"Knock up your sleeping heart gently, and slowly open your eyes. See if the busy world is still turning around lonely..."
On October 25, Rolling Stone Records released "Tomorrow Will Be Better" In the high-definition MV, there are young Li Zongsheng, Fei Yuqing, Qi Yu, Cai Qin, Su Rui... this most well-known public welfare single in the Chinese music scene has once again triggered a group of people’s nostalgic thoughts. Will you sing this song, and can you understand the nostalgia it caused?
Rolling Stone "Tomorrow Will Be Better" MV clip
From 1986 to today, the "incomprehensible spring breeze" has blown the "young heart" for 33 years. It has been played as an episode in the movie "The True Colors of Heroes", and has existed as a symbol of collective consciousness in the fundraising party. Today, "Tomorrow will be better" as a classic nostalgic image, has become a representative of innocence and ideals. Synonymous with the 80s. Today's push is about the nostalgic aesthetic behind "Tomorrow Will Be Better". What are the different moods people nowadays have when they "sing your enthusiasm and stretch out your hands"? How do we aesthetically understand this artistic will of returning to "ideal"? What kind of popular culture does it represent?
Written | Feng Qing
01
Charity Songs and the 80s "Memories Kill"
With the high-definition remake of "Tomorrow Will Be Better" on the Internet, people began to miss the innocence and ideals of "Memories Kill". The "80s" formed by the convergence of emotions. That was the era when peace and development began to become the "wind of the times", and it was also the era when popular culture spread violently on a global scale.
In 1986, regarded as the "year of world peace", the emerging electronic media began to use various forms of entertainment to convey an implicit or explicit message to the new group of young people: long and fascinating The trembling "Cold War" world pattern is about to come to an end. The "Tomorrow Will Be Better", which was released this year, inherited the belief of the times that the work "A Family under the World" created by Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop" himself, tried to express the belief of the times: people on earth should make no distinction between you and me. , Peaceful coexistence, caring for each other.
We are the world
everywhere is a family
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
We are the ones who make a brighter day
"The lyrics
are undoubtedly not a novel attitude, but just an attempt to convey a simple public feeling, that is, "sympathy." The difference from the past is that emerging media technologies and increasingly free and people-friendly pop art techniques can allow the emotional expression of such public welfare themes to gain the widest and strongest influence.
was written by Michael Jackson and led 45 American singers to sing "One World".
Today, we can find many reasons to tout the era in which we live. We have long-distance communication equipment at our fingertips, we can always obtain the knowledge we want, and we can express emotions and opinions more conveniently in the field of public opinion. But this does not prevent us from feeling increasingly boring and flimsy in life. Therefore, we need more stimulation to mobilize our passion for life. And "nostalgia" vaguely constitutes a popular stimulus model. This kind of stimulation is not so "stimulating," but it can accurately hit our hearts and immerse us in an atmosphere that seems familiar but with a subtle strangeness.
What is interesting is that in the 1980s, in the historical scene where everyone sang "Tomorrow will be better", this kind of "nostalgic" mood has already emerged. The lyrics of "Who can ignore his homeland and put aside the childhood in memory" are intended to evoke not so much youth's endless longing for the future, but rather a review and reconstruction of the beautiful and simple situation of "childhood". The constant return to a kind of "ideal" purity may be an inevitable artistic impulse or "art will" in modern life.
After all, from the early aesthetic cultural history of modernity, we can already see many "nostalgic" colors. Whether it is Rousseau's romantic nostalgia for the simplicity of the countryside, or a romantic journey of returning to the homeland of a nation, it all manifests a sensitive rejection of the current civilized and urbanized life situation. Putting it in a larger context, this nostalgic critical attitude of civilization has risen to a sharp revealing and aesthetic resolution of various abuses in the real political situation of human beings, such as war, hunger, disease, and discrimination.
02
Nostalgia, the conservative root of popular culture
"Tomorrow will be better" was once the theme song of the movie "Heroes". In this gangster's grievances and grievances film, the song "Tomorrow will be better" is looming to show the aesthetic salvation of the endless greed and killing of the arena.
Similarly, in the real world, "Tomorrow will be better" as a public welfare song seems to contain the idealistic belief of great harmony, but its fundamental problem consciousness is that the world is not peaceful from beginning to end. Under the long-term tense world situation, with the rapid advancement of media technology, the cultural logic embodied in popular popular culture is no different from the ideal of the aesthetic community that began in Kant-Schiller during the Enlightenment period: seeking reconciliation in discord. Relying on artistic imagination, tell the public the importance of love and peace.
"Tomorrow will be better" in "Heroes".
Popular culture undertakes this important mission of enlightenment information transmitter because-the imitability and repeatability of emerging media technology requires the lowest technical and artistic threshold, and its form is easy to reproduce and reconstruct . Popular songs are characterized by "catchy", and the meaning of their lyrics is intuitive and easy to understand. In addition, the distribution method of album records helps to make popular art quickly enter the private domain of the public; the popularization of music television (MTV) allows the creation of audiovisual acceptance procedures to obtain a "synthetic" atmospheric effect-in KTV In the “music” space, the emotional resonance of the crowd will be implemented locally, and within a certain range, all social strata that are unfamiliar with each other will be connected into a short-term aesthetic community. Television stations, radio stations, and concerts have allowed a wide range of audiovisual acceptance to form a habit, so that the images of artists and works of art in popular culture have become "totems" and symbolized in contemporary life.
