After two-plus years, Lady Gaga has been removed from China's musical blacklist, which means she can now perform on the mainland. Her third studio album, ARTPOP, has also been approved for release, as the singer herself announced in a tweet: "I'm so excited!!!! The Chinese Government Approved ARTPOP to be released in China with all 15 songs!"
But...
Donnie has a music video. He worked on it for three months. It features pandas and handjobs, and if you didn't think of the Oriental Pearl Tower as phallic before, well:
Pacman, Peso, and I recently returned from a 16-day Asia trip that included a five-day stay in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (as in America, the N-word is taboo in DPRK). This journey started in August when our record label, Forest Hills Tenleytown Music Group, launched a Kickstarter seeking $6,000 to fund the trip and a music video called "Escape to North Korea." With the help of a five-page feature in the Washington Post Style section and a generous $5,100 donation from James Passin (aka "The American Who Bought Mongolia”), we were able to raise $10,400 and get a lot of attention in the process. People actually cared, for some reason.
Here's a laowai who loves his hometown of Cleveland so much that he raps about its charms to a Chinese audience. Cleveland, the city whose football team has had more staph infection lawsuits than playoff appearances since 1999, the city with a sulphuric I-71 cutting through it, the city consistently ranked one of the worst in the US, the city...
We'd like to thank William Kirby and Peter Bol, the Harvard professors in the above video (part of a series called China X), for being their delightful selves as they sing the "Chinese dynasty song."
Ylvis's hit "The Fox" (What Does the Fox Say?) was the surprise viral song of the late summer. We can't believe it's taken all of nearly two months, but here, finally, is a parody of that video set in China, featuring that other wonderfully mysterious creature of the woods, by which we mean -- of course -- the giant panda.
We don't have a lot of information about this video just yet, but it was sent to us recently by YouTube user Scott AH, whose e-signature suggests he's with Comedy Club China. It's a good one, if only for this scene at the 19-second mark:
The wonderfully idiotic adults behind Rebecca Black's "Friday" have done it again, kidnapping what appears to be a sweet teenage girl and forcing her in front of the camera to perform the world's worst song. Ark Music Factory, led by producer Patrice Wilson (he's the dude in the panda costume; what panda costume, you ask? hang on), has topped itself with "Chinese Food," simply a glop of bewilderment and suburban American camp.