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Hooters still hot in Shanghai
　　By Fraser Newham
　　
　　"Most of the regulars are foreign men. They come here to eat after work, and stay until closing time," Hooters girl Lucky Zhou says with her prize-winning smile. "My favourite is Mike. He’s American, in his forties – he comes here nearly every day, drinking beer, playing with the girls."
　　
　　Lucky, aged 22, is studying law at Shanghai’s Fudan University, and she has just been named Chinese Hooters Girl of the Year. Waiting to start her shift, she has already changed into the tight white T-shirt and orange hot-pants worn by Hooters girls all over the world. They fit like a glove. Chances are, Mike isn’t coming for Hooters’ famous buffalo wings.
　　
　　"Delightfully tacky yet unrefined", as the American chain chirpily styles itself, Hooters Shanghai opened its doors in October 2004. Dominating a strip of bars in the expat enclave of Gubei, the first Hooters to open in China now reportedly serves an average of 250-300 customers a day – and plans are now well under way to open a second outlet in Shanghai and one in Beijing within the next year. Lucky is one of 70 girls – many of them students working part-time – employed in the Gubei branch, and one of 15,000 Hooters girls worldwide, now trading big smiles for big tips in locations as diverse as Buenos Aires, Taipei and Neunkirchen, Germany.
　　
　　Hooters was not initially conceived as an international megabrand. The first branch opened its doors in Clearwater, Florida in 1983, a beach bar run by six buddies determined to have a good time and hoping to sell some buffalo wings along the way. Yet Hooters today counts as the tenth largest restaurant chain in the United States, and this year food and beverage sales will for the first time surpass US$1 billion. And while the Florida company Hooters Inc may retain the buccaneering tongue-in-cheek of the early days, it now shares the brand with a much slicker beast, the Atlanta-based Hooters of America, formerly owned by a friend of the original founders but later taken over by seasoned F+B supplier Bob Brooks – the man behind the Burger King milkshake, among other claims to fame.
　　
　　Under Brooks’ leadership, the brand has in recent years expanded and diversified at a speed which might impress Richard Branson. Hooters Air offers the brand’s trademark hospitality experience one mile high, with five aircraft now serving 17 cities in the United States. The brand has become a sponsor of major sporting events and has lent its name to a lifestyle magazine, a line of potato chips and a credit card. February 2006 will see the opening of the Hooters Casino Resort in Las Vegas, this time managed by the original Florida company – once again on friendly terms with Brooks after many years of distrust.
　　
　　And then there is overseas expansion, including China. "We chose to enter the Chinese market in Shanghai," says Misia Jin, the 29-year-old branch manager at the Gubei outlet, and a veteran of Shanghai’s hotel management scene. "Shanghai is the most commercial city in China, and also the most open-minded. Many foreigners here are already familiar with our brand, and white-collar locals are keen to try new things. You can’t say this about the second-level Chinese cities."
　　
　　Hooters is not the only major Western restaurant brand with an eye on a Chinese market already well-served by a range of independent imitators, all hoping to offer homesick expats and aspiring white-collar locals a taste of US-style sports bar culture. "Locally our major competitors include TGI Fridays, Malone’s and the Hard Rock Cafe," Misia told Asia Times Online (although the Shanghai Hard Rock is temporarily closed during relocation). Friday’s and Hard Rock can be found in most international cities; Malone’s, on the other hand is a Shanghai one-off – now 11 years old, the foreign-owned sports bar was one of the earliest major venues to appear outside of a five star hotel, and is the only one of that first generation still going strong today.
　　
　　What distinguishes Hooters from the rest, of course, is the small matter of 70 Chinese girls dressed as Daisy Duke. "Hooters girls are special," says Misia. "They are university students who speak good English – fun, open-minded girls. The guests won’t get bored."
　　
　　No doubt. But what does the Chinese public make of it all? Certainly in America there are people who have serious problems with the fundamental Hooters philosophy – with the result that the brand spent much of the 1990s fighting for its life. Particularly menacing was the unsuccessful 1994 lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, arguing that the company violated anti-discrimination laws by only employing attractive women.
