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FORGATÁS
DIAMOND LOVER
Credit @演员傅方俊 weibo
FORGATÁS
DIAMOND LOVER
Credit @演员傅方俊 weibo
PRIVATE LIFE
Rainről készültek a fotók ma Sanghajban, délután fél öt körül. Azt mondják, hogy az állandó petárdázások miatt borzasztóan rossz a város levegője. Reméljük, hogy Rain ez ellen védekezik a maszkkal, és amúgy teljesen egészséges.
Credit @tuiiiiizz és Rosahyunwoo weibo
REKLÁM
LAVIVA ICE TEA - háttérkép
MÉDIA
Raint megemlítik ebben az újságcikkben, amely India Manipur nevű egyik tartományának leghíresebb énekeséről szól, Gems-ről (a nevét az angol James-nek megfelelően kell ejteni). Izgalmas, hogy bár úgy tűnhet, India érintetlen terület a hallyu számára, a valóságban ez nem így van.
A cikkért köszönet a Cloud USA-nak, aki közzétette a hírét itt:
http://cloudusa.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/rain-mention-articleexcerpts-meet-manipurs-biggest-pop-star/
GQ INDIA
Meet Manipur's biggest popstar
Writer: Kerry Harwin Photo: Abhishek Bali18 February 2015
How armed militants and ‘Korean style’ converged to create space for a new kind of Manipuri star
Felirat hozzáadása
It’s nearly midnight, and about 800 people are gathered at the outdoor concert grounds. The stage is a makeshift affair in a quiet residential maidan on the edge of Imphal, the rugged capital of Manipur. A rope runs down an imaginary aisle that divides the grounds: boys and men on one side, girls and women on the other. There is no rope backstage, but a similar, self-enforced gender division persists among the performers.
“This is a free show,” says Gems [pronounced James] as we walk into the loosely segregated room at the nearby community hall. “But they still have to pay me,” he adds, his tone making it clear that tonight marks a new phase in his still-nascent musical career. Gems is Manipur famous. He gets stopped on the street regularly. Prominent local directors are eager to work with him, or even to get him to record a promotional song or video for their upcoming films, which screen in cinemas in Manipur and do brisk DVD sales in the state.
With the knowing air of a stage parent, Gems’ father, Rajendra, whispers “This is the green room” before finding a chair on the balcony overlooking the stage. Bundled in his coat and muffler, he settles into a snooze that will continue intermittently until his son’s performance three hours later.
These kinds of local showcases go up at least once a week, and though the crowd – drinking juice boxes or chewing pan, depending on age – quietly appreciates the succession of Meitei love-song crooners and their shared backup band throughout the show, it would be overgenerous to call it enthusiastic. The first cheers of the night come when Gems is announced.
The musicians put down their instruments, and an MP3 of Gems’ highly produced pop echoes through the speakers. Gems and his rapping sidekick, Devashish, bounce onto the stage, and suddenly, we’ve been transported from a B-grade battle of the bands to a 2000-era *NSYNC concert. Though Gems and Devashish don’t quite stoop to synchronized dance routines, every step seems to be choreographed, and the smiles glued firmly to their lips are those of trained pop idols. Musically, Gems evades description. Guitar-strumming love songs give way to EDM-inspired synth beats on one tune, and piano melodies evocative of early Sixties American pop tinkle through the next.
After the series of singers wearing conservative dresses in demure colours, these guys are something entirely apart. Gems peacocks around in a mustard blazer over a V-neck tee and white pants. Devashish drops rhymes and pulls at the sleeves of a black and white jacket with the cuts and accoutrements of a sailor suit. In Manipur, looking the part is often more important than, uh, the part; and the main part of Gems’ local fame is what the kids call “Korean style”.
Gems performing in a show
In the first year of this millennium, Hindi films were banned in Manipuri cinema halls. As is typical in the state, the ban was implemented not by any official agency but by insurgent groups fighting for greater independence from the Indian government. These insurgents see Hindi films as a form of cultural imperialism exerted by a neglectful and distant ruler. Those who fail to comply with insurgent demands have a tendency to find Chinese-made grenades lobbed through their windows, and so, for nearly 15 years, the ban has stood.
Though Imphal lost half its cinema halls to the ban – Hindi movies were popular and filled seats – it gained two new cultural products. The first – a development welcomed by the insurgent groups – was a local Meitei-lon film industry. (Meitei people dominate the Imphal valley, forming a slim majority in Manipur, a state ethnically divided between the predominantly tribal and Christian hills and the Meitei majority valley.) The second, almost-certainly unintended consequence of the ban was the arrival of Korean media in Manipur. While guns and drugs travel regularly through the almost-entirely uncontrolled jungle that straddles India’s border with Myanmar, the smuggling of non-contraband goods is a regular and accepted practice at Moreh, the dusty one-road border town that hosts the Indo-Myanmar Friendship Gate, where citizens of the two countries can cross the border freely, as long as they make it back across by 4pm.
