If you read Chinese, and you spend time on sites like Baidu and Yahoo.cn, please roll your eyes and skip this post — nothing here will be news to you.
I do not read Chinese, though, and I've never clicked around much on the big Chinese portals — so when I spent some time poking around this weekend, I was surprised to see that at least two of the biggest ones offer "MP3s" as a top-level tab. If you're a non-Chinese-reader, run Yahoo China's "MP3" tab through Babelfish, and you'll see that it offers a ton of bootlegged hit songs in various DRM-free file formats (Jeremy Zawodny has a post about this here).
In the "MP3s" section of Baidu and Yahoo China, I stumbled on Taiwanese pop star Jay Chow (aka Zhou Jie Lun)'s theme song for Fearless (Huo Yuan Jia), the new Jet Li action movie about 19th-century martial arts hero Huo Yuan Jia. Here's one ripped MP3 of the song, here's another — it's wicked catchy. Sort of hiphop meets backstreetboys meets chinese opera (sung in falsetto by a dude). After I listened about forty times, I found the movie's official site (gah, no US release dates! I'd gladly pay to see it!), and the music video: high, low.
I like the part in the music video where the dude is being such a hard-ass rapper and he punctuates the end of a line with the FAN. Like, "BLAYUMM–how you like me now, with my figgidy-FAN?!" I give Jay-Z like five minutes to rip this off cover this.
Incidentally, the little popup media window that appears when you select an MP3 on Yahoo China says (via Babelfish), "The force recommendation use fart fart dog (PPgou) downloads acceleration software high speed downloading, the speed multiplies!" Whatever fart fart dog is, it's nice to know that The Force believes it's helpful. (Thanks, Jen Collins!)
Previously on Boing Boing:
# Battelle's analysis of Google, Yahoo, MSFT, AOL and China
# NPR "Xeni Tech": Yahoo may have aided in jailing of second China writer
# Yahoo logo parodied over China: what's good for the Goolag…
Reader comment: Tian says,
Your post about Huo Yuan Jia has brought some early childhood memories back. When I was growing up, there was a TV show based on Huo Yuan Jia (a famous martial artist). My parents never let me to watch it claiming the show promotes violence (they sounded like a certain American attorney we know that wants stop violent video games). But the irony is that I was allowed to go watch live executions! Yes, paramilitary policemen carry out orders for the court. I never understood their logic.
Update: Several readers wrote in to point out that I neglected to include the real punch line: both Yahoo China and Baidu's "MP3" tabs don't just offer Chinese pop music — you can find plenty of pirated Western tracks, too. With help from Babelfish, non-Chinese-speakers can find and download anything from the Beatles to Britney in seconds. Who knew?
