Chinese verse and English chorus

Singing is great, but surely it sounds better if the verse and the chorus are in the same language, no?

Yesterday we did the funniest radio show I have done this far. We did a music feature where I picked 6 bands/artists from China, played 15 seconds of their music, and then my 2 workmates (who know nothing about Chinese pop and rock) had to give a score/some feedback about the songs. In order to make it as natural-sounding as possible (we don’t broadcast live, unfortunately) none of the guys had heard the songs before they sat down in the studio. Hehe.

The funniest part was probably picking the songs. China sure has some interesting artists/bands. One thing that hit me when I was listening through an endless amount of young, bubbly girl-pop (some sounding like worse versions of Spice girls than others…) was that man, there’s a lot of Chinese artists/bands that sing a whole song in Chinese, only to throw in some English phrases/words during the chorus?! It sounds quite silly, and I have no idea what the idea of this is? To my workmates, who don’t understand a lick of Chinese it sounded even MORE silly, gosh, one guy laughed so much tears started running from his eyes when we listened to the song 一半女生 –I ban nv sheng- by the Hong Kong duo ‘Twins’ (one of my worse choices, but we needed to have a good mix of good and bad!) who sang their whole verse in Chinese (something about growing up and not being a woman yet but also not being a girl…) and then went: “Bye bye bye, bye bye happiness!” in the chorus and resulted in an instant laugh attack from my colleagues.

Anyways, in the end we had some high and some low scores. The highest score went to the Beijing punk band Recycle, followed by Taiwan male singer Xiao Gang (小刚 I think that’s his name??) The worse score (one 1 and one zero!) went to the band ZERO (零点), some rock band from Beijing who did not impress any of us with their song 从0开始 (begin from zero).

We’ll definitely be doing this sort of music feature again, so if anyone has any fave Chinese artists, or any examples of when rock/pop goes bad (unfortunately those are almost more fun than the ‘good ones’), please feel free to open up!