The ballad stands "by the roadside", "in search of some everyday miracle"; Folk musicians "discover" some melodies in people's lives, "pick it up", and then use folk songs to give back to people.
Author: Lan Er
Editor: Prince Zhi
Format: Wang Wei
The "medicine primer" pulls out the emotional energy that exceeds expectations
The warm comfort finally made people cross the cold winter.
At the time of the winter and spring solstice, "We Folk 2022", which healed many people, came to an end. Zhou Yunpeng, the landlord's cat, Wan Xiaoli, Liu Shuang, and Ma Tiao, because of the warmth and strength that touched the young people who experienced a difficult year, became the TOP5 in their hearts. But the ranking and results are not the biggest meaning, just as the folk festival at the end is still the common home of all musicians, "We Folk 2022" is ultimately about a folk song gathering, just enjoy.
Looking back, this folk variety show has fallen to a very special time. It went on the air on December 23, 2022, and over the next two months, people gradually moved through the recovery phase and began to look forward to and believe in a time when life would truly restart. As a result, the existence of folk songs makes people feel so appropriate, 10 Friday updates and more days of companionship, we often see this emotion in many interactions: "The end of three years stolen by the epidemic has been cured by 'everything is not as bad as imagined'".
Behind the coincidence, is inevitability.
As Jiang Bin, chief producer of "We Folk 2022" and vice president of iQiyi, believes that the value of variety shows "is to discover the things and emotions that exist in itself" and "make it as it is" at the right time and with the right expression.
Behind this show, in the final analysis, is the creators' continuous capture of public life, social emotions and youth culture. In the view of the creative team, on the one hand, in the past ten years of rapid social development, people have been running, tense and tired for too long, eager to find spiritual and emotional peace and harmony - the nostalgic tendency to yearn for pure and authentic times and emotions in recent years is the true embodiment of this inner appeal; At the same time, as young people move from campus to the depths of society, their ideals and the rhythm of life have been completely disrupted by the epidemic, and their confusion and even helplessness about the future of life have impacted them.
It is under such an understanding of the times, in iQiyi's view, that folk songs are needed to appear at this time. Because folk songs come from life, it writes life records life rooted in life, compatible and rich, it can empathize with people with the same experience and feelings of the singer, can use the precipitated feelings of life predecessors to inspire youth, and can also use a keen and gentle soul to heal every ordinary person.
Jiang Bin's role in folk songs and "We Folk Songs 2022" is very interesting, not calling it an "antidote", but feeling that it is more like a "medicine introduction", which allows people to complete their own interpretation in the rich image space of folk songs, on this content bearer, return to their own story points, pull out long-ago or buried emotions again, with the help of temperature and power from the outside, the final realization is people's self-observation, dialogue, reconciliation.
When people hear Zhang Weiwei sing the phrase "Lover, do you feel that tomorrow has come, and our ship is parked on the pier" in "Rice Shop", people will not stop crying because of the same drift; Hearing Wan Xiaoli sing "every day must be carefully irrigated, but orchids are dying day by day, and the breeze sends the fragrance of apricot blossoms", you will feel that "ah is really not so bad", and the turn of life may be ahead; Hearing Chen Hongyu's "Ideal Thirty" must say every time he sings "Ideal Thirty", "I hope that when you are in thirty, the ideal is still there", you will feel that you are not alone in your struggle; Hearing Xu Jun resolutely shout in "29", "May you be as cool as the wind, wild as a dog, and plunged into the lights", it seems that you can instantly boil your blood and no longer hesitate.
The original intention of the creation of "We Folk 2022" was landed and verified in the program, and finally radiated unexpected emotional energy in the public field.
Some people say, "It's either listening to hi or listening to crying." Some people say "little by little, true, miscellaneous, this is our life". Some people say that because of it, "on the runway of rational life, life will not make a hard landing." Some people say that "folk songs are our wave mountain, only here can we heal our pain".
And what is more direct to catch this love and touching emotion may be a report card.
As of February 21, on various music platforms, the previous 86 songs in the program have been on the list 1,304 times, of which #We Folk 2022# has appeared on the TOP3 of the NetEase Cloud Music Hot Search List - classic folk songs and newborn original folk songs reproduced in the program have become the song lists that many people have repeatedly cycled for two months.
From other dimensions, "We Folk Songs 2022" has a popularity value of up to 6831 on iQiyi Station, and it has also won the TOP1 position of variety shows several times this winter on many third-party industry platforms such as Bone Duo, Maoyan, Kuyun, Lighthouse, and Yunhe, including the daily list of the industry list for many times, the top 1 weekly market share of the Lighthouse Network Variety List, and so on. As of the end, the show scored the highest score of 7.9 points on Douban, and more than 65% of users gave more than four stars, which is undoubtedly a very good conclusion for such a brave public variety show attempt.