With no customs checks, smuggling has effective official sanction. Despite five shockingly thorough searches and ID checks on the 110-kilometre drive from Moreh to Imphal, vehicles laden with made-in-China synthetic fleece blankets, plastic goods and mobile phones, and case after case of Win – the one-rupee king-size cigarette favoured by Imphal’s heroin addicts – pass freely and pay no duty. Indian military and paramilitary forces have far greater concerns in the troubled state. It was this small-time smuggling via China that, in the early Noughties, began to include DVDs from Korea.
The subsequent arrival of high – or at least higher – speed internet means it’s unlikely the DVDs selling for 20 or 30 rupees in Imphal’s Paona Bazaar today have come through Burma – a man called Diamond, who ran one of the bazaar’s larger DVD shops, told me bitTorrent was his preferred source for piracy. But with appetites already whetted by smuggled discs, Korean films, serials and K-pop albums have become staples of the Manipuri cultural diet. Speaking to several DVD peddlers on the streets of Imphal, none could agree on whether Korean, Meitei-lon, English or Hindi films were their best sellers, but the most forthcoming among them held that men prefer Hindi and English films, which tend to offer more action, while women prefer Meitei and Korean films, which feature a flair for the romantic, along with dashing and carefully styled actors.
K-Pop anthems and hit Korean film franchises trade in by-the numbers romance, and a fashion palette primarily concerned with the cutesy and the feminine. It is perhaps this that has paved the way for Korean media to become a significant niche in Manipur’s culture industry, and one of the primary replacements for Hindi cinema. But whatever the cause, the influx of Korean culture has put “Korean style” on the minds of Manipur’s youth – so much so that Tapta, a local folk rock legend whose songs tend to follow Meitei political sentiment, recently released a song with just that name, parodying those who dress like Gems, whom he calls “cartoon characters”.
The funny thing about “Korean style”, or the Manipuri conception of “Korean style”, is that it has very little to do with Korea. Rather, the sailor suits, double-breasted jackets, epaulettes, diaphanous dresses and patent leather shoes seem more related to Korea’s accumulation and subsumption of European and American fashion than to anything indigenous. And it always comes back to aesthetics. Whenever I speak of Korean films in Manipur, nobody seems quite able to explain why they’ve taken off as they have. But whether it’s a question of race, style or simply sex appeal, actors and singers trump movies and songs, and clothes take primacy over plot construction.
Gems at a gig in Manipur
Rekha, a 19-year-old aspiring model who wants to try her luck in Delhi but can’t convince her parents to let her go, tells me she prefers Korean cinema because “the style is unique and the stories are touching.” She is categorical about Hindi cinema – “We don’t like Bollywood films” – and cites a reason with which many of us can likely sympathize: overacting. Sanjay, the early-twenties singer of Gravity, a local rock cover band that occasionally gigs in Imphal’s fancier hotels, admits sheepishly to listening to K-pop after first listing metal and punk as his primary influences. Asked why Korean culture is so popular in Manipur, he gives the politically incorrect and yet intuitively appealing response I would often hear from locals: “They have chinky eyes and we have chinky eyes also.”
I sit down to talk with Gems’ mother, who instructs me to call her Ima, Meitei-lon for “mother”. Her kindness is overwhelming as she comes at me, all warmth and smiles, indifferent to my comprehension. With the aid of a translator, Ima tells me that although she stumbled across her first Korean movie by accident – Full House, a romance she watched in 2005 – she’s been hooked ever since. These days, it’s only an invite to a Meitei film premiere that’s likely to get her to watch anything made within India’s borders. Trying to capture what it is about these films that Ima finds so appealing is more difficult than one might expect, but she keeps bringing up Rain, the protagonist of Full House and a multimedia Korean sensation with smash hit films, a television series and seven albums to his name. Finally, Gems’ elder sister, Saroja, interrupts: “She likes all the handsome boys.”
While Gems can certainly sing, it’s this pretty-boy Korean persona that puts him a ways out front. And this persona doesn’t come cheap. Except for the occasional contest winner, the primary route to Manipuri stardom seems to be spending like you’re already famous. Gems has now self-produced three videos, locally referred to as albums, spending between Rs.30,000 and Rs.95,000 on each. Their production quality is high – higher than that of many Manipuri films – and they look like the videos of any credible pop singer. When your language is spoken by fewer than 2 million people and broadcast on one television channel, YouTube becomes your go-to means for promotion.
