Mulan, as sung by Lisa Loeb

For my first World Lit. class at UAH, we were given the assignment of finding an ancient text and writing, effectively, whatever we wanted. Being at the extreme peak of my apathetic, self-pitying state, I went for the obvious and chose the shortest text I could possibly find: the original ballad of Mulan. The text itself wouldn't be more than a printed page in the original Chinese (cf. here, may require some fiddling with text encoding), and the English translation isn't much longer (cf. here). I figured it couldn't possibly be too terrible, as I could just write about the Disney movie/Christina Aguilera if all else failed.

As it turned out, the story was pretty awesome, and I wrote a not awful paper about it. Seeing how the source material was transformed into the movie was nifty to the max, given how little there was with which to work.

When it comes right down to it, this song has absolutely nothing to do with Mulan or even my essay. The topic of the song is slightly reminiscent of Mulan, but it's actually about a princess instead of a peasant; virtually everything else is the same, though. It's actually extremely depressing if you listen to the lyrics, but it's such a pleasant song that I manage to look past that.

As everyone here ought to know, Lisa Loeb is the ridiculously cool/indie singer, who was the only artist ever to top the Billboard Hot 100 before actually being signed to a record label with her song "Stay (I Missed You)". Somehow, though, I'd managed to go without ever hearing this song until recently, and I've always absolutely adored her for her song "I Do".

Rin', the group providing the music for this track, is a trio of Japanese ladies who perform a type of world fusion music using traditional Japanese instruments: the koto, a 13-stringed, zither-like instrument that doubles at the national instrument of Japan; the sangen--better known as the shamisen--a three-stringed, banjo-like instrument; the shakuhachi (lit. "1.8 feet"), a flute traditionally made of bamboo; and a number of other instruments. I often consider Rin's music to be the true soundtrack of my life. In 2006, Rin' collaborated with Leigh Nash (Sixpence None the Richer) and Lisa Loeb to release an English-language album.

I present, for your consideration, "Anti-Hero", by Rin' ft. Lisa Loeb.