Tradition EP (5/4/2022)

 Tradition is the debut EP of Monsune, a Chinese-Canadian artist from Toronto, and it is really, really good. There is a lot I want to say about this EP, but in this post I'll just limit myself to a concise analysis of his lyrics. At first glance, some of the lyrics do seem to be pretty stereotypical words about love and whatnot, but as you look deeper you start to see a lot of metaphors and allusions to his childhood and experiences growing up.

Lets look at the first song, 1998, for example. At first glance, it does seem to be about some girl he met in 1998. (This idea is shared by bruhbean on this song's genius page, which can be found here: https://genius.com/Monsune-1998-lyrics). Yet, I think that there is a lot more to this song. Monsune (aka. Scott Zhang) was 19 years old when he first released his first single "Nothing In Return" in 2017, which means that he was actually born in the year 1998. Putting this into context, it begins to seem as though that the person that he is talking to may be one of his parents, especially with the lines such as "baby is a bird bird now."

This post used to be some long post analyzing Tradition, which is the debut Ep of Monsune, aka Scott Zhang, who is a Chinese-Canadian artist from Toronto. I wanted to just go through each of the lyrics, Genius-style, and try to explain what my take on everything was. But that was too much work, so I just swept the project aside.

So instead of doing all that analysis, I want to just go over each song and give just some general thoughts on it, as well as some general thoughts on the music in general.

1998, the opener, is a song about himself and his parents. 1998 is the birth year of Scott (I'm going to call him Scott now, I am that pretentious), and it's a reflective song about growing up, at its core. Scott was 21 when he wrote this, and I completely understand the way he seems to feel about life as a young adult. The opener even states that "I'm at that weird age where I can't tell if I'm an adult or still a child," which is the perfect way to describe young adulthood. Speaking from my own experience, I still feel like a child, but at the same time I realize that I am an adult, and that there is no going back to my childhood, which is mirrored in the lyrics:

But the day that I grow up

I'm never coming home

And I still remember us

Rolling with the windows down

But I guess our time is up

Baby is a big bird now

Cloud is a trickier song to place for me. I think that it's about him wanting to be away from his parents, and telling them that he doesn't need his advice, and all he wants is to enjoy life in the moment (hence, all the times saying "we can get high" in the song).

Outta My Mind is a song about a girl. But dig deeper, and I think that it's also about his uncertain future. Scott is always thinking about his future, as a young adult and especially as an aspiring musician. This is shown in the chorus, where he says "don't care if you ain't my type/Don't even know you/But I can't get you outta my mind." He doesn't know if the future will be one that he likes, but he still can't stop thinking about it.

Mountain was also a weird one for me to understand. Ultimately, I think that it's about his relationship to music. He doesn't want to need music to survive (relying on music to make a living, which is a very risky path), but at the same time he still is surrounded by his music at all times. The music makes him feel great and he has fun making it, but he doesn't know if it will all work out in the end, as shown from the lyrics in Verse 3:

You get me high, higher than a mountaintop

Higher than an astronaut

But can you get me high enough?

I think the part about him saying that he wants to get high even links back to Cloud, implying that that song also has something to do with his relationship to music.

Jade is probably my favorite song, at least thematically, from the EP. It takes about his Chinese immigrant heritage, from its name, to the description of how he comes back to China every summer in the very first verse. It has this cute little part where he imagines his homeland sending him off, telling him that it wants him to leave, as it has its own problems too (ex: I've got bills to pay, too). There's a sort of push pull here that I think a lot of immigrants or children of immigrants feel. He says that he wants to "go home," but at the same time he has already lived in the new land for so long that he is a citizen of his new country. In the second verse, Scott says that he will come home, but then that's cut short by a little bit of uncertainty, as he adds an "if you want." The truth is, Asian Americans (or I guess Asian Canadian, in Scott's case) are their own category. We aren't completely Asian with our imperfect mastery of the Asian languages, and I'd wager to say that most of us are more American than Asian. We feel the need to return to the homeland, but sometimes we might not be welcomed anymore.

And then the EP ends with a final statement saying "I don't know, sometimes you just grow up like that." I love that ending. It brings the EP back full circle, having Scott come to acceptance with the fact that he is grown up and that nothing will change that.