Leehom Wang - Musical Style

Musical Style

Wang's music varies in style greatly from album to album. Although he is classified as an R&B artist, Wang Leehom demonstrates competence with many styles of music ranging from traditional Mandopop, Broadway, jazz, rock, R&B, gospel, acoustic, Indipop, hip-hop, to rap. Many of the styles are infused with a Chinese flavor.

When he first debuted, he sang old school pop and acoustic R&B ballads. Starting from Revolution (公轉自轉), Wang began to test out R&B pop music, but quickly jumped to a quirky style of dance pop for Impossible to Miss You (不可能錯過你). Starting from Forever's First Day (永遠的第一天), he began composing rock songs with heavy electric guitar melodies and less emphasis on dance pop. Nonetheless, he still concentrated in light R&B music. The One and Only (唯一) became his only fully produced rock album.

Unbelievable began a new road of music for Wang. Aside from the usual R&B grove, he contributed hip hop and rap that was not clearly emphasized in his past albums. "Not Your Average Thug" was a newly composed R&B style with a huge amount of American influence. "Can You Feel My World" was a different style of R&B, and the song contained great uses of the piano and violin as the accompaniment. Fast dance songs like "Ya Birthday" and "Girlfriend" (Chinese: 女朋友; pinyin: nǚ péngyǒu) incorporated rapid rap and heavy drum rhythms. "Girlfriend" included a heavily emphasised chinese flute and a music style that is influenced by Indipop.

Shangri-La was the first chapter of Wang's new style, chinked-out. Chinked-out is a new kind of musical style developed by Wang that involves modern "west" music of R&B, Hip Hop, rap, and Dance, along with "east" music of heavy Chinese instrument influences, more notably the koudi, tuhu, and ijac. "Deep Within the Bamboo Grove" (Chinese: 竹林深處; pinyin: zhú lín shēnchù) which emphasized samples of Tibetan Opera, and different minority tribes in Yunnan and other remote areas of China.

Then, I coined the term chinked-out. Derived from the historically derogatory racial slur chink, used to put-down Chinese people, chinked-out reclaims the word, turns its negative connotations upside-down, and uses them as material to fuel the new sound of this music. The term describes an effort to create a sound that is international, and at the same time, Chinese. In this album, I decided to implement some of China's most precious and untapped resources, the musics of its shaoshu minzu, or ethnic minorities, concentrating on the regions of Yunnan, Shangri-La, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia. This is not one of those world music CDs. It's an R&B/hip hop album that creates a new vibe the whole world can identify as being Chinese.

— Leehom Wang on Shangri-La