text | Linghu Boguang
saw another question on a certain platform, that is, are the top three in the Chinese music scene all from Taiwan? Then there are Teresa Teng, Luo Dayou, Jay Chou and the like. This question is too grand and actually not very valid. The biggest problem is that it is not easy to compare.
Because the so-called Chinese music scene ranks among the top three now, it refers to pop music in the commercial record era. This is because the political movement and market opening were relatively late. In the commercial record era, the mainland only caught the tail, with mainland rock and campus folk songs. , the contribution is also great. However, there are different measurement standards for Mainland art, which was affected by the three literary reforms before, and then there were a large number of high-achieving musicians in the Mainland system during the reform.
Strictly speaking, it is because of the different relationships between "political movements" and "cultural environment" for Chinese music as a whole. Probably because of the difference in positioning and contribution. The main contribution of Hong Kong and Taiwan is the pop music style, and the status of pop singers must be very high. At the same time, with the marketization, the audience in the mainland has been growing, but the artists in the mainland's previous system were ignored, but in the industry The contribution from outside is not low, and may even be higher.
To give a simple example, the benchmark for Chinese independent music and independent bands since 2010 is Universal Youth Hotel. Wanqing has a great influence and contribution to Chinese rock music, rock bands and Chinese independent music in the new era. They have directly influenced Taiwanese bands. However, due to commercialization and other reasons, Wanqing is still not very popular among the Chinese public. .
If you want to say that the status of the top three in the Taiwanese music scene is as high as the ceiling, Taiwanese rock music is a joke compared to mainland rock music.
is so popular, but is it really like that? There really aren’t many talented people in the Hong Kong and Taiwan music scene.
I have written about this issue many times. Whether a country or region’s music scene is prosperous mainly depends on the accumulation of music education, combined with the mature music industry chain, to create various modern music styles. Why is it like the European and American music scene? Strong, classical, jazz, country, rock, RB, hip-hop, disco, electronic, etc., all music styles are established by others. Just like film and television drama genres, they have formed industry standards and cultural systems.
The main music styles in the Chinese music scene. After the reform of Gu Jiahui and Xu Guanjie in the Hong Kong music scene, martial arts represented Chinese style, Cantonese opera evolved into local pop songs, Wong Ka-kui represented pop rock, and then it was all pop with various musical style elements. Have you ever heard of Hong Kong folk songs, Cantonese electronic music, Cantonese jazz, Cantonese rb, Cantonese hip-hop (either there are none, or there is no established music style system)
The Taiwanese music scene is better than the Hong Kong music scene. After the folk song movement in the 1970s, new folk songs, new Folk music, pop rock, Zhou Huajian and other Chinese styles are all the same, and then various music style elements pop, Jay Chou's generation innovated new Chinese style, Chinese rb, Chinese rap, pop rock, various styles merged, and then led the way for 20 years.
Remember, after 2010, Taiwan has not innovated or established a new Chinese music style.
If I had to count, it would be the new wave of Taiwanese romance represented by Caodong, Laowang Band and others. But in this wave, in addition to Taiwan's own innovative Hokkien folk bands, there are also retro psychedelics represented by Sunset Speed, and finally Caodong, who is influenced by mainland rock.
The peak of Taiwan's music scene was actually the 1970s and 1980s, the innovation after the "Folk Song Movement". Taiwan simply further simplified the Chinese music pioneered by Shuang Li, Chen Gexin and others. Except for improving the recording and mixing skills. The most typical example is that betel nut picking has directly changed from fusionjazz to guava.
Because around the 1970s, Chinese-speaking areas faced a problem. Hong Kong and Taiwan were economically developing and urbanizing. The first is to inherit the old Shanghai music, the second is the national music that has not been improved, the third is to directly face the impact of European, American and Japanese music, and the fourth is the impact of powerful red songs and national music after the three reforms of mainland literature and art.
Early artistic pop songs, red songs, lyrical songs, and modern pop songs are four completely different things.
Everyone started from the same place, early art pop songs, but they all faced decades of cultural development gaps.Others relied on ideological movements to liberate culture first, and when modern pop songs had already made achievements, you began to follow suit in making lyrical songs.
Compared with Taiwan's music scene, why is Hong Kong's music scene not good?
Hong Kong's earliest music was influenced by the mainland, because the early Hong Kong literary and artistic talents were basically from Shanghai around the time of New China. They fled to Hong Kong in large numbers, thus driving the development of Hong Kong's literature and art. For example, in the early days of Hong Kong There were only fragments of Cantonese-language films, which were dismissed by film and television professionals from the mainland and later joined by Taiwanese capital. As a result, before the rise of the three Hsu brothers, Hong Kong had always been dominated by Mandarin films and Mandarin songs.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Taiwan and Hong Kong were affected by the Japanese economic invasion and then the cultural invasion, and a large number of pop songs gradually spread. Yes, the father of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong literary and art circles at this stage is Japan, and the father of Japanese literature and art is the U.S. military stationed in the 1950s and 1960s. After all, in those days, the U.S. military passively brought European and American local culture and the U.S. government actively guided and domesticated Japanese local culture. .
Therefore, the literature and art of Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s can indeed be called the ancestors of Europe and the United States.
