This web site is a rock album, called "Sings in Code", by the Chicago group Xianggang Delight.

It consists of songs inspired by songs the Who made in 1965. Additionally, these songs incorporate theories of global economics espoused by University of Chicago professor Saskia Sassen.

Between 2001 and 2005 Xianggang Delight wrote and performed one new song each month in Chicago. For each show the set list grew by one.

From 2006-2009 the band processed all materials generated in the initial period. The songs on this web album combine live excerpts, primitive demos and new studio overdubs. We have tried to set the site up so that the correlations between our songs, The Who, and Sassen's ideas can be understood

New songs will be uploaded periodically; consider subscribing to our unfolding process.

Saskia Sassen, a sociologist, late of the University of Chicago, currently at the London School of Economics and the New School for Social Research, theorizes the rise of transnational flows of people, commerce, culture and technology. These networks coalesce at various nodes, which she has termed Global Cities, such as London, Chicago, Hong Kong. These global cities engender new social, economic, cultural, political, etc, realities which threaten the hegemony of the nation-state. Sassen's Transnationalism Project at the University of Chicago contains many relevant links to resources related to contemporary theories of globalization. Of special note is Globalization and World Cities - Study Group Network, out of the University of Loughborough, Scotland, a site whose nifty maps Xianggang Delight has leaned on heavily over the years for visual aid and inspiration.

Using the Pinyin spelling for Hong Kong as our band name is another way of bringing a global perspective to our local activities. Each song title combines the name of a Chinese province with a synonym for "delight."

In their first year The Who released 18 songs, spread across three singles and an album. The 18 songs on "Sings in code" match these songs in chronological order. These songs are not covers or replicas, rather, they are more like structural analyses; This document shows a graphical representation of this process applied to the Who's "I can't explain."

This self-conscious approach to creating songs exposes the way contemporary musicians make rock.

One might suppose that Anytime You Want Me's complex history (cover version, US/UK, soul/rock, black/white) might result in something equally dense when processed by XGD. However, and almost in defiance of that, Guangzhou Enjoyment is deliberately repetitive and sparse. The one external reference is sounded at the coda, where audio of a breakup from Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love plays.

Guangzhou Enjoyment is a love song, which might seem odd for a postglobal rock band. But as the article below suggests, love and intimacy stand clearly within the purview of the global economist.

Love makes the world go ‘round

Renato Rosaldo (1989) has argued that emotions come to have experiential meaning in reference to social positioning. He uses the notion of “emotional force” to refer to the thoroughness with which emotional patterns are internalized and the centrality or marginality of such emotions in people’s lives (Rosaldo 1989:2). I have illustrated here how the meaning and force of love in the lives of Filipina migrants in rural Nagano were tied to these women’s positioning within global relations of power. Love was a key, if contradictory, term through which Filipina migrants in Central Kiso crafted senses of self as they carried out and made sense of their transnational daily lives. Love enabled these women to claim both globally translatable senses of modern personhood and a sense of humanity in the face of their work in hostess bars. Love also made the transnational ties of their lives—and their accumulation strategies—possible. Women who did not “love” their customers did not meet their quotas or get new work contracts; and if a woman could not “love” her husband, because, for example, he was abusive or would not let her send money home, she was constrained in her ability to support her family abroad. Love was an integral part of what enabled Filipina migrants to work in Japan on entertainer visas and what encouraged them to remain in Japan after those visas expired.
“Filipina migrants in rural Japan and their professions of love”, Lieba Faier (2007)

Anytime you want me

Roger Daltrey pushed insistently, in the period when the Who was deciding on its sound, for an emphasis on American R&B covers, like this wonderful Garnett Mimms classic.

If there is a XGD song that functions as a manifesto, this would be it. It points out how each of the typical elements of a rock band (e.g., songs, concerts, lyrics), in XGD’s hands, becomes a weapon of underground subversion. The slangy lyrics are not the result of trendiness or laziness, but a deliberate attempt at hiding the song’s true message.

The first verse of the song quotes Robert Burns’ 1791 “Poem on Sensibility” about sorrows embedded in beautiful melodies.

The role of l-l-l-language in establishing t-t-t-ransnational solidarity

1. The most popular first language is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers). However the most popular second language is undoubtedly English, the "lingua franca" of globalization: About 35% of the world's mail, telexes, and cables are in English. Approximately 40% of the world's radio programs are in English. English is the dominant language on the Internet.
From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization

2. “We can certainly recognize real obstacles that block the communication of struggles. One such obstacle is the absence of a recognition of a common enemy against which the struggles are directed. Beijing, Los Angeles, Nablus, Chiapas, Paris, Seoul: the situations all seem utterly particular, but in fact they all directly attack the global order of Empire and seek a real alternative. Clarifying the nature of the common enemy is thus an essential political task. A second obstacle, which is really corollary to the first, is that there is no common language of struggles that could ‘‘translate’’ the particular language of each into a cosmopolitan language. Struggles in other parts of the world and even our own struggles seem to be written in an incomprehensible foreign language. This too points toward an important political task: to construct a new common language that facilitates communication, as the languages of anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism did for the struggles of a previous era. Perhaps this needs to be a new type of communication that functions not on the basis of resemblances but on the basis of differences: a communication of singularities.”
“Empire” p57, Hardt & Negri (2000)

In the song Wuzhou Pleasure, the workers have the benefit of working in close proximity which gives them a shared language. This in turn allows them to develop the codes described in the song.

