Original, Zhao Wanxi, New Weekly
Cai Xukun has become the king of rock and roll. Is it a distortion of the list or a loss of aesthetics?/Tuchong Creative
Popular music pierces the cultural undercurrents of our society with a sharp touch. It allows listeners to enjoy themselves while feeling melancholy. Between emotional reversals, bad money drives out good money, and fans bully ordinary listeners, thus creating a generation of young people who have no songs to listen to and can’t listen to songs.
Rock fans never expected that the hottest rock singer of 2019 would be Cai Xukun.
According to the Golden Tower Awards list, the top 1 favorite rock music of college students in 2019 is Cai Xukun’s "Rebirth", with a comprehensive score more than 30 points higher than the second-place New Pants Band.
The introduction to the Golden Tower Awards says it is "the most authoritative award in the Chinese campus market."
On the music charts that require fans to brush the charts, no one can shake the status of ikun (Cai Xukun’s fan name, homonym "Ai Kun") – even Jay Chou, the national idol, can barely match it.
In September, Jay Chou’s new song "Say Good Don’t Cry" maxed out the whole network, and as soon as it was online, it contracted nearly half of the hot searches on Weibo, and sold 2.88 million digital albums in just one hour.
But according to the latest "2019 China Data Music List", Cai Xukun’s EP sales in 2019 still far exceeded Jay Chou’s.
"The music market in 2019 is a win-win situation for the’Battle of Kunlun ‘." This sentence is not a good word for Jay Chou’s "Sunset Red Fans" or the ikuns who are struggling to win the rankings.
When Tengger is singing Wolf in Cantonese with Yang Mi, what other music is unacceptable?
All the quarrels between the needle and the wheat were silenced with the emergence of "Wolf Disco", a rap song that crossed the boundaries of earthy taste and literature, and was definitely a hit at the end of last year.
It has not only repeatedly topped the major music charts, but also appeared on the New Year’s Eve party of Hunan, Jiangsu, and Oriental in different forms this year.
The Internet Divine Comedy has once again become a brainwashing melody that we cannot avoid. Gyms, restaurants, bars… Every corner of the public place is urging us to draw rainbows on the left, dragons on the right, and Guo Fucheng on our chests; entering the virtual world, we receive all kinds of confusing "authoritative" music lists.
Mr. Zheng once described the current music charts as crap on the talk show "See You Tonight at Nine," but on the recent broadcast of "Roast," he said: "I have no right to judge music, because there is no music anymore."
The Tibetan Mastiff who refused to be docile seemed to be unable to do anything except not evaluate it./"Roast"
Even the former "Rock Tibetan Mastiff" Zheng Jun, who was so direct against major music platforms, could be said to be risking the world. After all, no one was willing to admit that his music taste was not good, and fans couldn’t accept that the songs he brushed out every day were defective music.
Everyone is forced to accept the cultural outcome of this business logic. Can this generation of young people really not listen to music? Or is it true that the Chinese people today have no songs to listen to?
Young people with no songs to listen to
It can be said that the "holy war" that fans brush the list originated from Wu Yifan.
In November 2018, Wu Yifan’s debut album "Antu" landed on the US iTunes music chart. Kris Wu, a slightly unfamiliar name to American netizens, overtook A sister Ariana Granda, Lady Gaga, Queen and others within a few days, representing American fans to exclude others from the top three.
Forbes reported that "Wu Yifan brought Chinese music to the West with a new album." Although this way of boosting popularity with money and yelling is not very glorious in hindsight, it at the time showed many fans at home and abroad the power of Chinese "bots" (water army) and made the world foresee the huge scale of the Chinese mainland music market.
The farce ended, and the results were cleared./@ifeng.com Dafeng
According to the "2019 China Digital Music Industry Research Report" released by iResearch, the size of China’s digital music market has reached 7.63 billion yuan in 2018, an increase of nearly 60% year-on-year.
