da nang – Kids
There’s an old saying: “The richest gambler is the man who has never won.” The very same can be said about young and talented men and women who engage in any kind of activity that the general public cares about.
Where do they end up? The ultratalented athlete who gets pushed into pro competitions early on will likely end up finally destitute and physically broken. They won’t want to watch another game as long as they live.
The great artists, young upstarts like da nang’s twosome once were, will receive plenty of praise at first. But they’re likely to take it to heart and use all their energy to become professionals in the dirty world of the entertainment business.
da nang’s “Kids” is about doing what you love and fighting to, later in life, find the time, energy and financial resources to do it some more. But as the talent of da nang proves, the greatest works of art, often times are created in this way. Besides, working-class artists may be the happiest people in the world and may not even know it.
Kyrell Duplexes – Convenient Dreams
There are virtually no stories about modern artists travelling to a foreign land to showcase their work and shocking the locals with just how far-out they’d gone. For the most part, this never happened, regardless of what popular movies might have you believe.
For example, the few Western rock bands who travelled to countries behind the Iron Curtain were surprised by just how quickly kids had adopted their fashion and by how many soundalikes those places already had.
And, indeed, out of all art forms, cinema and rock n’ roll seem to be the ones most quickly translated into other languages, and for other cultures. Every place now has its punk-rock, heavy metal and pop.
Globalisation might mean more than just uniformisation. It certainly helps create languages that most can speak. Kyrell Duplexes, a band led by a Canadian expat to China, makes North American-styled pop-punk about the struggles to fit into a new society.
“Convenient Dreams” is a song about finding out that the world extends to more than one continent and learning strategies to adapt and learn to enjoy foreign cultures. And do you think that this energy-filled punk-rock would shock any of the new neighbours of the Canadian musician? Think again!
