Молодость и Общество (S.H.E)

the journal

Youth Society is the second studio album by Taiwanese Mandopop girl group S. H. E. The album was released on January 29, 2002, by HIM International Music, four months after the group's debut album, Girls' Dorm. With the release of this album, "S. H. E Girl Friends" underwent a name change and became simply "S. H. E." It features S. H. E's first collaboration with Jay Chou, who composed "Tropical Rain Forest." This album features a larger number of covers relative to Girls' Dorm, including "Remember," "Give Me More," "Hypnotism" and "I've Never Been To Me." Musically, Youth Society incorporates genres like pop, hip hop, R&B, ballads, and Britpop. Youth Society was a commercial success at home and abroad, selling more than 1.25 million copies in Asia to date. In Taiwan, it sold more than a quarter million copies, becoming the fifth highest selling album of the year.

On September 11, 2001, the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center, S. H. E released their debut album, Girls' Dorm, in memory of their prior living quarters. It ended up selling an impressive 150,000 copies for a debut group, quashing speculations of an unremarkable debut due to the incident. After Girls Dorm sold an excess 750,000 units throughout Asia, recording for the group's sophomore album began immediately. In the album, in addition to Derek Shih, who is responsible for coordinating the lyrics to 5 songs, there are also Vincent Fang, Jennifer Hsu and other participants in the production. Based on S. H. E's sound quality, vocals, positioning and potential, the album was created.

The lead single "Remember" is a classical and hip hop style cover song with lyrics by Derek Shih; the original song is "Super Star" by Sweetbox and the chorus melody is from the classical score Swan Lake. "Remember" is also the theme song of the Taiwanese TV series Magical Love. Tso An an, who created "Beauty Up My Life" last time, created "Belief" on Youth Society, which is a lyrical R&B song with Chinese style influences that serves as a follow up to the group's 2001 song "Not Yet Lovers". "A Message of Happiness" is one of Selina Jen's favorite songs. The song, composed by Lotus Wang, fully depicts the unspeakable but truly touching friendship between friends or classmates. The producer wanted S. H. E to sing together in the studio, and they had to hold hands and sing together, recording under the condition of playing games and singing together, and collecting a lot of sounds of the three of them playing on the spot, so it would feel especially warm and real. The original version of the song "Remember to Forget" is the song "Suki na Hito" by the Japanese duo Kiroro. The song "Scarf" was written by Matthew Yen; while its music was composed by Tanya Chua. "Requirement for Loving Me" is a pop ballad written by Jennifer Hsu, which shows S. H. E.'s melodious harmonies and their respective vocal characteristics. As a more characteristic bitter love song, the lyrics "One can save his own happiness, don't cry for you anymore" exhibit a kind of bittersweet love. When they first got the song "Requirement for Loving Me" Selina, Hebe and Ella said that it was a more challenging song and also very distinctive, so the three of them felt that they should express the message of "Requirement for Loving Me" in a special way. "Hypnotism" is a Thai style dance song. The final track on the album is a cover of Charlene's "I've Never Been To Me". The track "熱帶雨林" (Tropical Rain Forest) is listed number 4 on Hit Fm Taiwan's Hit Fm Annual Top 100 Singles Chart (Hit Fm年度百首單曲) for 2002.

Similar to Girls Dorm, not all of the songs in Youth Society had music videos; the last five tracks used edited concert footage instead. S. H. E's second karaoke VCD combined the music videos from Youth Society with all four videos from Girls Dorm.