He is a music master and a social activist. He rubs shoulders with the god of death without changing his passionate character
Jiang Feng
Character profile: Sakamoto Ryuichi, born in Japan in 1952, debuted with the album "Thousand Knives" in 1978, and was responsible The soundtrack of the movie "The Last Emperor" won Oscars, Golden Globes and Grammys for this. In 2014, he faded out of music due to cancer. In April this year, the Chinese version of his autobiography "Music is Freedom" went on sale.
has to admit that there are really effortless geniuses in the world. For example, Sakamoto Ryuichi, who has just released a new album and published the Chinese autobiography "Music is Freedom" with his face value online and excellent skills.
Unfortunately, this autobiography really cannot provide much reference for young people with musical dreams, because there are too few details and descriptions of the struggle. It is more like a memory photo album of the master, telling the story of his boisterous life calmly. As he said in his preface: "Pick up the fragments of memory and put them together into a story. This kind of thing is completely incompatible with my nature. However, I am also very interested in how I became the Sakamoto Ryuichi I am today. "
Oscars, Grammys, Golden Globes, how did Sakamoto Ryuichi, who won the three major North American awards? Perhaps, while watching the movies he participated in, listening to the music he composed, and then thinking back to his ups and downs, he can get a glimmer of answers.
surpasses the starting line of ordinary people
Regarding his achievements in the first half of his life, Ryu Sakamoto attributed it to his "environment". After all, for many people, he is a person who wins at the starting line.
Sakamoto Ryuichi's father is Kazumi Sakamoto, the editor of Kawaide's library, and was the editor in charge of famous Japanese artists such as Yukio Mishima. My mother is a hat designer and works in a jewelry store in Ginza. There is an artistic atmosphere all over her body. My grandfather is even more powerful. A well-known person in the financial world, he has served as the chairman of an airline company. He is an old classmate with the 58th Prime Minister of Japan, Yuto Ikeda, and a lifelong friend. The kindergarten Sakamoto Ryuichi entered is not ordinary. All children must learn piano as required. The 3-year-old Sakamoto Ryuichi also came into contact with music and learned to compose before going to elementary school.
Sakamoto Ryuichi's strong self-awareness had sharp corners in elementary school. One day, the teacher asked them to outline their dream career in the future. Some children chose to be doctors, some were entrepreneurs, and some were musicians, but Ryuichi Sakamoto refused to make a choice. He said, “I can’t imagine myself becoming a certain identity. Moreover, engaging in a fixed profession is a concept that I am somewhat difficult to understand." Although
did not aspire to be a musician since childhood, Sakamoto Ryuichi's talent has been well cultivated. When he was 10 years old, his family invited professors from Tokyo University of the Arts to be his piano instructors. At the age of 14, "prodigy" Ryuichi Sakamoto actually thought he was the reincarnation of music master Claude Debussy, and he followed Debussy. Signature practice writing. Today Sakamoto Ryuichi is obviously quite dissatisfied with this paragraph of himself, saying that when he was a child, he was "staying in a soft and warm greenhouse, almost nothing."
After entering high school, Sakamoto Ryuichi's literary youth is full of breath, and reading has become his greatest interest. He has always been among the best in the amount of books he borrowed from the school library.
In music, Ryuichi Sakamoto has a deeper cultivation. He imitated Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy in composition, and was required to "write a sonata in 7 hours" in the university entrance examination. He was the first to hand in papers and was excellent. Even if you don’t want to work after graduating from university, you continue to "lai" in graduate school and never go to class. The orchestral music handed over at graduation is still added by Daimin Lang, the president of the Japan Composers Association and the president of the Japan Music Copyright Association. Appreciated.
"If you want to strike up a girl, I usually talk about politics."
logically said, with a high starting line and full curiosity, Sakamoto Ryuichi should go on the road to "outstanding students" more and more smoothly. However, there is still a small flame in his heart, which encourages him to go further and further on the road of personality youth. When he was in college, he was deeply obsessed with the Beatles and collected photos and peripheral products of the Beatles madly. Only those who know the Beatles can become his friends; because playing basketball is very attractive to girls, he put aside music , Signed up for the school basketball team; and because he saw seniors who participated in student sports, his head was bandaged like the early Hollywood action film superstar Steve McQueen. He also devoted himself to student sports and read a lot Political books, including "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism"And the Communist Manifesto.
Sakamoto Ryuichi frankly said that for him at the time, the student movement had largely become a "weapon for picking up girls." "If I want to strike up a conversation with girls, I usually talk about politics.'What do you think of what is happening in Vietnam?' The other party will answer:'I think war is wrong.' Then, I will go with the other party. Demonstration and parade. During the parade, I will protect her considerately and ask her to stand in the middle of the line as much as possible and not be hit by the police mobile team."
In the 1960s, Sakamoto Ryuichi's ideas became more and more radical, and he shouted " Slogans such as "Liberate the music controlled by capitalism" and "Use music to serve the workers, peasants and soldiers" have even found a target of criticism-Japan's most influential modern composer Toru Takemitsu. The reason for the criticism is: "That guy Toru Takemitsu You actually use a Japanese musical instrument, right?"
