Amy’s Top50 Songs of 2016

Continuing with my late schedule [1][2], I went the extra nerdy mile to put together my list and made a spreadsheet to help me order my song picks (FYI, it actually helps), which made me realize that -at least- 10% of my list is coming from a soundtrack, even though my movie-watching has been low this year. On top of that, I managed to cut down on my Chinese music input to 25% (from 50%) in a very creative way, but still 70% is East-Asian-based; and if you add the South-Asian, it goes up to 86%.

That’s been the bias this year. Sorry!

A lot of the track picks are also songs that we’ve posted on the site, so forgive if the list seems redundant~


Let’s get this started with a mention of the songs I cut in one swift *WOOSH* after I did my spreadsheet~ ALL THE FREAKING CONTESTANTS ON THIS YEAR’S SEASON OF SING MY SONG (中国好歌曲). If you follow the Chinese music indie scene [Zing! F Yeah Chinese Indie], you may have heard of many of the acts that feature on the music contest show, which allows performers with original songs, that are chosen by a coach/producer who helps them work on them.

As with any (music) contest show (imho), seasons can be tiresome (plus, Asian varieties can be SUPER long. 1.30hr an episode!!!), BUT (!) if you want to navigate through the Chinese (Mainland/Taiwan/HK) indie scene, the show makes it super easy. You can watch all the season on the CCTV YouTube channel; the episodes (last I checked) aren’t subtitled, though, one of the lackings in Chinese soft power.

These six songs from Season 3 were included in my preliminar list :P

  • Vika Zeng ZhaoWei (曾昭玮) –
    Fortunately, I Was Not Born in Ancient Times (幸亏没生在古代)
  • Chiu-Pi (邱比) – Everything About You is my Style (你的一切都是我的风格)
  • Jessie Zhang Xi (张希) – Sharp Mouth, Weak Heart (刀子嘴地雷心)
  • He Da He (何大河) – Zhu Lao San (猪老三)
  • Astro Bunny (原子邦妮) – Beauty’s Tears (美人泪)
  • Wang Hui Chu (王汇筑) – Ambulance (救护车)

All info on the songs (including episode#) is on the playlist as notes.

Second bonus!

Season 9 of Coke Studio! Especially Zeb Bangash and Faakhir Mehmood’s rendition of Dilruba Na Raazi [MV], and Coke Studio does translate the lyrics of the songs in Nastaʿlīq, Roman Urdu AND English (!!!). One of the reasons I got so into South Asian music :P


Cheat playlist available at the bottom of the last page.

amy

YAM Magazine editor, photographer, blogger, translator and part-time web designer. Film junkie, music junkie… and lately series (a.k.a. TV) junkie.

2 Responses

  1. December 29, 2016

    […] Leave y’all with the link~ […]

  2. December 13, 2018

    […] iTunes playlists) that I was going to have trouble cutting my list to 50 clean picks. So as it happened last year, I got a bit of cheating to do. LOL Mostly Kpop […]

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