Weaving the song of life, softened many late nights in two months
The "slow" tonality of folk songs and the difference from other music genres make the key to this attempt to find the right expression from variety shows for the first time and release their "magic" as much as possible.
In fact, the preparation of this show is really hard work. They spent a year, visited more than 80 music companies, auditioned more than 10,000 songs, learned about more than 2,000 groups of musicians through data back-tuning, extensive listening to songs, etc., and had face-to-face and in-depth communication with more than 250 groups of musicians. After fully understanding folk music and deeply studying the track and audience, the program team found a folk logic that could impress them.
As mentioned above, the creators deliberately preserved and presented the original appearance of folk music as much as possible, and created conditions for the fundamentals of folk music creation to be realized to a certain extent in this time and space.
In terms of the selection of musicians, "We Folk Songs 2022" gathers half of the representative figures of Chinese folk songs, covering three generations of folk musicians, and presents the style and charm of folk song creation in different eras in the program.
From the competition system and stage construction on stage, to the life field and creative collision offstage, the show fully puts folk songs into life. For example, during the recording, the program team did not let the musicians stay in hotels regularly, but let them stay in mountain guesthouses. The sunshine and natural oxygen, the gathering with old music friends of the same frequency in a relaxed and relaxed atmosphere, so that folk musicians have a soul to be consistent and easier to grasp the space for creative inspiration - Wan Xiaoli, who has not written his own new songs for four years, wrote "Time in the South Court" in such an environment, noting down a few bunches of grass and trees, a few ducks and a few people playing and singing the humorous life, simple and freehand, which captured the hearts of many audiences inside and outside the show.
On the stage, pyrotechnics, atmosphere, and sense of presence are also the core points of creation. The program team built a folk song city in Changsha, providing musicians and audiences with an atmosphere of life and the city, and also doing their best to establish a unique "folk music listening sense" through the adjustment of audio-visual technology and space design. For example, in the ninth episode of the program, there was a folk song market, where musicians and the audience walked together in the streets of Folk City, singing on the street, sitting on the floor, and intentionally touching folk songs may trace back to the most authentic existence of a long time ago.
Of course, the life creation of restoring folk songs, the most worthy of mention in the program, is the design of one of the schedules - "Changsha Twelve Hours". Folk music people casually walk to the streets, busy cities, parks of Changsha, go deep into the most pyrotechnic life of locals, eat snacks, watch living methods, chat with people, and then they use each hour as the theme, grab the exclusive temperament of it, original innovative songs.
From this, we can most intuitively feel the delicate touch of folk songs on life, feel the keen touch of folk singers on life, they may be from the natural characteristics of different times, echoing the different perceptions of life; Or from the different times of human life, to realize the richest emotions in the world - an ordinary day, through their twelve different brushstrokes, at once rich.
The works created in this way are impressive to the audience in almost every capital, and among them, we especially want to mention, such as Ma Tiao's creation of Ling Chen, although only one song is finally presented on stage, he has composed three works: "Night Endless" sees young people still enjoying life on the streets of Changsha at one o'clock in the morning, telling about the vigorous and heat-filled atmosphere of the city; "Night Passerby" sees people in all corners of the city who are busy working for this prosperity, traders, vigilantes, cleaners, transporters, it tells the hardships of life; "No One Like Me" feels the loneliness of the individual self in this noise. Three profiles, three perspectives, and three emotions present the folk songwriter's strong and multi-layered perception and capture of life.
As Zhong Lifeng in the show self-interpretation of folk songs and folk song creation, in his opinion, folk songs are "on the side of the road", "looking for some daily miracles", "I seem to have found these melodies in you, I picked it up; I am willing to walk away from you and give back to you in this way."
In such content, the audience truly felt that folk songs can be fireworks of daily life, simple joys like children, or imaginative dreams, and a person's late-night meditation.
"We Folk 2022" deeply touched the audience with life and understanding, some people felt that time was softened, some people found another self in the world from it, and some people found that it was not "unable to fall in love" with folk songs. And this touch not only makes people repeatedly cycle and sing these ballads, find solace from them, but also become "poets" under the surge of emotions, and also write a lot of beautiful words for folk songs and themselves.
This kind of dyeing and circulation of sensibility and life force may be the best effect of this show's collection of folk songs.
Taken from the "We Folk Songs 2022" Weibo super talk user message
Folk songs take root in life and flow according to life
At the end of "We Folk 2022", through the overall presentation of the program, it is very valuable that we have gained an opportunity to re-experience and understand folk music culture and folk musicians, and also made new discoveries from it.
