Entertainment | The Chexican

An Amazing Media Year

by thechexican | Aug 17, 2025 | Entertainment

I grew up in a time when the “boy’s don’t cry” attitude was still a prevailing and unchallenged social attitude, and with everything that happened to me in my adolescence, my response was to grow callous and rid myself of the high emotional sensitivity I had in early childhood. It certainly didn’t help that those were also times in which presenting as straight-passing was a prudent survival mechanism. In turn, this has created a high bar for art in any medium to clear, and why I highly value media that is able to elicit an emotional reaction from me. The stronger the better. For everything going wrong in the world—the U.S. specifically—2025 has been a rich year for me in this regard. In music, television, and gaming, I’ve experienced very strong works that didn’t just entertain, they’ve moved me to tears and inspired a sense of resolve that feels critical in enduring the future ahead. 🎞️ Sinners Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster horror film certainly lived up to the hype. Without getting too deep in the subtext reeds and attempting to unpack a lot of the underlying meaning that the Black contingent on social media platforms have already discussed at length earlier this year, all I feel necessary to say is that the musical sequence midway through the film was worth the price of admission alone. That amalgam of Black culture across time that is deeply synonymous with American culture was poignant enough, but the inclusion of Asian dancers associated to represent the two Chinese secondary characters resonated with my Chinese ethnicity, in total a stunning representation of the power of music and the oneness of humanity. It was an excellent warm-up to the visual feast that was… 🏟️ The Cowboy Carter Tour Beyoncé tours are more than just music concerts, they’re major cultural and economic events at this point. Ever since her 2016 Lemonade album, she’s been on an insane ascent as an artist, no mean feat given that she’s always been an undeniable front runner in the...

mode of VULGAR

by thechexican | Apr 13, 2025 | Entertainment

This Friday, I went to go see Dir en grey perform for the first time since 2011 at the House of Blues in Anaheim. I was originally supposed to go with the same person I’d gone with last time I saw the band live, but they ended up not going. All of my subsequent efforts to find someone else to go—and eventually, resell the ticket—failed to materialize. However, I’ve never been one to be held back by the prospect of going alone to a concert. Rather than wearing one of my old Japanese rock band/concert tees, I decided I was going to attend repping my present-day musical apex, Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE, so I threw on a tour tee and my silver sparkling high tops and made the drive up to Anaheim in the early evening little after 5PM. Background I have a long running history with this band, being a first-wave fan back in the early 2000s when information and even their music itself was both scarcely available and heavily gated by language barriers and regional music industry practices. I had found I liked hard rock and many of its sub-genres at the time and was a fan of plenty of domestic acts, but Dir en grey was my first love in music. From their instrumentation to their aesthetic, they seemed to be executing all the best parts of the different American bands I liked on another level. Before Dir en grey, rock music was a single dissonant harmony to me, but at first listen, terms like “lead guitar”, “rhythm guitar”, and “bass line” immediately made sense to me. In those early days of 2002, with only a single English website that covered a few visual kei bands and only around 3 barebones Japanese language fansites, the only option back then was to pay importers or Japan-based individual eBay/Yahoo Auctions sellers $60+ for CDs albums and small fortunes for official merch. To this day, one of my greatest personal treasures remains that used first-press slipcase edition of GAUZE I spent little over $150 on. But things also moved quick in those early 2000s when high-speed home...

RENAISSANCE: My Beyoncé Experience

by thechexican | Sep 15, 2023 | Entertainment

I started drafting this after I’d attended the show in Inglewood, CA on 09/02/23 at SoFI Stadium, but between other responsibilities and time constraints, along with the developments detailed below, I hadn’t been able to get it to a “finished” state until today. Beyoncé & Me, a Brief History A member of the Beyhive I am not. For the majority of her career, I’d been ambivalent about the Destiny’s Child singer gone solo. In my high school days of the 2000’s, my tribalistic association of music with personal identity had me turning my nose up at music artists whose style didn’t require them to actually play live instruments. Pop and R&B were trite manufactured genres for competent singers without the actual musical talent to not need to rely on teams of songwriters to do their work for them. As I aged into and through my 20’s—and my sexuality as a gay male—my musical palette expanded. Real-world experience allowed me to start being able to better recognize the amount of time, energy, and labor that actually goes into things, doing away with that snobby simplistic delineation between “real” and “trash” music and assessing more on merit as best as I can gauge it without having any formal education in music theory myself. And throughout the 2000s, I liked Beyoncé well enough. Her voice was undeniably great, but her output was wildly hit-or-miss for me. I liked 3 or 4 songs off B-Day; I yawned at all the alter-ego nonsense popular at the time including I Am Sasha Fierce & “Single Ladies”; 4 had me back to liking a few songs and entirely disinterested in the rest. And then Beyoncé happened. I’d experienced “visual albums” before from Japanese musicians I followed long before 2013, but seeing it done domestically with such unrivaled production value was impressive. As for the music itself, it lyrically and sonically offered a balanced mix of rawness and refinement that felt different from her prior output. The comparatively tinny youthful voice got replaced...