Text | Huo Yan
"The evening star is like your eyes killing people and setting fires, you don't say anything, the wild wind disturbs me." Simple melodies, lyrics, and a sense of picture: aurora, fireworks, heavy snow, white hair, the Mohe Ballroom in 1980... The images that come to mind become more concrete because of the spread of short videos. Someone edited "Mohe Ballroom" and "Daytime Fireworks" together, the gray dance hall, Liao Fan in a worn-out leather jacket danced alone with a cigarette, his steps were hesitant but leisurely.
For this song, there are countless interpretations and comments on the Internet, focusing on the love of the Northeast and the 80s.
Northeast China, the eldest son of the former republic, has gradually fallen behind with the huge structural transformation and industrial adjustment of Chinese society, and has become a place where many people want to escape. While the Northeast is painfully undergoing a metamorphosis from center to edge, it becomes a familiar and unfamiliar landscape in the artwork. First, a series of exaggerated and satirical comedies in the 90s turned the northeast into an "earthy" symbol. In recent years, it has been "Tiexi District", "The Piano of Steel", "Daytime Fireworks" and the novels of Shuang Xuetao and Ban Yu, which have risen a trend of "Northeast Renaissance" and "Northeast Scar Literature", depicting the streets of Xiaoser, the closed factories, the middle-aged people who are not ambitious and the air that is always chaotic.
For young people who gather in first- and second-tier cities to experience rapid changes, the overall regression of a place is an unusual experience. The northeast seems to run counter to this era, others are desperately moving forward, but it is helplessly retreating. Gradually, the northeast, which has encountered various difficulties, has become a symbol that can be consumed, it is the background of Xiao Ser in the short video, the exaggerated look in the film and television drama, the memory of the father in the novel, the counterpart of the "reality care" and "bottom concern" in the commentary, and the "edge" where people in the center begin to be fascinated. The symbolized northeast is static, frozen there as soon as it appears, and how the dynamic development process of the northeast over the decades has rarely been shown step by step from glory to this.
Also symbolized are the people who live here. With the popularity of a series of literary and artistic works such as Zhao Benshan's sketches, duo turns, "Country Love" and "Liu Laogen", we have an almost stereotypical understanding of northeast people such as tacky, funny and vain. In recent years, a series of works that have been dubbed "Northeast Scar Literature" have brought up a new image of Northeast People in front of our eyes, who are decadent, marginal, empty, depressed, and stoic. But what remains unchanged is the tenacious vitality of the northeast people, in the irony to dissolve the pain of being abandoned by the times, they always have a reason to persevere and a way to enjoy themselves.
These people come slowly from the 80s, and people are always desperately nostalgic for the 80s and give it more and more aura. Nostalgia stems from the dissatisfaction of the present, before our dream was to look forward, now our dream is to look back. For a long time, literary and artistic works tended to treat the 80s singlely, depicting it as a passionate literary and artistic era, coupled with a dreamy filter, so that people had the impulse to compare themselves. The 80s looked colorful, excited, and catching up with the pace of modernization, while the present moment that belonged to us was flat, boring, and crushed by numerical calculations.
But the '80s weren't monolithic. The "Northeast Renaissance" and "Northeast Scar Literature" are a reimagining of our lives mediated by our parents, so that we reflect a different kind of 80s and 90s in front of our eyes, and then find that it is not only the atmosphere of the time, but also those who are determined in their hearts. From the glory of the 80s to the bleak fate of the 90s, although their parents look like a loser, they are always full of pride and dignity in their hearts in the tragic struggle with the big times. Of course, this imagination is inevitably beautified, we give our fathers many beautiful qualities that we lack, and the descriptions of their sufferings are becoming more and more homogeneous, thus achieving a false intergenerational reconciliation.
Through the creation of those sense of atmosphere and character, "Northeast" is no longer a "place" concept, but has become an era concept, representing a special era of the next group of people living in a special way. They are marginal, hurt, and unable to seek the truth. They are persistent, tenacious, and poetic.
The Northeast, the 80s, and the love story are the three elements that make up "Mohe Ballroom", and what connects them is literature.
