Author | Ding Qianwen Editor | Fan Zhihui
Recently, another folk "grassroots singer" has become popular on the Internet.
As of May 19, the Douyin account of "Guo Youcai (Heze Shuge)", which became popular all over the Internet with his cover of "Promise", has reached 10.24 million followers, and the number of people online in the live broadcast room has exceeded 1.5 million. The highest number of viewers of this live broadcast also exceeded 27.74 million, with over 100 million likes.
Before May 9, Guo Youcai had less than 200,000 fans. He repeated live broadcasts on the street day after day, and was a drop in the ocean among thousands of Internet celebrities.
In other words, it took Guo Youcai 10 days to complete the transformation from an ordinary netizen to a top Internet celebrity.
According to Xin Dou data, the account "Guo Youcai (Heze Shuge)" has gained 3.14 million followers for three consecutive days since May 10. Among the average number of followers per day, middle-aged people between 31 and 50 years old are the main fans. audience.
What’s interesting is that this is not the first time that Guo Youcai has become popular, nor is it even the first time that a cover of Li Yijun’s old song “Promise” has appeared in the industry.
As a netizen said, "It's not that "The Promise" became popular, it's that too many people are nostalgic and it has touched the pain points buried in their hearts."
Barbecue has been unknown for five years. Not long after "Promise" World Knowledge
became popular, Guo Youcai's wife Su Chang described Guo Youcai in an interview with the media as "a very old-school person in private", and this main business is selling barbecue and sideline business Young people who sing live broadcasts also regard covering songs from the 1980s and 1990s as their main "business" in the live broadcast room.
Every day at 10 o'clock in the morning, Guo Youcai starts the broadcast on time with his iconic slicked back hair, a retro-looking suit, and slovenly stubble. This image also makes this young man who was originally born in 1999 look like a middle-aged man who has been eroded by time.
At the same time, the live broadcast settings behind it are also very elegant. The old BMWs of the last century and the Heze South Station, which has long been abandoned and stayed at the beginning of the millennium, all retain the style of the 70s to 90s. Not only that, Guo Youcai also used yellow pill packaging shells to manually create a retro and nostalgic filter with a sense of age for the world in the lens. What appears in front of the lens is an old-fashioned and familiar flavor.
This kind of deep nostalgia under the trend of the times has also aroused high resonance in the sinking city to a certain extent.
As mentioned above, middle-aged people between the ages of 31 and 50 are Guo Youcai’s main audience. This group has experienced the rapid development and changes of the times and is at the time of “reminiscing about their youth.” In the context of involution, lying down, and social trauma and pressure, nostalgia for nostalgia is the basis of reality mixed with loss and escapism. It is also due to the ability to obtain a certain amount of psychological comfort and emotional resonance from nostalgic beautiful memories.
Guo Youcai's retro cover hit the mood of this era exactly.
Some netizens described it this way: Guo Youcai sang about the vicissitudes of migrant workers, the helplessness of old bachelors, and the grievances of married women. The past came to mind. When he sang "You and I can't start over, can't stay, can't resist the fate." , "It hurt so much, and the force was so strong that I mustered up the courage to find my first love, whom I hadn't seen in 30 years."
This life-changing sentiment triggered by the pain of "The Promise", as the live broadcast slices spread on the Internet, eventually gradually formed the Internet spectacle of coming to Guo Youcai's live broadcast room and cyber "crying the grave" under the video.
It can be said that although there is no ostentation and he cannot be called a professional singer, his rich and full emotional narrative, rendering of a retro and nostalgic atmosphere, and the enthusiasm for following the trend on the Internet have become important reasons for Guo Youcai's rapid emergence from the industry.
It is worth mentioning that this is not the first time Guo Youcai has hit the traffic password.
As early as 2017, he had his first taste of popularity in Kuaishou with the style of a spirited young man with "Guo Youcai (Promoting Heze Bu)"; in 2022, Guo Youcai, who has a music dream, began to change his account to sing live and shoot funny jokes. He also gained attention for his cover of "Really Love You" during a PK with another Internet celebrity "Million Brother", and released the single "Really Love You (Talented Version)", but due to the The dispute over the goods resulted in the account being unable to continue operating.
It wasn’t until October 2023 that Guo Youcai, whose barbecue business declined due to the cooling off, officially re-lived as a singing blogger under the name "Guo Youcai (Heze Shuge)", focusing on the nostalgic style. Later, the spread of covers such as "Love Country More Love Beauty" and "Big Deal" also helped him accumulate a certain number of fans before "Promise".
After Guo Youcai’s followers exceeded 3 million in 3 days, the popularity of a song that set a city on fire also spread to Heze. According to
reports, the daily passenger volume at Heze South Station also exceeded 1 million in a single day in less than a week. In order to see the lineup or catch a wave of traffic, a large number of tourists and Internet celebrities also came to check in. On the Douyin platform, the "Guo Youcai Live Broadcast Third Perspective" live broadcast account has sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and can also get more than 10,000 online followers and more than 100,000 fans.
