Ladies and Gentlemen - The Beatles !

 Last Saturday, Theresa and I saw the Beatles, as played by four Japanese guys, at a TexMex Bar in Suzhou, China.  Think about that for a second.  There are more bizarre twists in that plot than your average episode of the Twilight Zone  It's only one samurai sword shy of a Quentin Tarantino film.

Zapata's was the venue.  The band really did come from Japan.  These four guys took it seriously too.  The instruments are the same as used by the real Beatles....at least the 1964 incarnation of the band.  The suits and shoes are straight off the Ed Sullivan show.  The haircuts too.  The base player, the ersatz Paul McCartney, he is right-handed but learned to play left-handed in order to look just like Paul.  Each one played his character like a method actor.  Except for the drummer.  Poor Ringo can't get any respect anywhere.

It's a funny thing about English.  People say it is the language of science and global business.  But in truth, it's the language of music, the language of movies, the language of global cool.  Marcelo, an old friend from Brazil, told me he learned to speak English by singing along to Pink Floyd albums until the needles wore the grooves out.  In Strasbourg, people told me how they'd learned English by tuning in the Armed Forces Radio from Germany and singing along to Rock Music of the 60s and 70s.  In China, the best English speakers are the ones who spent their college nights in the KTVs...the karaoke joints...learning the songs of Bon Jovi and Madonna.

In China, more than any other country I've been to, they are rabid consumers of English culture.  The cheapest entertainment comes from American movies and TV shows downloaded from the internet.  DVDs are cheap and the typical Chinese shop has more variety than in most U.S. shops. The Chinese music videos that run on the local version of MTV look and sound exactly like the videos you see in the U.S.....even though the words are in Chinese.

This is not to say that the modern generation is abandoning the culture of China.  Not at all.  But if they have to learn English, then it's a lot more fun to learn it from a Hollywood film than from a language instructor.  The only downside is that folks are left with the impression that, in the U.S., everybody carries a gun, that all corporations are evil, and that the movie Twister is an accurate representation of normal Midwestern weather.

Anyway, the Beatles tribute band was a good time.  They weren't perfect.  The accent was more Kyoto than Liverpool.  (Think: Love Love Me Do).  And a couple of times the guitar playing was rough.  But they were good.  The best Japanese Beatles band I've ever seen in Chinese TexMex bar.