Creator Liu Shuang said that he met an old man when he was collecting wind in Mohe, and after only five minutes of chatting, he sketched a story: an old man named Zhang Dequan, whose wife was killed in the 1987 Daxinganling "May 6" forest fire accident, has not remarried for more than 30 years, and has no children, he often goes to the "Mohe Dance Hall" to dance alone to commemorate his wife who loved to dance before his death.
Social events and criminal cases have become the treasure house of the theme of "Northeast Renaissance" and "Northeast Scar Literature", which can not only condense complex social elements, but also transform emotions into "legends". Using this as a starting point, Liu Shuang continued to fill in literature, and he wrote a letter in the first person, which was full of flowery rhetoric and literary imagination.
The evening star is obsessed with the night space under the four no-man's eyes, and refuses to tell the reason for patronizing the planet, like the clear eyes under your soft eyelashes, and the life has put a fire in my place, there is no reason, there is no reason.
Kangshi, what haunts me in my dreams is often you running among the burning buildings, the flames jumping on the hem of your skirt, fainting on your chest, you running anxiously, calling my name, but I am not by your side. For 30 years, it has been lingering. Sometimes I really get lucky, but I think to myself that you may have managed to escape to the forest in the east, where you built streams and moss, transformed into deer, and danced thoroughly.
In terms of literary standards, this letter appears to be contrived, "Kang's", "Beiping" and other titles pretend to be the Kiss of the Republic of China, similar to "You may have successfully escaped to the forest in the east, built streams and moss, and transformed into a deer", which has the shadow of the youth literature of that year, and the plot of barn dancing is borrowed from the movie "Once Upon a Time in America". Liu Shuang tells a social event with complicated imagery, and behind the rhetoric and lyricism, the truth of the story cannot be verified.
The interesting thing about "Mohe Ballroom" is that it is originally a literary creation, and the details are derived from the fiction of the creator, but it constantly relies on the 1987 news reminder: the story is true, the emotion is true, as for the details, please do not dwell on the truth and falsehood. On the surface, it is a realistic narrative, with a perspective that cares about social events and the characters at the bottom, but in fact, all emotions come from the narrator and are full of his personal imagination. The author himself also confessed: "I did not leave the contact information of the old man, and I mentioned in "Goodbye to the Evening Star", the name is also a pseudonym, in the content of the simple conversation of less than five minutes, I only learned the time, place, characters, events, after my consent, back to Beijing to write lyrics, the article is based on the factual background of this less than five minutes of conversation, a lot of self-filling and literary imagination. Nor did I expect that niche songs would face the public eye, and I would not have the heart to consume empathy. Please friends from all walks of life, don't go to the door to find, chickens and dogs are restless, let them turn out the dusty memory to satisfy everyone's curiosity. ”
Despite this, it is still impossible to stop people from adding their imagination and reinterpreting. This also incorporates the official background, the Mohe Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism released a number of introductory videos about "Mohe Ballroom", and invited everyone to have the opportunity to travel to Mohe to punch in, turning the poignant love story into a publicity for the image of Mohe. All kinds of media have a keen sense of smell and want to continue to track down clues, concoct a social report or a non-fiction creation. The owner of the dance hall immediately reopened the dance hall, and the locals pulled out their mobile phones one after another, looking for a possible "Zhang Dequan" old man on the street, vying to become witnesses. Brushing short videos, we were touched by love stories on the one hand, and on the other hand, we brought ourselves into it, and with the first snow of this winter, people walked out of their homes to dance in the cold wind, performing loneliness in front of the camera, like a performance art.
In this way, reality and fiction are like the air in the northeast, chaotic and chaotic, haunting together. People don't care about the truth at all, and they can't afford to seek the truth. All they need is a love story and a solo dance scene, immersed in it unreservedly, imagining themselves as an old man from the 80s, with a loyal love, turning sadness into a legend.
If you compare, you will find that the solo version of "Mohe Ballroom" is not outstanding. In the LIVE live version, when the audience gritted their teeth and sang "The evening star is like your eyes killing and setting fire", "Desert River Ballroom" is no longer a story of one person, but a carnival of a group of people. When the romantic story of the individual satisfies the collective love fantasy, when the prosperity of the center produces the so-called "care of the times" and "strong nostalgia" on the edge of the contrast, we touch ourselves in this way.