Heze Cultural Tourism is also keen to seize this wave of popularity, opening a special live broadcast channel for onlookers, repairing roads and base stations overnight, and providing free water and large pots of food to ensure tourist experience.
However, behind Guo Youcai’s popularity is also related to his own grassroots life experience. In addition to the popularity of his works, Guo Youcai has also become an inspirational representative who dares to fight against fate and uses dreams as horses. This is one of the reasons why he has gained great popularity.
It is reported that Guo Youcai lost his mother at the age of 10 and dropped out of school at the age of 13 to start his own business. After a series of business failures, he sold barbecue and live broadcasted to make money. The inseparable love story between Guo Youcai and his wife Su Chang also made many onlookers empathize with each other in the ending of "A good wife helped me become a successful person, and I returned a good wife ten thousand taels of gold", and found their own shadow, and even initiated grassroots rebellion. new hope.
For example, in most news reports about Guo Youcai, the focus of discussion is not "Guo Youcai's cover", but the issues of mate selection such as Guo Youcai, who is not good-looking and comes from a poor family, is not disliked by his mother-in-law, has a well-established mother-in-law, and does not dislike his girlfriend for not having money or material things.
As Guo Youcai said, "Maybe everyone also sees their own shadow in me."
Why do grassroots narratives fail so often?
In fact, there is no shortage of "grassroots singers" in the development of the Chinese music scene.
Under the boom of TV station auditions where the Internet is underdeveloped, all people can participate without any threshold, and many ordinary people with music dreams can realize their dreams.
Programs such as CCTV's "Avenue of Stars" and Shandong TV's "I'm a Big Star" were once rich in grassroots singers. The typical representative is Zhu Zhiwen, who went from rural Heze to the Spring Festival Gala with his cover of "Rolling Waters of the Yangtze River". . Even idol-oriented auditions such as "Super Girl" and "Happy Boys" provide zero threshold for ordinary people to sign up for auditions as long as they are of the right age.
On the other hand, in the millennium era when the Internet was just beginning to spread, street singing was also another stage for grassroots singers. For example, in 2008, Ren Yueli, the "Xidan Girl" who sang in the Xidan Channel in Beijing, and Xuri Yanggang, a migrant worker group who sang a cover of "In Spring", etc., were all well-known to the public and successfully entered the professional path. They were also recognized on the Spring Festival Gala stage. As an inspirational teaching material.
It is undeniable that "grassroots counterattack" has always been a popular storyline among the people, and the public is very tolerant of grassroots singers. The popularity of "democratically elected" grassroots singers also reflects that the public has gained a certain right to speak aesthetically outside the academic and professional music scene.
Now, with the advent of the short video era, grassroots singers have once again gained a new channel to be recognized by the public through the perspective of "Internet celebrities".
Artists such as Hua Jie and Yuan Shuxiong have become popular due to certain original or cover songs and have appeared on the mainstream music listening charts. Guo Youcai's version of "Promise" has also recently ranked No. 1 on the Kugou Music site's Top 500 and QQ Music's multiple charts. First, NetEase Cloud is at the top of the hot song list, taking the initiative in the sinking market and dispelling mainstream authority.
To put it bluntly, these listeners are the largest base of listeners in China, helping "Guo Youcai" complete a bottom-up mainstream counterattack.
Nowadays, the public's pursuit of Guo Youcai and his like is not accidental. For example, the amateur wild concert in Changzhou Cultural Square, the grassroots singer concert beside the Xi'an city wall, etc., have all been sought after by the general public in recent years. It has also driven hundreds of millions of tourists to visit.
It can be said that the popularity of grassroots singers also means that the collision of discourse rights between the elite and the grassroots is gradually blurring. Just as Linghua of Phoenix Legend once mentioned many times, "Young white-collar workers suddenly took off their headphones on the subway, and their (Phoenix Legend) song rang throughout the carriage. Under everyone's gaze, the white-collar workers suddenly felt ashamed." Self-deprecating music Depressed by being rejected by the avant-garde and popular.
But nowadays, the songs of Phoenix Legend are popular among young people as national songs, regardless of whether they are elegant or popular, but they meet the needs of carnival and decompression.
After all, there are successful cases such as Hai Lai Amu and Nomi Mo who have climbed from the bottom to the mainstream. Guo Youcai's popularity does not seem surprising.
Conclusion
Looking back, Guo Youcai’s popularity is just another grassroots representative chosen by the algorithm. It is a short video symbol for the public to express the emotions of the times. It is also a narrative of the times that we are happy to see in the development of short video platforms.
However, after Guo Youcai, there will also be "Li Youcai" and "Zhang Youcai". Under the communication logic of algorithm preference, there will never be a shortage of top grassroots people who "have no skills, only feelings".
is just the public's music aesthetic, which is gradually being monopolized and "directed blasting".
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