Songs Rhino loves, #60: Guo Ding - “Fallen Man”

An out-of-nowhere delight!

I discovered this song via a friend of mine who is a half-white, half-Persian Bahá’í who was raised by his “Bahá’í pioneer” parents in China and is only now moving back to the USA at the age of almost 40. (He is a fellow rapper, and I know he would want his music advertised, so I might as well use his name – he is called Javad Luckey!) A mutual friend of ours, a Black American Bahá’í who lives in Alaska (a truly wonderful man and a third rapper, but I won’t use his name because he hasn’t yet made his music public), asked us for our favourite songs of the current moment, and on the morning of 1/10/2023, Javad hit us with this smoky masterpiece of a torch song. It’s rare that I hear non-English-language songs sung in the style of a Solomon Burke or an Anthony Hamilton, but this stirring vocal performance paired to this dusky instrumentation reminds me of the best of what I’ve heard those cats do. Translate these lyrics into English effectively and make a few more cosmetic changes and I think something like this might be at home on North American or European alternative radio.

Speaking of an English translation of the lyrics, here’s a YouTube video which provides one. Ultimately I think they’re probably too allusive and cloaked in metaphor to make sense to an English-speaking audience to the degree that they probably do to a Mandarin-speaking one, but I still find them stirring! Either way, I warmly recommend giving this a listen – it’s very powerful.