　　
　　Hooters China, at least, one year after opening, claims that it has yet to receive a single complaint. This could well be true. Attitudes to commercial sex in China are ambiguous to say the least – while officially the public presentation of sex and sexuality remains strictly controlled (in the pages of state media, for example), the reality is that sex in China today is widely commercialized, sometimes with a surprising degree of official acquiescence. Hostessing, a largely East Asian phenomenon in which a woman drinks and flirts with a guest in return for a fee, is extremely widespread – provincial capitals invariably offer a wide variety of options, and far from the neon glow of Shanghai or Beijing even the smallest county town will support a dingy KTV lounge or two, offering an hour’s privacy behind a dirty curtain in a secluded booth.
　　
　　The Hooters management are understandably keen to distance themselves from such shenanigans, stressing instead the "good clean fun" aspects of the Hooters experience. "Our philosophy at Hooters is about being healthy and having fun – Hooters girls are like cheerleaders," says manager Misia Jin. "The atmosphere here is very different from what you get in the dice bars on Hengshan Road [a popular strip of identikit bars in Shanghai’s Old French Concession, where bored hostesses play dice and, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, attempt to sell customers brand-name whisky”>. Everything is bright here; we have large windows to let the sunlight in. The Hengshan Road bars are all very dark."
　　
　　For their part, the Hooters girls echo the company line; carefully worded suggestions of exploitation are met with blank looks. Instead, the girls bring their families to the restaurant to visit and join in the fun – and overwhelmingly they see the experience as an empowering one. "I’m gaining work experience here which will help me with my future career," says Kitty Ye, a real estate major who plans to study abroad. "My spoken English has improved enormously. Also, I’ve made friends with customers from all over the world, which has been very educational; it’s corrected some of my misconceptions about the outside world."
　　
　　"You’ll see more skin and booty shaking at your average half-time at a high school football game than you will at Hooters," concurs Mike McNeil, vice president of marketing at the Atlanta head office. In truth Hooters has always known where to draw the line. Witness for instance the contents of the chain’s employees handbook, recently acquired by the Smoking Gun website, which may insist on tight T-shirts, but also sternly notes that shorts "should NOT BE SO TIGHT THAT THE BUTTOCKS SHOW".
　　
　　The real controversy in the United States has in any case not been about the selling of sex; rather it has been about the use of female sexuality as a marketing tool – and this sort of issue is much less contentious in China, where it’s widely accepted that employers will consider appearance when recruiting staff, at least for jobs that involve dealing with the public.
　　
　　All of which suggests that China can cope with the Hooters girls – and as it stands the company’s prospects in China look good. As manager of Malone’s Sports Bar, Shawn Doyle has been serving burgers to foreign Shanghai for over a decade. "If they are really attracting 250 or 300 customers a day at this stage, I would say they are doing a good job at building an increasing guest base," he told Asia Times Online. "Talking to customers at Malone’s, some of them are also going to Hooters. But I don’t see them as a competitor – maybe we offer the same beer and sports on the TVs, but the concepts are very different in terms of food, environment and entertainment."
　　
　　At present the brand’s key strength in China is its high-level of recognition among foreign visitors and residents – and of course, not only do the girls speak good English, they also have lots of experience talking to foreigners; and for Ron from Detroit who’s only in town for four days, a few beers at Hooters probably offers more fun than an evening with the local business partner, no matter who wears the hot-pants. As such Hooters seems to be avoiding the fate of many "theme" restaurants, which often find interest dropping off once the initial buzz dies down – such as the now bankrupt "Planet Hollywood" chain.
　　
　　And the Chinese customers? "We are gradually seeing more local customers – including some who are visiting Shanghai from small towns but know us from our website," says branch manager Misia Jin. But with 85% of customers currently foreigners, it will be a long time before we see Hooters China attempting to emulate the sort of state-by-state ubiquity that the brand enjoys in the United States. The girls in the KTV dens of small-town China probably won’t be hanging up their miniskirts any time soon.
　　
　　Fraser Newham is a Shanghai-based freelance writer. His home page is www.frasernewhamfreelancing.com.

囧次元动漫 https://www.9ciyuan.com/

These Musical Genres Are Made for Mashing
　　
　　By KELEFA SANNEH
　　Published: July 21, 2005
　　When it came time to pick a single to go with the movie adaptation of "The Dukes of Hazzard," the producers evidently faced a difficult choice. Did they want a raucous country song? A Britney Spears-style club track? An old hit that everybody knows? Something by the beloved veteran Willie Nelson, who appears in the film as Uncle Jesse? Something by the teen-pop-star-turned-reality-TV-star Jessica Simpson, who plays Daisy Duke?