The "2019 Global Music Industry Report" released by the International Federation of Phonographic Records IFPI shows that China has soared to seventh place in 2018 after entering the world’s top ten music markets for the first time in 2017.
Under the huge music market, there are many young people who have no songs to listen to.
According to the "2019Q3 Chinese Digital Music Industry Quarterly Report" released by your music chart, the largest proportion of popular songs in the Q3 quarter of 2019 was OST (film and television soundtrack).
As the saying goes, "Since ancient times, bad movies have produced good songs". Nowadays, there is no audience to watch good movies, and even good songs can only be collected from movies and TV dramas.
I watch dramas to listen to songs./"2019Q3 Chinese Digital Music Industry Quarterly Report"
In addition, the second most popular songs are from idol stars, accounting for 25% from 19%. In comparison, powerful singers and independent musicians are relatively weak.
Veteran powerful singers have chosen to reach the younger generation by singing OST songs. After many years of silence, singer Lin Zhixuan sang the theme song "Drunken Dream Past" of the anime "Master of the Devil Dao · Xianyun"; a melodious "Do You Know It or Not" made Hu Xia and Yu Kewei, two "old singers", return to the attention of fans.
Compared with male singers, the leading female solo singers in the Chinese market in 2019 are very scarce, with only 3% of the songs on the list becoming popular.
Among the leading female singers, Li Yuchun and Deng Ziqi are still the mainstays, and among the remaining female singers, nearly 50% are online rookies.
The slump in the Chinese music scene has almost become a recognized fact, but many young people who rely on film and television theme songs, new albums by idol singers, and online brainwashing divine songs to enrich their playlists will never admit that their musical aesthetics are inferior to others. Even if life is a mess, their musical taste is still perfect and invincible.
A few days ago, NetEase Cloud Music launched its 2019 annual personal summary report, and the circle of friends was immediately flooded with screenshots of various reports. It is rare for contemporary people to share their inner secrets so directly. Music has given us this opportunity.
Scholar *** once said: "Song playback, song ordering, song sharing comments, promotion, and learning to sing songs all reflect a kind of auditory egocentrism, which is a manifestation of narcissistic narration in the Internet age."
Under the general identity anxiety in society, people use pop music to reinvent their identity, and the significance of this load in songs exceeds the quality of the songs themselves, so that young people who "have no songs to listen to" no longer actively seek better music.
The draft "killed" Chinese pop
In June 2015, Mr. Wang Feng, who was deeply troubled by "making headlines", was completely angered by a candid photographer. He published an article through his studio titled "Without Wang Feng, the mainland music industry lost half of its country", stating that he had never cared that he could not make headlines. The article also posted various data reports to prove that without Wang Feng, mainland music would be "miserable" and "lost half of its country".
The name "Wang Banbi" came from this, becoming a label that Wang Feng could never tear off, but looking at the current domestic pop music scene, there is some truth to this.
The people who laughed at Wang Feng back then probably didn’t expect that they can’t wait to have a few more Wang Feng now./Tuchong Creative
Wang Xiaofeng, a music critic, once said that "one Wang Feng could rival all the rock singers in China." "Wang Feng understood how to take both rock and pop markets, and he was the first singer to let performers blur the concept of rock and pop."
As a "traitor in the eyes of rock listeners", Wang Feng’s way of fusing rock and pop is to become a mentor on "The Voice of China" and ask all the contestants who come to compete – "What is your dream?"
Since the birth of "The Voice of China", there has been a story group specially responsible for planning the stories of the contestants. The rock youth who once vowed to bloom in the rock industry has become the introduction to the sad and inspirational stories of the contestants in the talent show. I wonder if such a life experience can make his later singing career "fly higher".
"The music show is essentially a sign of the music depression," Mr. Li once said. "It’s ultimately a show, a trick." And this grand and long trick is about to kill the last breath of mainland pop music.
Wang Xiaofeng commented in his article "Where has the music gone?"
