We see MT now walking DS swaying her well-defined, buffed to a perfect polish abwork. I just took her as sort of a Pia Zadora and searched for ‘gangster’ along with her name, wondering just what could back someone, so marginal to many, to such fame, but you folks are even lucid about her. I’m impressed. [For me she sounds kinda skinny and worked on by the outboards in a few vs other clips, but that's me (shades of Khanh Ngoc, that wrapper of a thick ca phe sua nong sort of timbre, which I don't detect in most of her stuff)]. I don’t know much of anyone outside of Thanh Tuyen or maybe Huong Lan or Cam Van, but it looks like the production is getting the upper hand in presentation in general, and perhaps a lot of this MT business is affected by that. In the current piece, the band does their little crunchy guitar break (tham goi ten anh, I think it is). Some hokey blinky lights that aren’t much good at it, but isn’t that sexy hipswivel action to rival something you’d see on thehun worth a lot artistically?

MT was doing a party nearby recently at which the ever-cutting-edge and very-pro-can’t-you-tell-by-these-cut-off-gloves-we’re-wearing crew set lasers to burn straight into the crowd’s eyes, and some adequate though not really memorable sound work with equally cute stuff up there. I take this as a thread that runs through much of what’s given us by a generally sincere culture (VN) after being starstruck by the gloss of the Western polish. “Fake it ’til you make it” I hear a lot in criticism, and I don’t focus so much on a performer as what the crowd has been sold as cool to follow. It’s a lot of smoke and mirror imitation of what the industry has done and made it on, so why not?

I’ve worked with yankee singers you probably wouldn’t remember, and know a competitor of Thuy Nga, and somehow this is all in character with observations from that experience. There are better and worse singers for our personal tastes, and to each his own, etc. She is a polished presentation, and I guess good for what she is. I think there’s someone called “Fabio” or something who is in that kind of ilk, too. There’s a product for every taste, and she is apparently a good one for her own audience.

Of course, I never got the idealizing of PBN either. Seems to me, people wouldn’t eat up the tailings of a culture that held them in oppression and cost vast bloodshed to clear out. If you take into account the draw that such shameless slickness as that has upon Viet Kieu, any performance value of pretty wrapping fits right in. This isn’t to minimalize anyone as much as comment on what may underlie the fact of such success of someone whom many don’t think so highly of; it’s simply the nature of the surroundings in which they perform. MT is built on flash, like those wiggly lights on the floor that Truong Vu doesn’t need. Its like the bunch of fizz that people were sold by sharks from the West (I know some of them, too, buying gear cheap here to sell to producers in VN hungry for some of the action, at a killing), and it’s what they know and can call their own. There is similar criticism of opera singers here, with the not-so-visually-appealing ones with a great voice being loved for that voice while the fashion models (like the Russian who, according to a friend who ‘queezed her on the zeep codes’ to learn that she wasn’t a cosmopolitan Moscovite after all but from some farming area) find another part of the audience, and it all seems to work.

You’re all right in your own way. Try not to fight each other over something so subjective. Beyond any one singer’s virutes/drawbacks, the picture is much broader than focus solely upon MT’s feast of a derriere can take into account.