To this day, Zhu Zheqin's name is still associated with "Sister Drum". She is Chinese mainland true world music singer and the only female singer with international influence.
Today's listeners, it is difficult to imagine the brilliant achievements of "A Sister Drum" and "Yangjinma" in the 1990s.
Later, many female singers in the mainland tried to follow the path of Zhu Zheqin's year, from pop or ethnic crossover to world music, but none of the latecomers reached the height of her year.
You know, "Yangjinma" premiered in 81 countries and regions that year. Until then, only Elvis Presley, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey had been treated equally.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Zhu Zheqin's musical career reached its most brilliant peak. Because of this, Zhu Zheqin's image was prematurely solidified by the outside world, although her musical world and inner pursuits are actually very diverse.
According to the eyes of the world, she could have used this to dominate the domestic music scene, but Zhu Zheqin's personality determined that she preferred a free and free life.
This personality matches her diverse and mixed musical style. It was also doomed that she would not become a pop artist in the usual sense. Although she did debut as a pop singer that year.
People who do not know enough about her early experience will be surprised that Zhu Zheqin participated in the CCTV Youth Song Contest. It was at the Youth Song Contest that she became famous in one fell swoop and started her singing career. Therefore, only Zhu Zheqin, who stood out from the previous CCTV Youth Song Contest and eventually went to the world, not the ones that people often mention.
At that time, Zhu Zheqin was just a fledgling, and he was only a pop singer, and he had not been influenced by world music. At the 1990 CCTV Youth Song Contest, she sang a touching song called "A True Story", which some people also called "The Story of the Red-crowned Crane".
This song spread throughout the country at that time, and many people were familiar with it, but they did not know that the person who sang it was Zhu Zheqin.
The inspiration for this song comes from a real story that happened that year: a college student named Xu Xiujuan was unfortunately killed in the process of protecting a red-crowned crane.
Xu Xiujuan is the child of a fisherman's family in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang, and has a strong affection for nature and animals since childhood. At the age of 17, he came with his father to the Zhalong Nature Reserve to raise red-crowned cranes. Her crane taming skills soon became famous both chinese and foreign.
In 1986, Xu Xiujuan was invited to raise red-crowned cranes in The Yancheng Nature Reserve in Jiangsu Province, and the following year, due to an accident, she was killed in the swamp. In honor of Xu Xiujuan, composer Xie Chengqiang wrote her deeds into a song.
The theme of a college student dying to save a red-crowned crane is completely different from the common male and female love in popular songs, but with compassionate humanistic care and ecological spirit.
At that time, such songs were very rare in China. Zhu Zheqin won the second place in the popular singing group of the Youth Song Contest that year with this song. Debuting with this song also seems to foreshadow the musical path she will take in the future.
"A True Story" still sounds so moving to this day, and Zhu Zheqin's early singing voice is not as rich in pristine wild beauty as later. At that time, Zhu Zheqin still used a typical popular singing method, which was indeed very different from the later Zhu Zheqin.
This difference, just like the early Faye Wong imitating Teresa Teng's style to sing "Obsessed without Regret", is very different from the classic style formed by the singer later.
Despite this, "A True Story" is still a very important work in Zhu Zheqin's musical career, especially the reverence for natural life embodied in the song, which is still worth savoring.
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