I haven’t earnestly started my study of the language yet and so I can’t really tell if this is Mandarin, Cantonese or some other language:
Mandarin.
髮如雪 (snow-like hair… or hair like snow) is one of Jay Chou’s best songs I feel, but the lyrics are really, really difficult to graps. It is filled with allusions and allegories… Imagine a pop song that used lines inspired by Blake and Shakespeare and you could kind of get a feeling for it. To date there are several parts of the song that I can’t quite figure out what the deeper meaning is. If you’re looking for something to study off of, this is probably not the best choice. Although it was one of the first Chinese songs I started listening to.
Yeah, that is the idea 
Is that Fearless song from the Jet Li movies also in Mandarin?
My favorite part (going off of the subtitles) is the part at the start where he says “I raise my glass and drink in the frost.” Is that first part an accurate translation? In some ways I think this song was what first started me on the road to developing an interest in Chinese culture. Even though I was going off of subtitles I could somehow tell that these were really good lyrics.
[quote=“Atomist”]
My favorite part (going off of the subtitles) is the part at the start where he says “I raise my glass and drink in the frost.” Is that first part an accurate translation?[/quote]
from second line of the lyrics.
我舉杯 飲盡了風雪
I’d say it’s a fair translation, but instead of just drink, the original lyrics implied shooting the frost down (bottomed up on that frost).
I think that was the last Jay Chou album I bought…
Hmm… I’d say the lyrics are classically inspired but I’d stop short of saying they’re really exceptional. It’s kind of a mish-mash of lines from esteemed works and ideas inspired by those works, but there isn’t really a sense of consistent imagery running through it. Also, the lyricist Fang Wen-shan is known for taking his liberties with Chinese grammar. One of my all-time favorite songs is 千里之外 (10,000 li apart), also written by Jay Chou with lyrics by Fang:
But you get some really… out there… Chinese here, as well. The first line is a great example of how mixed metaphors are totally acceptable in Chinese. [quote]屋簷如懸崖 風鈴如滄海 我等燕歸來[/quote]
“The eaves are like cliffs, the wind chimes like the sea, and I am waiting for the sparrows to return.” The beginning and end of these similes seem completely jumbled, and by the third line, it’s completely tossed away in favor of an alternate metaphor.
“The story took place outside the city, amid a lingering thick mist – an interaction that cannot be seen.” (Well, that’s my interpretation…) At any rate, you can see we’ve left the cliffs-by-the-sea analogy behind and moved on to mists outside a city. It just keeps changing through the song: dreams, cicada wings, flowers, rain, dust, boats, shadows, lotus flowers… As a cohesive whole it makes little sense, though each individual line is fairly beautiful and jam-packed with imagery. If you just want to learn somewhat useless but fun vocab words and don’t think too much about the meaning behind them, this is a fun way to do so.
Jay has some more down-to-earth songs as well. Here are a few: 聽媽媽的話、七里香、安靜、說好的幸福呢、珊瑚海、稻香 Those ones I could help you with meaning more. They’re quite simple.
Really difficult, but beautiful, Chinese-style ones include 菊花台、青花瓷、蘭亭序、煙花易冷.
If you’re looking for simple lyrics, you can check out SHE, Wang Leehom (王力宏) – especially his early stuff – and most other pop singers.
‘History’ by Verve?
that invokes the story of Jingwei (精衛), the daughter of Yandi (炎帝), who drowned in the east sea and turned into a swift that attempts to fill the east sea by throwing rocks into it. well… simply because it mentioned ocean and swift…
the rest of the song has nothing to do with it though…
‘History’ by Verve?[/quote]
it’d be more like this, but less coherent
huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/2 … 18453.html
if you take the first line from each of those pop-sonnets and put them together as if they were one song, then that’s similar to what 千里之外 or 髮如雪 feels like structurally.
I was saying that Blake is not remotely complex and songs are based on his work. 
As for Shakespeare, he’d simply write for his audience. If he were in a band, it’d be Radiohead.
Thanks. Things like this are precisely the reasons I don’t get what’s going on in Fang Wen-shan’s lyrics. I understand the text itself, but have no idea how these ideas coalesce into a whole because I never learned the background. We spent most of our time in college history classes covering Qing China, Republican China, and communist China, but even in language classes talked very little about literature. I need to do some remedial reading. 