If you haven't seen the video, check it out here.
I think I'll hold a soft spot in my heart for the song, however, after witnessing how much it touched my taxi driver a few weeks ago. Most of my cab rides in recent memory have been fairly uneventful: I somehow communicate to the cabbie where I want to go (usually with spoken directions, though sometimes I type in the Chinese characters into my phone beforehand for places I'm not as familiar with and show the phone to the driver), the cabbie verifies my destination, and we set off. During most taxi rides, I'm usually regaled with Chinese talk radio (whose content I have mixed success understanding), or verbal notifications that drivers receive from people in the area soliciting a cab, or a boisterous phone conversation between the cabbie and who-knows-who-else. In short, I typically drown out the background noise in the cab, and just play a phone game or catch up on text messages until I reach my destination.
One particular cab journey, however, left an impression: after I got into the taxi and verified my destination with the driver, he turned on some music. He had the song above, "Just One Last Dance," programmed into a playlist. Though I doubt he understood the lyrics, he nonetheless sang along with gusto to his own interpretation of the song. When the song ended, he played it again. And again. I'm pretty sure I heard it about 5 times that evening as I headed home, and the passion in the cabbie's singing only increased with each rendition.
I found his singing simultaneously awkward and touching. In hindsight, however, I wonder if perhaps he did understand the lyrics. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to be touched by the melody of the song, and the lyrics matter less than the emotion. Something in the music spoke to the cabbie, and he felt no shame in sharing that experience with me (and I'm sure all his other passengers) that evening. I remain humbled by how open the Chinese can be in expressing themselves--the cabbie felt no need to hide behind irony, and if I'm willing to emerge from behind my own ironic defensive shell, perhaps I can admit to some beauty in the melody, as well. So today, when I heard this song in the cafe, I wondered what that cabbie felt and what he thought when he heard it.