Context: I am looking over the "Humans" section in the Ben cao gang mu, or Materia Medica, Arranged according to Drug Descriptions and Technical Aspects, by Li Shizhen, famed physician of the 16th century. It's the most famous of a considerable corpus of Chinese medical texts, and features all sorts of herbs, minerals, and fauna.
Boring background over, let's get to why I'm bothering to post though a week and more's worth of reading is dangling like the Sword of Damocles above me. When I typed the title into Teh Internetz, this is what I found:
A MUSIC VIDEO OF JAY CHOU RAPPING ABOUT HERBAL MEDICINE.
Okay, in case you're not convinced that naming a song after a frigging early modern medical encyclopedia is totally sweet/bizarre, here're some on-the-spot teaser translations of the lyrics:
You can't cut the deer horn too thin,
you can't screw around when you're learning from the old master.
Turtleshell jelly, Yunnan ginseng powder
and dried caterpillars,
your own music, your own medicine,
the amounts are just right.
Yeah, listen up, Chinese medicine's bitter,
copying out formulas is even bitterer,
you better open up that Ben cao gang mu and read you some fair-copy editions.
Toads and lizards, they've traveled all over the jianghu*,
these venerable ancestors' efforts, we can't lose them.
I detest rap as a rule (and its associated culture of "hos" and "pimps" and violence, which you can witness in the first minute or so of that video**), but Chou's songs have generally been a lot more closely tied to tradition--either in musical influence or in themes, and this one is just awesomely ridiculous. I mean, FAIR-COPY EDITIONS? Can we imagine an American rapping about those?
(In case you weren't convinced yet to watch, there really are some scandalously clad ladies.)
*Jianghu-a term in martial knight-errant (wuxia) novels that refers to the sort of "parallel world" in which aforementioned knights-errant move. Literally, "rivers and lakes."
**Strangely enough, the sexy ladies seem to more or less go away after an initial "hook"...
