Already an audiophile in high school, my best friend, Aaron and I were just embarking on our lives mission of hunting down strange and exciting music. It was a lot harder back then, being from a small town with no good record shops and mp3s being five years away, we were limited to what we could get off the radio and from other music seekers. We were pretty much addicted to the once popular Canadian Chris Sheppard's Techno compilations (Techno Trip foreva!), but we knew there was more. And Aaron struck bizarre surrealist gold when his friend from Hong Kong, Willy Wong lent him one of his HK faves. Willy Wong was in a strange situation, his mother was a broadcaster at a major Hong Kong network who decided Willy wasn't cut out for HK's cut-throat education system and sent him to Morden, Manitoba with truck-loads of cash to go it alone. He had it all, fast cars, cool clothes, the ability to break pencils with his mind and a CD that would go down in personal history as the most illusive bit of foil and plastic I could never get my hands on; that is until now.
I guess I was well into grade 10 when I first held Grasshopper's 'Make Some Noise (remix...)' album in my hands. I was immediately intrigued by the Asian design sensibility, which was one of the major reasons I went to Japan in the first place. Unfortunately, I can't show you more of the pretty boy trio featured on the inside cover but it all has to be viewed within the context of the CD it held. Grasshopper is a top-performing pop/dance trio loved by fans in Hong Kong and all over the world. Their music consist of mainly Cantonese and Mandarin pop and dance songs, performed by the group’s three male artists, Calvin Choy, Remus Choy and Edmond So.
I have from time to time tried to listen to some of their other music and to be completetly honest I don't dig it at all. What little I've heard is typical syrupy Canto-pop that conforms to formulas used by all the big HK pop names. What sets Philips Records, 'Make Some Noise' apart from their other efforts is the producer's bizarrely innovative juxtapositions of Americana infused into the crooning Chinese trio. This is 'Too Many DJs' in 1992 but with even less regard for copyright infringement. The idea of respecting intellectual property has alway been sketchy one in Hong Kong and never was it more apparent than in the making of these remix tracks. I have sent people on missions to Hong Kong three times with instructions to find this disc and they always turned up empty. I visited a huge Chinese department store in Osaka and asked a guy at a CD shop what the deal was. As far as I could tell the Chinese government has a lot of control over which CDs are to pressed and which are to disappear into the great unknown forever. Seems this disc didn't make the cut. I can say with 100% certainty that not a single sample used on this disc was cleared with anyone and this shit only gets better with age.Here are just a few of the offending samples I recognize, and believe me it's not nearly half of them. This reads like a time capsule of the early 90's.
Street Fighter II Turbo - every sample on the game, it might seems a bit tired now, but it was the first time.
Chimo Bayo - Asi Me a Gusto Mi, "Chiki Dang Chiki Di Dang Dang"
Funky Drummer - I know, I think it's public domain now.
KLF - some track I don't know by name but it's essential Acid
Bart Simpson - "Yo, what's happ'nin dude?"
C & C Music Factory - "Everybody dance now!"
Gregorian Chant - A bit popularized by Enigma
Miss Piggy or Grover (Not Sure) - "Oh yeah?", definitely Frank Oz
Roy Orbison - Pretty Woman, famous riff that should have stopped this project dead in it's tracks, remember 2 Live Crew?
Flavor Flav - "Yeah, boyee"
Erasure - "I love to hate you!"
Chuck-D - "C'mon y'all!"
Slick Rick(?) - "Ladda dee Laddoo dah"
Nazareth - Opening drum from Hair of the Dog.
Manfred Man - Do wah diddy riff
Public Enemy - "Yo Dre! Wha? Gimme a funky ass bassline" hysterically followed by,
Vanilla Ice/Queen - Ice Ice Baby/Under Pressure sample
Brian Hyland - Yellow Polka-dot Bikini "One, two, three, four, tell the people what she wore"
Homer Simpson - "ehh"
James Brown - "Clap your hands, stomp your feet!"
Not only is this usually funny as fuck, it amazingly really works super-well! People tend to overuse the term so bad it's good but when it's not genuinely good, it falls into so bad it's good. So, like the kids say these days, it's all good!
Nowadays, it's hard to know what Grasshopper are up to. Despite their massive world wide fan base, there's very little English info on them. If pictures are worth all those words than their live show must be the kind of incredible that would make Prince blush. Dressed in the most flamboyant outfits you can imagine (think Village People meets Roman soldiers), the singers dance around and grab at the naughty bits of hot animal-headed Chinese chicks on stage. It's almost as strange as the album I'm reviewing today. Part concert, part fashion show, all pagan ritual, I'd stay till the end just to see if anyone would get sacrificed at this no holds barred orgy.Reinvigorated by finding this great album, I plan to follow Grasshopper more closely from now on. If that producer ever got out of jail, I'd be curious to know if he has done a follow-up remix album. I know there was another Grasshopper remix album that came out in 1995 called 'Cocktail' but I'm setting myself up for disappointment.
Did Willy get sick of being asked if he was "Weally weally Wong?". Not sure. I lost track of him after high school but he will always be remembered fondly as the guy who brought that fucked up Grasshopper shit into my life. This should be in your collection if you are at all into electronic music, it's a definitive early example of uninhibited, and uncensored stream-of-consciousness mixing from the far east. Will you be playing this at any parties, I doubt it. But if you're at all like me, you'll sleep better at night just knowing it's there.Click here to listen to a low-quality RealMedia version of the album or better yet e-mail me and see what I can do for you. Seriously, gimme a shout.