When such a rare encounter with folk as a whole, ordinary audiences, perhaps only following a few songs when they were popular, found that what defines folk is not its babbling melodic rhythm, but deeper poetry, expression and presentness.
Folk songs actually have a wider boundary.
It can be the world, it can be the individual; It can be a story or a fragment. Wan Xiaoli's "Gyro", in 36 lines of small phrases, can fully describe the meaningful or meaningless rush of people's lives, as well as the helplessness, contradictions and struggles in them, reminding people not to become a spinning top that is twitched by the whip and does not stop spinning. And Ma Fei in "Ama Ni Wonton Shop" can also only through a small scene of the wonton shop, insert a sentence into the ordinary daily life description "She has lived in Hunan for thirty years, I don't know if the hukou has moved over", which derives more meaning.
It can revere words, or it can use only music to self-represent emotions - just as in the performance of "My Home", Xiaojuan uses the improvised onomatopoeia of "stay more, stay dumb, click more da" and repeatedly chant, leading the audience into a pure, meaningless state of happiness triggered by the connection between ethereal nature and moving sound.
Ballads can even be a methodology to change other expressions. In the adaptation stage stage of the show, the musicians have made a rich folk temperament and ideas adaptation of a number of film and television red songs that have heard calloused ears for decades, and the new feelings that hit them not only make the audience happy, even if the musicians themselves have also been unexpectedly discovered, just like Zhou Yunpeng, who has been regarded as the "ceiling" by folk music lovers, the stage performance that impressed the most in the whole process was his adaptation of the 87th version of the classic song "Funeral Flowers" of "Dream of Red Mansions" with Ye Bei, in his opinion, It is the completion of a new breakthrough and aesthetic.
Because of this, folk songs are actually very mobile.
It has a flow of perspective. As the typical example of "Changsha Twelve Hours", one flower and one world, one ballad describes one aspect of microscopic life, and a group of ballads can form a larger world.
It has the flow of time. With the growth of a creative individual, TA's observation and philosophies are also moving forward, touching from their own lives to trigger different creations, just as the landlord's cat presented in the show "Next Stop Chashan Liu" and "City Zoo", which is the transformation and extension of a young person's identity, state and thinking from campus to society. With the evolution of the times, the life described in the folk song continues to grow and change, that is, just like a love theme, Ma Tiao's "Blockade Line" records the love and hurt of young people in the previous era of wandering and hard work, Xiaojuan and the residents of the valley in "See the Letter Ru Qi" presents the simplicity of the slow era in Old Man Muxin's "Once Upon a Time Slow", and the youngest Fengzi's "Pirate Captain 2.0" typically leaves traces of the integration of Eastern and Western cultures at the present - this series of brushes over, You can discover the real trajectory of the evolution of the times.
It is precisely for this reason that Jiang Bin said that in "We Folk Songs 2022", "folk song" is a verb, "We want to make a chronicle and record our times and lives through folk songs" - this is also the value and significance of folk song creation and folk song inheritance.
Folk songs are also inseparable from the exploration of the world, inseparable from the deep influence of the survival hometown and the spiritual hometown, in the program, we can also see the connection between the musician and the "hometown" that will naturally show from time to time, it is or such as Liu Shuang and others in the song into the language of the hometown, perhaps like Lin Qianqi from the spiritual hometown to find their own philosophical direction, to create such a work full of imagery as "Ignorance".
In fact, "We Folk Songs 2022" landed in Changsha, which is also such a new exploration of the relationship between the local, the city and folk songs, Changsha's fireworks, the warm temperament of the local people and the thick Xiangjiang culture, all inspired the creators and fell into many of their new works.
Therefore, in addition to this season's program, iQIYI also launched the "Urban Folk Season" covering four cities in Changsha, Beijing, Nanjing and Xi'an, seeking new discoveries from four cities with different geographical and historical locations, different cultural traditions and different humanistic temperament, inspiring the younger generation of folk song creators to understand more landed folk and hometown with music, and writing about the relationship between music and the city in multiple dimensions.
A total of 10w+ views on all platforms, and 1000+ audience interactions (click "Read Original" in the lower left corner of the article to jump to learn about listening).
From campus folk, urban folk to new folk, the large group of folk songs themselves has been sensitively perceived and captured, "We Folk 2022" also allows us to see that today's musicians are still exploring, musicians do not set self-boundaries, and sincerely create a beautiful "world on the same frequency" for ordinary people.
When spring is blossoming and everything is recovering, perhaps more ordinary people will meet to meet and have more contact with folk songs - and this will also be the vitality of folk songs and life after the cold winter.
THE END