Taiwan’s pop music originated from the folk song movement in the 1970s, which was closely tied to the political background and social trends of the time. Luo Dayou was the master of the folk song movement. Hong Kong is much simpler. After the economy took off, the public's demand for local culture increased significantly, and they switched directly from English songs to Cantonese songs. Different seeds produce different fruits.
In addition to Teresa Teng, Luo Dayou, Qi Qin and Jay Chou mentioned above, why was the Taiwanese music scene so strong in the 1990s? Like many of Chen Sheng's songs, you can tell as soon as you hear them that they are Chinese style. A large number of Zhang Yusheng's works before his death combined folk music/Taiwanese folk songs with rock, blues, and electronic music.
Wu Bai's Taiwanese rock music is not in the Mainland folk song style, but it is definitely in the Taiwanese folk song style. Several singers from Taiwan's ethnic minority groups, such as Wen Lan, Dynamic Train, Gao Shengmei, and the biggest name Zhang Huimei, all have excellent Taiwanese folk song style works.
is the king, and his contribution is indeed great, but Jay Chou has also been praised too much.
The strongest music scene in Taiwan is here. In terms of music style, it is mainly Taiwanese new folk songs and new folk songs. The aboriginal movement developed many main lines at that time. Among them, folk music represented by Luo Dayou, Qi Qin, and Wu Bai has done a great job in popularizing national music, followed by folk pop, rock pop, and then pure pop. This is really the pinnacle of the Chinese music scene.
In fact, during Zhou Wang Taolin's rb, rap, and New China style period, they were already in decline, but they reached their peak commercially.
Zhou's songs are now popular because his generation of audiences are in their prime, so they regard him as a god. You must say that his influence is definitely there and his contribution is quite large, but Chinese music has inherent shortcomings in musicality (in the history of the Chinese nation, music has not been considered a good thing and not popular, resulting in modern music almost purely relying on Transplantation introduction), generally speaking, the ability to appreciate music is insufficient, so it is necessary to rely on lyrics to expand the audience.
Chinese happens to have a natural advantage in terms of lyrics. The Chinese nation has a long history of poetry, and it would be too wasteful to use it. As for commercialism, commercialism is not a bad thing, but the development path of Taiwan's music scene is one that gradually becomes vulgar (a neutral term, not a derogatory one) and deviates from social responsibility.
To put it bluntly, the commercial value is gradually increasing, but the cultural and historical value is exhausted, and the comprehensive value is declining.
The popular music that can be recorded in history in Europe, America and Japan is not all billie jean, but more country road take me home, or hotel california. Bob Dylan even won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Bob Dylan and the Beatles were in dispute for a long time, but they dared not say that the music is greater than the words. Many Zhou fans think that the words are not important anymore?
Words are not important. Isn’t it good to listen to classical pure music? To put it bluntly, it’s just that the singer I like has poor lyrics and is being compared to him, just looking for excuses. For example, when Zhou fans competed with guava singers, they talked about the lyrics they wrote well, how to stop the war and fight against the war, and how to protect the environment in terraced fields. Demeaning other people's words to nothing.When it comes to comparing with Luo Dayou, the words are not important anymore, the main thing is that there is no comparison.
Pop music is so popular without lyrics. Can Jay Chou's "We Are Growing" be popular? It's different if the words are changed to "Grandpa Brewed Tea". Are "Blue Storm" and "Huo Yuanjia" the same song if the words are changed?
html In 2023, following the passing of the Hong Kong music scene, I declare that the Taiwanese music scene is officially "obsolete"
Except for rock, folk songs, red songs and ethnic songs, which are songs with humanistic qualities that emphasize lyrics, the mainland can barely lag behind. All other genres that focus on arrangement have almost no ability to compete with the mature record industry in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
In fact, Chinese people in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand know very little about mainland songs. For example, in the first decade of the 21st century, mainland pop music was dominated by online songs. Although they tried hard to imitate the styles of Hong Kong and Taiwan, most of the songs at this stage They were all only available in the mainland market, because at the same time, the Taiwanese music scene was at its peak.
In addition to the firewall, it was difficult for mainland songs to attract the attention of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia in the early years. As it became more and more difficult to write catchy melodies after 2012, many mainland songs between 2000 and 2012 were dug out. The pre-2012 Mainland internet celebrities who have become popular in Taiwan on YouTube in the past 10 years have such songs as Asking for Buddha, Will You Never Come Back in Autumn, Will You Be My Wife, Love Song of the West Sea, Horse Rod, and Mistakes.
When listening to music in the Chinese-speaking community, everyone has the same taste. As long as the melody of the song is catchy and the lyrics are not too bad, it is fine. If you can write unconventional lyrics, it is high-quality. There is no such thing as high or low. In recent years, In 2007, Douyin's famous song was rubbish, but the melody was catchy. If ordinary people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia didn't still hum it, what's the difference between it and ordinary people in the mainland singing Hong Kong and Taiwan's Guava in 2007?
No matter what, because the Hong Kong and Taiwan music scene has been accumulated until around 2020, of course the Hong Kong music scene has long been outdated. A few years ago, Jay Chou was at the peak of the Taiwanese music scene, but with Mayday lip-syncing last year, Jay Chou wrote songs like "Christmas Star." Taiwan’s music scene is officially outdated.
