Netizens have been busy this past week, watching Jeremy Liu’s (劉子千) excruciating music video for his track Nian Ni (唸你), the title of which loosely translates as “thinking of you,” and making unflattering comments about it. The music video has amassed a huge number of hits and according to reports in the United Daily News, the album that contains the single has sold more than 470,000 copies in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, and shops around the country are being stripped of existing stock.
Liu is the son of the massively prolific songwriter and singer Liu Chia-chang (劉家昌), whose songs have helped establish the fame of divas such as Teresa Teng (鄧麗君) and Ouyang Feifei (歐陽菲菲), and crooners Fei Yu-ching (費玉清) and Bobbie Chen (陳昇). This has been a mixed blessing now that Liu Senior has turned his mind to giving his son a leg up the entertainment ladder. Nian Ni harks back to an older style of singing, and Junior’s talents, on first impression, seem rather inadequate for its demands. The Apple Daily describes him as singing “like a duck.”
Still, his performance on the music video of Nian Ni is remarkable. At first it seems merely inept, but then the very earnestness of the singing and his evident disconnect from the lyrics make it enormously humorous. Worse still, the song itself seems to have lodged in the national consciousness. On the nominally serious talk show This Is It (關鍵時刻), host Liu Pao-chieh (劉寶傑) even suggested that the singing might cause a few deaths and suggested that it should be played to dogs to see if it causes anguish in sentient beings. It must be said that a cover of the song by SpongeBob SquarePants, also posted on YouTube, is actually much better than the original.
Photo: Taipei Times
Liu’s mother, with the kind of sympathy that only a mother could command, is quoted as saying, “There are other songs on the album that show he can sing well. The way he sings Nian Ni is a deliberate choice.”
According to the Apple Daily, father and son fought bitterly over the release of the album and the younger Liu had gone off to write songs of his own to show he would not live in his father’s shadow. The rift was mended when Liu Senior threatened to cut the purse strings and Junior came back to heel.
He is now launched in the public eye in a way he probably never hoped to be, but as another Pop Stop favorite, Edison Chen (陳冠希), has discovered, notoriety is almost as good as celebrity for making it in the entertainment industry. On This Is It, one of the panelists praised Liu Senior for his “genius” in creating a song that is so jarring that it could not but lift his son into celebrity stardom.
Speaking of notoriety, entertainment industry bad boy Jackie Wu (吳宗憲) has stepped out of line in ways he may not have intended, and was earlier this week charged with fraud. The funnyman could face up to five years in prison if found guilty of shady financial deals related to his ownership of an LED company. The company is reportedly facing financial difficulties. Wu, one of the country’s most highly paid entertainers, has faced a string of business failures. In a tearful interview on Wednesday, he was quoted as saying, “I might make mistakes, but I don’t commit crimes. I may have lied to myself, but I would never lie to my fans.” Wu maintained that he was innocent, but swore that if he were found guilty, he would retire from the entertainment industry forever. We’ve heard that one before.
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