modernity in very direct and scathing fashion. The mind blowing part is that the government not only sanctioned the song with the new lyrics, it used the song for questions on the gaokao earlier this month, prompting confusion and anger from students as well as netizens. In any case, the video has since been taken off the major internet portals, so this one requires a VPN to watch. more ›

One of the cutest things we've found in our search for funny National Day things is this homemade music video. Set to the tune of Jackie Chan's "Country (国家)," it features a class of (it seems) 60 year olds and their families singing along, posing around Chinese flags and generally being absolutely psyched about their patriotism. more ›

Last week, one of our favourite local bands Pinkberry began filming a music video for 'Pinkberry Song' and asked us along to take part. It'll be a month or so before we can see the finished result, but it was an impressively professional start - we can't wait to see how it turns out. more ›

Frenchman in Shanghai 《上海的法国人》, a cover of Sting's 1987 hit Englishman in New York, by Roubichou Gauthier. more ›

This is probably as random as it can get, a music video featuring Empire of the Sun (not to be confused with Shanghai-entwined novel of the same name), a new electro pop duo, made up of Luke Steele from The Sleepy Jackson and Nick Littlemore of Pnau, from down under. more ›

These days it seems Vice magazine is trying its hand at almost everything. Besides the iconic music magazine and record label they do some interesting web documentaries at VBS. Like every other news organization in the world they decided in the spirit of the Olympics to do a month of pieces on Beijing and China. Since their main focus is music they did a bunch of interesting little stories on bands like PK-14, Subs, Demerit, Mi San Dao and more. Check them out here. This morning we were having trouble loading vidoes on the VBS webpage, try youtube if you have the same problem. more ›

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Time Magazine recently published a list (click here) of, what they consider, to be the top 5 Asian bands to watch in Asia for 2008. Representing China is PK-14, a band that Time is describing as postfolk. Shanghaiist isn't exactly sure what the hell postfolk is, or if it is an accurate description of the music...but we don't really care, no matter how you describe PK-14's music..it still rocks. The band is currently in Sweden recording their new album which is scheduled for release on Bing Ma Si later this spring. more ›

By Michael Ohlsson more ›

Migrant workers—let's face it, you either love 'em or hate 'em. There's just no in between. It seems that lately, they've been getting some love from the people, what with Chongqing's official Migrant Worker Day and now with the recent announcement by none other than Premiere Wen Jiabao himself that the popular "Migrant Worker Song" (or "Ode to the Migrant Worker" as we prefer to translate it when we're feeling poetic), a song written by workers and popularized over the internet, will be performed at the annual CCTV Spring Festival show. more ›

... and spotted doing menial tasks like sweeping the roads, picking up the trash, cooking and putting up pictures of Chairman Mao. No, really, it's just the Red Laowai in his latest incarnation. Tired of singing Chinese commie propaganda songs, he became Jay Chou for a while before donning on his uniform again to become Comrade Lei Feng, the soldier in whose footsteps the youth of China have been indoctrinated to follow. In this latest... more ›

The Red Laowai (红老外) — yes, that shirtless dude in New York that's been singing communist propaganda songs such as “My China Heart"《我的中国心》, "Without the Communist Party, there is no New China"《没有共产党就没有新中国》and "Oriental Red"《东方红》and putting his videos online — has done it again. This time, he has put his shirt on, created a music video and he's singing Jay Chou and rapping. The song 止战之殇 (The Wound That Ends War) is an anti-war song in... more ›

After much hype and 2 years without a CD or performance in Shanghai, Third Party (formerly known as Muma & Third Party) celebrates the release of their debut album 'Velvet Highway' with a special show at 4Live on November 15th (Thursday). What has really got us excited about this show is that their record label, Oriental Sky, has informed Shanghaiist that props are being flown down from Beijing to recreate scenes from their music video.... more ›

At the risk of pissing off our rich and powerful film producer friends and thereby never getting invited to a press junket again, we want to begin this movie review with a simple declarative sentence, the likes of which has not and may never be seen again in film criticism: the movie Blood Brothers (天堂口) sucked ass. more ›

Late last year, actress Zhang Yu made headlines for blowing the whistle on the widespread use of the "casting couch" in the Chinese film and TV industry. The above video reminded us of that, though in this case, the two men are attempting to get the woman, named Shi Mei, to do some kind of nude scene for her music video. They try to persuade her this way and that, while Shi replies that although she wants to be famous, she doesn't believe that she has to disrobe in order to do so. She asks the men if they'd do the same, were they faced with the same choice. One of them replies, "sure, if the concept demands it." They continue to argue back and forth, and the video ends with these lines, which could be right out of movie themselves: more ›