But the master is a master after all. When Ryuichi Sakamoto appeared in front of Toru Takemitsu wearing a red cuff, Toru Takemitsu admired the "angry young" in front of him, and answered Sakamoto Ryuu carefully and carefully. One questioned: "Music belongs to the world, but it must also belong to the nation. It is the nation's contribution to the world." Takemitsu Toru's answer had an important impact on Sakamoto's creative philosophy one day later.
To this day, Ryuichi Sakamoto still has the blood of angry young people. Although he has settled in New York, he will fly back to Japan from time to time to participate in activities against the government's restart of nuclear power plants. In 2015, the Special Committee of the Japanese Senate passed the new "Security Act", and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who announced his rest due to cancer, also appeared in the crowd surrounding the Japanese prime minister's residence. Wearing a black raincoat, he held up a loud horn and said, "Please don’t treat this as a whim. Even if the Security Act is passed, it will never end. Please join me, stick to it, and continue the action. "
If he said that when he was young, Ryuichi Sakamoto did things for the sake of being cool, then now he really has a heart of innocence.
"To make music that people still want to listen to 100 years later."
Sakamoto Ryuichi is well-known to the Chinese, mainly because of "The Last Emperor" directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. In 1987, he played the role of Manchuria's "Emperor of the Night" and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Manchuria Masahiko Kanazawa in "The Last Emperor". Initially, the director arranged for Masahiko Amada to cut his belly to commit suicide, but Ryuichi Sakamoto refused to cooperate and felt that it was a shame to associate the cut with the Japanese. He said: "Masahiko Amazure lived in France. He is a fashionable and beautiful man. How can such a person make himself bloody?" Bertolucci was persuaded by him to change the plot to commit suicide. In the movie, Ryuichi Sakamoto also has a hysterical line, "Asia belongs to us" (Asia belongs to us). As an anti-war activist, Sakamoto Ryuichi could not utter these words anyway, and almost made Bertolucci "breath fire" at the shooting scene.
Compared with acting, Ryuichi Sakamoto's musical talent in the movie is even more amazing. In fact, before "The Last Emperor", he had already composed a piece in the movie "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", which was praised by popular singer David Bowie and won the British Film Academy Award for best soundtrack. .
It is said that when he was the composer of "The Last Emperor", Ryuichi Sakamoto was suddenly asked by the director to "come the soundtrack here", and he can always complete it quickly by feeling, really a typical genius. There are 3 composers in "The Last Emperor", in addition to Sakamoto Ryuichi, Su Cong from China and David Bonn from the United States. Unlike the other two, Sakamoto Ryuichi creates more and richer works. He is like a master, a mixture of Eastern music and Western orchestra. In the film, the soundtrack of Pu Yi ascending the throne and the theme song throughout the film are all made by Ryuichi Sakamoto. In his creation, the erhu, guzheng, pipa, violin and other instruments are mixed and blended, pushing the whole film's heavy sense of history to the extreme.
debuted with the album "Thousand Knives" in 1978, and won the best soundtracks of Oscars, Golden Globes, and Grammys with "The Last Emperor" in 1988. In just 10 years, Ryuichi Sakamoto has completed the world from Japan to the world. Span.
In July 2014, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has published more than 200 music albums, more than 40 film soundtracks, and more than 20 books, announced that he had throat cancer and terminated all performances. This year, he was 62 years old. Before he fell ill, Sakamoto Ryuichi also said modestly that he rejected the title of "musician" because "I am neither a revolutionary, nor have I changed the world, nor left any works that could rewrite the history of music. Simply put , Just a trivial person".
However, after fighting with Shinigami, Ryuichi Sakamoto's creative enthusiasm blows out again. In 2015, after a slight turnaround in his illness, he immediately returned and took over the original soundtracks for movies such as "Life with Mother", "Wild Hunter" and "Anger". In January 2017, he announced that he would release a new album "async". async, originally a network term, means "asynchronous", which means that communication devices are not required to maintain synchronization. Sakamoto Ryuichi borrowed this word to express a broad and tolerant musical concept. He ensembleed many sounds of different frequencies that did not seem to have intersections in one space, and magically produced intersections.
In order to achieve excellence, he has personally worked on all the contents of the album. He once vowed that no matter what 20 years or two years are left in his life, he will spend his time on music. "I want to make music that people still want to listen to 100 years later."
However, the pride of such a Japanese is not at all proud of his country. He said: "I am very worried about the future of Japan, since 2012. One of the most unfortunate things that happened when Shinzo Abe became prime minister in the year was that the Japanese started to boast and boast. Too many TV shows are like this, and I feel sick about it. Just like the so-called'Cool Japan', I think that's all Not cool." He said that he would not compose for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because "I hate the Japanese official, I think they hate me too". It seems to
that after enjoying the fame and experiencing life and death, Sakamoto Ryuichi still lives in his heart as an angry and persistent young man.
