Well, we knew it would happen someday. The Coconuts Hong Kong cringe-o-meter has finally exploded.
The whole thing is pretty painful but we think our cringe levels hit critical mass when we got to the lyrics: “We livin’ here in China/’I’m a rhymer.” Oof.
Though it does get points for mostly rhyming, Another Day in China, a musical number rapped by a foreigner about why he loves living in China, is a little, well, watch the clip.
The guy who stars in the video is 21-year-old Dylan Jaye (known in China as Zhong Yilun) from New York. He graduated from Oxford University, and later went to Tsinghua University to study Chinese.
In a recent interview he did with a Chinese talk show, he said he went to China in September 2016 to be a professional musician and studied Chinese for nine months. He seems to be doing okay, with a Weibo following of 50,000 people.
According to his rap, he fills his day with buying stuff on Taobao, using Wechat, and Didi (a car-hailing service), not understanding Mandarin, struggling to pick up tofu with chopsticks, and sipping Oolong tea as the world crumbles because of Brexit and Donald Trump.
While some love the song — praising Jaye’s good looks and vocals and labelling the song “amazing!!!!!!!!” — others offered significantly less generous assessments.
“So cringey,” wrote one viewer. “You can’t rap man, this is cancer…” remarked another. Ouch.
The company behind the music video is called Ychina (“You ask ‘why China?’ Yeah, we reply ‘why not China?’.” Get it?).
It was founded in 2017 by 23-year-old Israeli Raz Galor who studied at Peking University. The company has about 4 million followers on Chinese social media, and has helped mainland broadcaster CCTV produce online shows about young foreigners living in China.
Though we’re probably not going to be waiting for Jaye’s album to drop, if you are a fan, you can watching him croon on a Chinese reality TV show below. Or not.
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