My Generation

My Generation is the culmination of the arc of self-mythologizing begun with their prior single Anyway Anyhow Anywhere. But where AAA is a defined statement of freedom and possibility, My Generation makes clear that these freedoms constitute a threat, necessitating an attack on the old. The earlier implicit violence is here made vicious and plain. However, Daltry here bizarrely plays a kid with a speech impediment so the words come out screwed up and scary. In the film version of Quadrophenia when the mods sing along to the song and substitute “f-fuck off” for “f-fade away,” they are exposing even more of the tune’s bitter center.

This song provides more bragging/self-mythologizing. The images in the video come from the Atari game Venture, illustrating the hi-adventure theme.

The Foshan Adventure

Foshan is an emerging center for international tourism in the Guangdong province. Sassen says promotion of cultural tourism has a dark consequence, the development of what she calls “survival circuits” for migrant workers, specifically the sex trades. So, another way of reading the song “Foshan Thrills and Spills” is by seeing its adventure theme as acknowledgement of tourism’s goal - to make the consumer feel like she is on an exotic adventure. Read more...

Daddy Rolling Stone

Significant links between Daddy Rolling Stone and Foshan Thrills and Spills include: 1) The call-and-response quality in The Who song (“yeah!”) replicated in the XGD song (“Oh lord oh lord!”); 2) The delivery of the XGD line “I got a sword that comes up nimbly to a point” mimics Daltrey’s wobbly “Till I-I-I come along” as well as 3) its sense of a swaggering dude stepping in to change the girl’s situation (although in the XGD version the scenario is recast as a rescue mission).

Our first stab at political content, about an outlaw who is never polite, except in the boiling climate of police repression that is Macao. Or what we imagined Macao to be.

Macao as a transitional space between global economic sites

Talent Flows Driven by Globalized Market Forces

Most Taiwanese merchant "pioneers" in the late 1980s and early 1990s were owners of small enterprises from Taiwan's suburban and rural areas. They set up export-processing factories in China's special economic zones such as Shenzhen and Xiamen and other coastal areas. Such labor-intensive Taiwanese firms create job opportunities for the host country but provide little incentive for Taiwanese managers to stay permanently in China. Normally, these Taiwanese managers go to China without bringing their families. They soon become "air men," flying back and forth between Taiwan and China through Hong Kong and Macao. These Taiwanese firms do not have long-term plans for their managers to reside in China, and thus do not create a problem of talent outflow.

Anyway anyhow anywhere

Intro
Townshend’s iconic guitar intro (you can almost see him sneering as he slams those chords) tips the listener off immediately that a new element has been added into the Who’s formula of defiance: a spotlighting of unusual sounds, sounds for their own sake, not pressed into the service of moving the song forward (and this of course was an aural mirror of the pop art costumes they started strutting in at this time). XGD replicate this effect with their own extended undulating, digital intro. Read more...

This is based on I Can't Explain's little-known flip side, Bald Headed Woman. The narrator in the song describes how he becomes a monstrous sexual predator, while the backup vocals describe the hideous physical attributes that turn the monster on.

A Global Empire Victoria City, or the City of Victoria, was one of the first urban settlements in Hong Kong after it became a British colony in 1842. It was initially named Queenstown but was soon known as Victoria, after Queen Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 - 22 January 1901)

Baldheaded Woman
1. When The Who talk about an ugly woman who makes the singer "mean, yeah lord" he's really talking about getting horny, dirty and deranged. XGD converts this into an actual sexual pathology: Daltrey was imagining himself as a bona fide bluesman; we turned him into a 20' stalker named Victoria.

2. Spare tone, the emptiest, most minimal sounding song in both Who and XGD canons.

3. Handclaps are deployed in both songs, almost as a lead instrument owing to the spare arrangements.

4. Daltrey's explosive harmonica solo. In the XGD version, this actually is used to aurally depict the monster, which Maureen can be heard attempting to fend off.

We worked on New Kowloon Joy for a ridiculous amount of time and it shows. New Kowloon Joy and Victoria Rapture were intended as a single to match The Who's first single (I Can't Explain/Bald Headed Woman), and as a result they feel different from the rest of the record.

Kowloon: global and historical context.
This is the original text of the speech that appears in the middle of “New Kowloon Joy.”

Asked where he came from, the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes said: “I am a citizen of the world.” He refused to be defined by his local origins and local group memberships. He insisted on defining himself in more universal aspirations and concerns. Diogenes knew that the invitation to think as a world citizen, was, in essence, an exile from the comfort of patriotism and easy sentiments.

XGD welcomes you to the ancient walled city of Kowloon, constructed in 1843, a few years after the British occupation of Hong Kong The British allowed the Chinese to house their military within Hong Kong’s walls until 1899, when the British suddenly attacked, only to find the Chinese had vanished. With nothing left to conquer, the British turned their backs on the little walled city and soon homeless people, gangsters, prostitutes and addicts, the products of empire, started moving in.

I Can't Explain is unique in the canon of initial entries of British Invasion discographies, in that it articulates elements of the adolescent experience that went otherwise undiscussed. While the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, et al, were creating protean odes to young love, young sex, and a new kind of alienated masculinity, Pete Townshend stood alone in identifying that most ubiquitous of teenage characteristics: the problem of not being able to explain how you feel. The tension between the passion of this age group and the inability to render it in language is arguably the exact tension rock and roll was invented to reconcile.