One of the life skills I have acquired since meeting my wife is being able to order food in a Chinese restaurant...in Cantonese.  Having three kids, I’ve had the experience of going through learning Cantonese at a toddler level three times over. And so, eventually the basics started to stick in my head, like colours, numbers, and typical action words that parents tell their young kids over and over again - like 給媽媽 which means give it to mama, because my kids grew up trying to eat Lego every second of the day.

Alongside all of that, Hong Kong became a city I associated as a second home. 

When the Umbrella Revolution took place in 2014, I became enthralled in better understanding why hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers took to the streets with umbrellas protesting against the apparent threat they faced in losing the autonomy they were originally granted under the 1 country, 2 systems principle put in place when Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997. 👈️ A very long sentence!  China’s plans to reform laws in Hong Kong in how the city is governed and how elections are handled, amongst a series of other changes, severely worried Hong Kongers who lived a seemingly separate, “freer” life to their counterparts in Mainland China.  

Politics aside, Hong Kong faced a change culturally, that a lot of people anecdotally said, would never recover from.  Legitimate fears of losing its identity and culture swept through Hong Kong.  

Enter: MIRROR. 

In 2018 a TV channel in Hong Kong ran the typical reality series we’re all familiar with to find the next Cantopop group.  Twelve guys won the show and MIRROR was formed.  According to the South China Morning Post, it’s not been since the deaths of Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui (considered Cantopop royalty in Asia), has there been anyone like MIRROR that has put Hong Kong on their shoulders and essentially elevated the city like how boy band has.  

Case in point, when we were in Hong Kong last year you couldn’t walk very far in the city without seeing an ad, billboard, or some form of MIRROR something - they were everywhere.  But if you’ve been to Asia, particularly Hong Kong or China, there always seems to be a glass ceiling around their entertainment business.  Depending on where you live in North America, you might get some releases of Chinese movies in theatres but ultimately, aside from K-Pop, Asia’s music exports to the west have been non-existent. 

MIRROR’s goal from its very inception has been to be a beacon of hope for not only the next generation of Hong Kongers but Hong Kongers in general who went through what a lot of them felt like a forced identity crisis after the riots and protests in the late 2010’s.

And so last week my wife and I are lying in bed on our phones as we always do and she shows me a RollingStone post on IG highlighting MIRROR as part of their top 25 future of music.  Given the group will be touring North America this spring and they have a track coming out with DOLLA aka the Milwauke Bucks’ Damien Lillard, it wouldn’t be surprising if we start to hear about MIRROR the same way we were hearing about this boyband called BTS back in the day. 

This week's issue is a 4 minute read:

🎤 Rappers reading their raps

🏀 The college basketball GOAT plays today

🍁 6ix God vs K-Dot

The Teleprompter Rap Era

Going to a rap concert is a completely different experience from going to any other type of live music.  But all genres of music would be different, wouldn’t they??  No italicized words, you’re wrong!  Rap is super nuanced in a sense that unless you’re getting some fancy shmancy performance from Jay-Z where he has an orchestra behind him, typically you’re getting a DJ who plays the artist’s tracks and the artist just raps over them.  

I’ve definitely been to performances where the rapper’s song is played and he’s just ad-libbing over it, aka just saying certain words on the mic as they come up and letting the song play as he walks around and shows us what hiphop looks like.

I mean, I get it. How do you remember the words to all of your songs when you’ve written so many.  If you’re Lil Wayne, you’ve recorded 3000+ songs - how in the world do you remember that many?  Dude has one track called 10,000 bars that has 7000 words on it - you’d need cue cards to get through it.  

This week the internet reacted to Lil Wayne having a teleprompter playing lyrics to “Right Above It” as he guest performed in a Florida stop of Drake’s It’s All a Blur - Big as the What? tour.  And it turns out a lot of artists use teleprompters to remember the words. It’s kinda like watching your favourite artists do karaoke on stage performing their own songs, which I don’t mind.  Besides, I think I’d rather have a rapper performing all of the lyrics to their tracks as opposed to the track just playing in the background while they add filler words here and there to make it sound like they were performing.

College Hoops’ GOAT

I’m not sure if you pay much attention to women’s basketball, let alone women’s college basketball but tonight arguably the top two women in women’s college basketball face off as Caitlin Clark looks to bring Iowa back to the national championship game for a second year in a row.  But to do this she’ll have to go through UConn and Paige Bueckers, statistically the best overall player in women’s college basketball this year.

If you don’t know who Caitlin Clark is, you probably don’t care for basketball in general.  In March, Clark set the all time record in college basketball, women’s or men’s, for most points scored EVER.  And the attention for the 6’0 guard has skyrocketed ever since.  So much so that Ice Cube’s basketball league, The Big 3, offered her a $5M contract to play in the 3 on 3 men’s league when her college career finished.  

On Monday Lil Durk doubled the offer to $10M hinting at having his own team this coming season.  

No word on whether Clark will accept the offer but something tells me going #1 in the WNBA draft might take priority over The Big 3.  Although The Big 3 is actually a lot of fun to watch!

What is going on with Drake?

I don’t even think I’ve covered Drake once in the 14 months this newsletter has been alive so how about a little Drake news for once, right?

What happened? Kendrick Lamar released a verse on a track with Future called “Like that” where Kendrick basically said, EFF DRAKE (and EFF J Cole…but mainly EFF Drake). For my hip hop historians out there, may I take you all the way back to Kendrick’s “Control” verse when he essentially called out every relevant rapper at the time, including Drake (and J Cole).

Since then Drake and Kendrick have exchanged subliminal shots at each other throughout the years but nothing that really got anyone out of their seats.

But with Kendrick essentially saying he’s the only rapper that matters and directing that towards Drake on the “Like that” verse, the whole hip hop world has been wondering when will Drake respond? We all know what he did to Meek Mill with “Charged up” and “Back to back” - what a time to be a hip hop fan in Toronto - and how he dealt with Pusha T by dealing with him but not really dealing with him and still winning the beef, IMHO.

But the interesting part this time is that there’s this little thing going on with people supposedly picking a side between Drake and Kendrick. A lot of people who have been close to Drake for years seem to be picking Kendrick’s side in this feud. For instance the likes of long time collaborators Rick Ross and Future seemingly have sided with Kendrick. LeBron James was mouthing the lyrics to the verse in warm ups earlier this week. And Travis Scott being the latest long time friend of Drake’s who apparently urged Future and Metro Boomin’ to preview the diss track at Rolling Loud in March.

So far Drake has done his typical read-between-the-lines Instagram caption thing to respond to the situation. But the hiphop world now waits to see what his actual response will be to this situation.