Humble is not a word you would associate with 50 Cent, but the guy did seem keen to please at his press conference last week when he charmed his way through 40 minutes of presentations and questions before telling us he loved Taiwan, in Chinese.
It was the opposite of what you might expect from a self-confessed gangster who has guns counting down loading times on his Web site and whose lyrics have got him in trouble with the politically correct and the left leaning.
"Fiddy" was unfailingly polite and put his foot in his mouth just once, when he praised Taiwanese women but then ruined the effect of generosity by dissing the guys. The Vinyl Word failed to register one cuss word, even when we were moved to ask him if it was indeed true that he used to sell crack cocaine. The answer was an almost apologetic, "Yeah, I could dance rings round you with this question and not answer it, but yes I did. I'm not proud of it, I did what I had to do at the time."
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
Later, he took to the stage at Zhongshan Soccer Stadium in front of around 20,000, teaming up with rappers Lloyd Banks and Young Buck for an hour-and-a-half of relentless rap, spitting lyrics with the intensity of an AK-47 on automatic. It was tough stuff for those more accustomed to the sweet and sticky Jay Chou (周杰倫), or MC Hotdog. Toward the end the New York hip-hop artist could sense he had lost his audience a little. "I hope you ain't running out of gas, 'coz I got a loads more hits coming."
It's interesting to compare 50 Cent's show with others The Vinyl Word has recently covered at Zhongshan Soccer
Stadium, including The Prodigy and Jolin Tsai (蔡依林).
Tsai pulled in the most punters, with well over 30,000 glo-stick waving fans. She also got asked back for an encore. 50 Cent nearly got another curtain call when he finished after 10pm; but The Prodigy's 4,000 fans were cut off around 9:30pm by a disco song. Clearly, in Taiwan, Mando-pop rules, rap comes second and dance music is still an acquired taste for most young music fans.
Drum 'n' bass -- it has to be said -- seems to appeal mostly to male foreigners. Even so, there were plenty of pretty young things dancing till 5am when LTJ Bukem and MC Conrad stepped up to the plate for Luxy's Peace Memorial Eve party on Monday. The London DJ was on top of his game and scored once again with a flawless performance.
The "Snow Job" party scheduled for the same night at new venue the Ice Bar, however, failed to happen. Promoter and DJ Marcus Aurelius said, "It's a pretty cool place but the owner got cold feet and called it off."
There's a bit of a chill this weekend on the party front. Cor is offering a "Winter Heat Bikini Party" tonight; and tomorrow Coffey, Junior and Megan will be hosting a late night (or early morning) session from 4am till 8am. Door damage is NT$300, with a drink. Cor is at B1, 331, Nanjing E Rd, Sec 3, Taipei (台北市南京東路三段331號B1). Also, Ministry of Sound is back! A low-key re-opening party tonight will cost you just NT$350 and there's a chance of winning a mobile phone. Wow.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would