“I want to make people laugh with my music. And I hope when I get old, I can show my songs and music to my grandchildren and tell them there was a time when I was interesting.”

— Kevin McGeary, a 29-year-old man from Northern Ireland who writes and sings Chinese-language songs that humorously reflect on social phenomena in China

    Anne Zhang

    zhangy49@gmail.com

    IN a room filled with a blend of foreigners and locals, Kevin McGeary surprised and entertained the eclectic crowd with his musical creativity and fluent Chinese during a solo show at the now-defunct Spyglass bar in Shekou in late March, a few days before he left Shenzhen.

    McGeary, a 29-year-old man from Northern Ireland and a former teacher with Shenzhen Polytechnic, garnered considerable attention in the city over the past two years by writing and singing Chinese-language songs that humorously reflected on social phenomena in China.

    Some people found McGeary’s music a lot of fun, but others said the lyrics were a little too radical and sometimes offensive. As a man who takes pride in his satire, the mixed reactions were probably just what McGeary was looking for.

    Learning Chinese

    Born in Northern Ireland, McGeary grew up in northwestern England and learned electric guitar at age 13. He started focusing on classical guitar in his late teens and taught himself classical music. McGeary lived in China for nearly six years, and said he came to the country because he wanted to learn Chinese. “Learning Chinese is a challenge and the language skill hopefully can get me a good job in the future,” McGeary said.

    During his first three years in China, McGeary worked as an English teacher while learning Chinese from scratch by himself. To improve his language skills and be more involved in local people’s lives, McGeary registered a QQ account and began chatting every day with his Chinese students and friends through the popular instant messaging tool.

    From September 2008 to June 2009, while he was teaching at a university in Hunan Province, McGeary said he went to sing karaoke almost every night with Chinese friends and began learning Chinese songs. But McGeary never expected he would be able to write lyrics in Chinese just 18 months after he started to learn the language.

    In November 2008, he wrote his first Chinese song, with lyrics similar to Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” By the time he got to Shenzhen in August 2009, McGeary had written more than 20 songs in Chinese.

    Musical satire

    McGeary spent much of his spare time in Shenzhen in writing, singing and recording Mandarin songs at his apartment in Nanshan District or performing at various bars, including frequent stints at La Casa in Futian District.

    He said he became bored with serious music at the end of 2011, then discovered musical comedy and began to immerse himself in the style. McGeary said musical comedy falls into three categories: bawdy ballads that can be dirty and provocative, whimsical tunes that are usually silly and unrealistic, and satire.

    Most of the songs he wrote in Chinese were satire, making light of current issues such as gutter oil, so-called “leftover women” — unmarried women of a certain age — one-night stands and mistresses.

    The song “Xiaomei,” for example, tells a story about a 28-year-old, single Chinese woman who has a good-paying job but has to lower her standards to find a boyfriend and get married so she can avoid being called a “leftover woman” as she gets older.

    McGeary also pays attention to working-class Chinese in his music. In the song “Migrant Workers,” he described the hard life of a migrant worker facing a lot of pressure and battling discrimination. Interestingly, one of the song’s last lines is: “But some day he’ll be a playboy with three mistresses.”

    Some of McGeary’s songs may sound radical and exaggerated. Take a few lines in “Song Glorifying China:” “The poor are all unkempt, the rich are all corrupt, high school students all dream of studying abroad even though nobody likes the education here…The milk powder’s all poisoned, there’s also gutter oil, but nobody stops Chinese people from eating beef…”

    McGeary said Li Zhen, a Hong Kong-based Mandarin teacher and opera singer, was the first person to proclaim herself a fan of his satirical songs.

    Li told Shenzhen Daily that she likes the originality and humor of McGeary’s songs. She said the hardest part of learning a foreign culture is to understand its humor.

    “Kevin has great comprehension of an exotic culture. It’s extraordinary that he understands Chinese humor well and successfully amuses Chinese people with his lyrics written in their language,” Li said.

    Learning about China

    McGeary said he reads Chinese newspapers every day to keep up with current issues in China, from which he gets ideas for songwriting.

    He said the experience at a Hunan university enabled him to get firsthand knowledge of young Chinese people and formed the basis of his understanding of Chinese society.

    McGeary said students often came to him to talk about their problems and confusions, including love affairs, career worries and dissatisfaction with Chinese education systems and social policies. He said those conversations illustrated social and cultural differences between China and Western countries and gave him inspiration for Chinese songwriting later on.

    Criticism

    Not everyone likes McGeary’s satirical music. American writer and translator Bruce Humes enjoys many of McGeary’s lyrics, but said his songs are “edgy” from a Chinese perspective. As an example, Humes cited lyrics from the song “Hunan:” “Northeastern women are not beautiful, Taiwanese singers are all gay, Xinjiangese people speak Chinese even worse than I do, I hate Hunan the least.”

    “His stereotypes of people from different regions strike me as good fun, but some Chinese may find them downright insulting,” Humes said.

    One night, when McGeary was at a bar performing a song called “Crossroad,” which contains lines such as: “Please don’t upload pictures of my naked body to the Internet” and “I just recalled that I have pictures of you using a bathroom,” two Chinese women in the audience left the bar without finishing their drinks.

    But McGeary has never been bothered by negative feedback.

    “I think we are living through a very interesting time in China’s history,” he said. “Even if you don’t like my songs, you have to admit that the humorous lyrics have zeitgeist.”

    McGeary said musical comedy is a hobby that he will keep practicing for a lifetime. “I want to make people laugh with my music,” he said. “And I hope when I get old, I can show my songs and music to my grandchildren and tell them there was a time when I was interesting.”