"The draft has directly caused today’s listeners to lose their aesthetic judgment of music. In the ears of TV viewers, the only word left in the aesthetic judgment of music is’singing skills’. They are more disturbed by the so-called inspirational life, gossip news, and gags. These contestants are instantly magnified to be very three-dimensional, but their music has become extremely dry."
Grassroots stars are propelled forward by a wave of overnight fame, with agencies providing blind and discerning young people with the lowest level of music products, convincing them that this is the best music.
The industry and aesthetic standards originally mastered by record companies were preempted by variety shows.
"These draft stars urged by catalysts have no professional achievements at all, and naturally they lack celebrity temperament. They are just celebrities under the saliva of social media," Wang Xiaofeng commented.
The deformed market mechanism is bound to produce only snobbish businesspeople and lazy speculators. Li Ronghao, who has assembled a team to produce new songs and finally released them from September to December, must have a deep understanding of this.
However, the audience’s enthusiasm for the talent show will not be diminished in the slightest. Every poor piece of music, when it is heard by the audience, the audience is trapped in this quagmire and cannot break free.
Only pop, no music
In 2001, six years after the death of the famous Taiwanese music producer Yang Minghuang in a car accident, his friend Huang Shujun was still deeply saddened by the death of his friend. Therefore, he chose the occasion of 1995 and released the song "Change 1995" to tell his nostalgic friend about the changes in the world after his departure.
There is a line in the lyrics: "Only pop, no music, I see that you are out of sight and clean, and it will be a good thing."
The prophecy of "only pop, no music" also entered the 21st century, and it has not been broken to this day.
The blogger @ChineseRock Rock Hell once said: "The so-called music industry is also quite interesting now. It never mentions the quality of the songs, and it calls out how many songs have been sold. After the end, the manuscript will be released, and the Chinese music industry will be revived. Everyone is happy."
The willful neglect of song quality is in part due to the failure of popular music to gain intellectual favor.
How many more songs can you listen to for your sweetheart?
According to the "Report on the Survival Status of Independent Musicians in China" released by NetEase Cloud Music in 2016, the professional level of independent musicians in China is still very low, most of them are self-taught, and only 11.8% have received professional and systematic music training.
Listeners and the pop industry as a whole don’t care, they all follow the pleasure principle – the industry creates the desire to consume, and the audience creates the consumption.
Fans’ enthusiasm for songs has been divorced from the music itself, and songs have become a symbol for listeners to prove their aesthetic taste and a host for material consumption.
But soaring chart numbers cannot disguise the collapse of the music industry as a whole. Audiences will one day tire of old-fashioned lyrics, cover adaptations, plagiarism, and brainwashing songs that always make it to the charts.
Last year’s Mid-Autumn Festival party, Tan Weiwei’s magic reform cover of "Dare to Ask Where the Road Is" was refuted by the original author Xu Jingqing./Tuchong Creative
Last May, the BBC published an article analyzing how emotions like sadness and loneliness have become more prevalent in song lyrics since the 1980s, and that pop music today is more aggressive and fearful than it was in punk’s heyday.
Popular music has pierced the cultural undercurrent of our society, allowing listeners to enjoy themselves while feeling depressed. Between emotional reversals, bad money drives out good money, and fans bully ordinary listeners, thus creating a generation of young people who have no songs to listen to and can’t listen to songs.
[1] "2019 Global Music Industry Report" International Federation of Phonographic Phonograms IFPI
[2] "2019 China Digital Music Industry Research Report" iResearch
[3] "2019Q3 Chinese Digital Music Industry Quarterly Report" by your music list
[4] The Symbolic Overflow of Popular Music Consumption and the Crisis of Modernization ***
[5] "Only the public, no culture" Wang Xiaofeng
[6] "Report on the Survival Status of Independent Musicians in China" NetEase Cloud Music
[7] Is pop music really getting sadder and angrier?. David Robson.BBC Music. 2019-05-14
Author | Zhao Wanxi
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The original title: "I haven’t heard a new song in 2019, it must not be Cai Xukun’s fault"
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