　　
　　Fortunately for listeners who enjoy a big-budget mash-up, the answer was yes.
　　
　　That yes came in the form of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ " (Columbia), a jumbled-up cover of the old Nancy Sinatra hit. The singer is Ms. Simpson, who delivers many of the rewritten lyrics in the heavy-breathing style usually associated with Ms. Spears. She is joined by Mr. Nelson, who sounds as if he’s amused by his garish surroundings. The song gets a staccato dancehall-reggae beat, interspersed with snippets of guitar and harmonica, with an aim toward pleasing both the country and dance-pop constituencies.
　　
　　In short, this is a song put together not only for a blockbuster film but also like one: carefully (and expensively) assembled with an eye toward capturing the attention of a few target demographics. Many analysts – including, recently, Edward Jay Epstein, author of "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood," and Tom Shone, author of "Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer" – have written about how this hunger for blockbusters has changed our experience of movies. But "These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ " is an example of how strange the results can be when this formula is applied to music.
　　
　　It has been three years since Eve and Gwen Stefani won the first Grammy Award for best rap/sung collaboration, and the new category was a testament (a few years late, of course) to the rising popularity of mix-and-match hits. A few years later, unexpected collaborations between big-name acts are more commonplace than ever, whether it’s Jay-Z teaming with Linkin Park (for the hit CD "Collision Course") or Nelly joining forces with Tim McGraw to conquer both BET and CMT.
　　
　　In mainstream music, unlike mainstream movies, genre still counts for a lot, which is part of the reason "These Boots" sounds so odd: you don’t expect to hear those performers and those genres all colliding, those fiddles sawing away over that electronic beat, that honky-tonk chorus giving way to a rap section that evokes Ms. Stefani. Ms. Simpson has a much bigger voice than Ms. Spears, so it’s odd to hear her hide it in order to pant the words in the verse. (By the time the first chorus arrives, she relents and gives us a bit of vibrato and melisma.) And Mr. Nelson seems to be ignoring the dancehall reggae beat altogether, delivering his lines under his breath, so quiet you can barely hear him. (This isn’t Mr. Nelson’s only recent foray into reggae: he has just released a reggae album, "Countryman.")
　　
　　Of course, this song was a strange pop confection from the start, written by the great and weird singer-songwriter Lee Hazlewood for Ms. Sinatra, who needed a hit and got one that might have been bigger than she wanted. The original lyrics delivered an oddly equivocal response to a no-good man: "You keep samin’ when you oughta be changin’," she famously purred, but the refrain both announces payback and defers it. "One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you" – but not, it would seem, today.
　　
　　The new version has new verses that turn a scorned woman’s vow into something not quite so dire: now the song is about how to beat a speeding ticket. "You believe you stopped me for a reason," she sings. "And I’m pretending my bending’s just for fun."
　　
　　Unfortunately, the music video doesn’t re-enact this scenario, although it does just about everything else. That familiar orange car, the General Lee, pulls up, and Ms. Simpson does something contrary to the spirit of the original show: she opens the door. (Why can’t she slither out through the window like everyone else?) The rest of the video unfolds in a rowdy bar, evoking everything from "Coyote Ugly" (her bar-top dance) to "Kill Bill" (an army of slinky but possibly deadly line dancers). For viewers worried that Ms. Simpson’s short shirt and shorter shorts leave too much to the imagination, there’s a climactic scene where she washes the General Lee – not very thoroughly, from the looks of things – while wearing a bikini. It just might be an homage to the infamous recent Carl’s Jr. commercial starring Paris Hilton.
　　
　　Given her ability to belt out ballads, it’s odd that Ms. Simpson’s career as a celebrity has had so little to do with music. By now she’s much better known for her reality TV series, "Newlyweds," than for any of her albums; it’s hard to think of another pop star who’s so recognizable despite having so few recognizable hits. And because of her biography – she’s Texan, and she has served as grand marshal at a Nascar race – she has become a de facto country star, even though she hasn’t yet recorded a country album. (It seems inevitable, doesn’t it?)
　　
　　You can’t have genre-scrambling pop songs if you don’t have genres, and that’s the paradox of "These Boots," which gets its charge from the fact that there are genre lines to blur. Which is to say that anyone repulsed by the success of this song should take heart: songs like this just might be helping to make themselves obsolete.