“They have chinky eyes and we have chinky eyes also.”
Though local TV now airs his videos regularly, he admits the first few plays didn’t come without some financial inducement. Now, one only needs to watch ITV for a few hours before seeing Gems crooning in verdant Manipuri rice fields, driving around town in his red Chevrolet hatchback or staring into the camera, pushing highlighted strands of hair out of his eyes and singing in front of a dizzying array of green screen backgrounds, a cheap solution in a state where the same popular shoot locations appear in video after video.
Gems estimates that he’s spent over Rs60,000 on clothes alone over the past two years, a sizeable sum in a city where a pakka flat can be rented for a couple thousand rupees a month. The family has another major Delhi shopping spree planned as Gems attempts to sign new film deals. This trip is crucial, because on the shoestring budgets of the Manipuri film industry, actors often bring their own clothes to the set and drive their own cars on screen. Directors who cast Gems aren’t only buying his singing, acting abilities and buzz, they’re also buying his image; an image of international cool; an abundance of white-on-white outfits that seem to be increasingly bankable on the streets of Imphal.
“His style is my style,” Ima asserts, laughing, and when I turn to Gems, he nods to confirm it’s true. “He is more famous,” she continues, “but I am more stylish.” The clothes, smuggled from China via Burma, bought from Delhi and sometimes ordered from abroad, are largely curated by mom. Ima’s help is focused on style and financing, and is the single biggest force behind Gems’ local success. And it isn’t hard to imagine that he’s being refashioned in the image of Ima’s beloved Rain, the Korean superstar whose acting career flourished after he won recognition as a singer. With his fair skin, high cheekbones and a feathered mane – Gems’ is a style not dissimilar from Rain’s look in his 2009 film Ninja Assassin.
DVD store selling Korean movies
“All the credit,” he tells me, “goes to my parents, because they invested in me. There’s someone from my family at every show.” Gems’ father, Rajendra, a retired schoolteacher who now translates English and Bengali mystery novels into Meitei-lon, can often be found chauffering members of Gems’ Sky High crew, a group of local musical aspirants that includes Saroja and emcee Devashish, from gig to studio to gig and back.
“In Manipur,” Gems explains, “there are a lot of singers who can sing really well, but they don’t focus on their dressing. They’re handsome, but they’re also performing; they need to be [well groomed and stylish] so that everyone can listen to their sweet song.”
In a state with a population on par with South Delhi, almost half of which doesn’t speak Meitei-lon, local celebrity is both rewarding and frustrating. With the most famous Meitei actors earning less than a lakh per film, even Manipuri superstardom would be a slow route to covering the costs of Gems’ wardrobe and video production. When the National Film Awards began accepting digitally shot entries in 2010, a small slice of hope for outside recognition appeared when Phijigi Mani, a Manipuri film, was selected as the best regional film at the national awards. But despite the presence of such outlets, the external commercial appeal of Manipuri films, which tend to be low-budget reimaginings of typical Hindi masala fare, remains limited.
With a “voluntary” association of local directors, the Manipur Film Forum, enforcing strict language and cultural standards of the kind preferred by the armed insurgency, even getting a chance to shine for mainstream Indian cinema and music producers is a challenge. Indeed, some of the few Manipuri actors who have managed to land Bollywood roles have found themselves blacklisted from Manipuri cinema until the powers that be decide that they have served their penance, a move intended to ensure that local talent stays local. A senior representative of the Manipur Film Forum informed me that the organization exists to “protect the will of the people”, but demonstrated remarkable evasive abilities when I attempted to question that claim.
Though Gems is aware of the impending ceiling of his celebrity – a ceiling that is reached as soon as he touches Manipur’s borders – more immediate concerns dominate: getting cast in “a realistic type of movie, not some jungle adventure”, a reference to the traditional Manipuri folk themes that dominate much of the industry, as well as expanding his presence as a playback singer, an additional revenue stream. English or Hindi may come later, but the current struggle is merely to move from being Manipuri famous to being Manipuri superstar.
“It’s my luck to do this,” says Gems. “I only finished one album before I [was asked to] perform a concert. I might be the only [Manipuri singer] to have achieved this.
“I have to get attention for not being regular like everyone. I have to do something in my life. If I get a job, it’s a normal life. If I’m singing, everyone around Manipur will know me… I think I’m in the limelight.”
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