Out of the aesthetic impulse to achieve publicity, popular culture must integrate itself with the media. It is unthinkable that popular music is separated from modern media. This can further explain why popular symbols easily trigger nostalgia. Take the song "Wild Wolf disco", which has been popular on the Internet in recent days, as an example: whether it is the extremely graphic "shining light ball" and "big back head, BP machine", or the non-standard that can evoke the common memories of the whole people Cantonese all point to the symbolic systems of the "previous generation" that we have encountered and remembered again in the Internet age.
Just as some Hong Kong movies in the 1980s, such as "Night in Shanghai" and "The Thirteen Great Insurance of Shanghai", will rebuild the imaginative memory of Shanghai in the Republic of China, movies such as "Lei Luo Biography" in the 1990s or "Me and TV dramas such as "A Date in Spring" aim to evoke a romantic projection of the "turbulent times" of Hong Kong during the 60s to 70s when Hong Kong was not fully modernized. In the mainland, video art such as "Sunny Day" and "Red Sorghum" also has the same symbolic function of establishing the current subject consciousness by projecting collective memories of a certain stage. This series of popular cultural representations together constitute a "micro-historical drama" in contemporary life, always reminding every modern public of a simple truth: we are historical people, and memory has created our value choices and personality orientation. Therefore, we are also easy to be nostalgic and easy to return to a certain artistic "humanity" community. This is the root of the conservativeness of popular culture.
"Sunny Day" stills.
03
Why today’s nostalgia
tends to play with and collage the memories of the old
"Tomorrow will be better" In the above sense, it actually presents "Yesterday was better". All the exploratory lyric for a better future is not so much an inspiration for our future direction, but a restart of some of our existing spiritual genes. Popular culture seems to be constantly changing, but its fundamental core is as simple asOne: The most basic and most widely used is the momentary memory of aesthetic judgments shared by all kinds of people in society.
On this issue, the Western "memory" tradition described by the intellectual historian Francis Yates in his book "The Art of Memory" constitutes an important idea for understanding the "nostalgic" taste of popular culture. Yeats tells us: the ancient people's "memory" as "internal writing" can keep the abstractness of words and the intuitiveness of things and images in the brain for a long time. The intuitive and spatial image memory points that are deliberately set in different time periods will help us to effectively preserve the magnificent and difficult content. Compared with natural memory, the so-called "art of memory" refers to allowing people who do not have the original experience to obtain a certain holistic illusion through classic pictorial symbols, thereby helping them to realize the historical life. Subject construction. "Tomorrow will be better" is the concentrated expression of this kind of mnemonics-through memories, we have once again strengthened our belief in certain concepts and firmly believe that this belief comes from our original "human nature."
"The Art of Memory", [English] Frances Yeats, translated by Qian Yan/Yao Le, 99 scholars | CITIC Publishing House May 2015 edition
popular culture symbol system as a deliberate "memory", It contains the centralized preservation of countless aesthetic memories, and at the same time it can constantly arouse strong locality and atmosphere through the penetration of the medium into the body. Today, we will gradually realize the repetitive nature of “nostalgia” itself in the rapid development of Internet media, and move towards the “vapor wave” art that tries to play with mnemonic symbols instead of engraving or worshiping such symbols ("Wild Wolf" "Disco" is exactly a variant work of this kind of art that is once again symbolized in the media field and gained admiration). Although the core of
art is "nostalgia", which evokes familiarity through re-encoding and decoding of historical materials, it conveys a certain irony with the help of cutting, re-arranging and image errors. This kind of “anarchic” re-creation on the Internet has given the public sufficient space to preserve the memories of the times, which makes it possible for the “Internet monument” to be possible. In this sense, the position that the “vaporwave” tries to convey is emotion. The preservation and technological progress go hand in hand.
But from another perspective, this kind of art captures the mass memory symbols of mass culture and fully exposes the reality of play manipulation in its own process of play, so that the artistic operation track of the "nostalgic" basis of contemporary new-wave cultural experience is no longer Secret, and become the object of symbolization itself. This kind of conscious exposure of the "Renaissance" in the Internet era constitutes the aesthetic characteristics of this kind of ironic art that seems to be "nostalgic" but actually has avant-garde criticism.
"Vapor wave" nostalgia in this sense is not simply a monumental or mnemonic nostalgia, but rather a critical historical reconstruction called Nietzsche, in which an active consciousness exerts its imagination. The genius, but this genius must use the fragmentation and deconstruction-reconstruction of symbols to express itself. In the "Vapor Wave", nostalgia and memory are no longer seemingly free but actually immersed in the experience of illusion, but seemingly self-exile, but in fact, directly watching the meaningless nature of historical changes. Of course, the subtle differences between these two practices are not easily noticeable. Only in some subtle aesthetic analysis can we realize the two different dimensions of nostalgia: recalling "tomorrow" in "yesterday" and reshaping "yesterday" in "today".
author | Feng Qing
