Folk songs are no longer hot? At first glance, this may sound like a fantasy.
I remember that the first time I listened to the folk song was from Song Dongye's "Miss Dong", and then the draft contestant Zuo Li sang the four sides, for a time the mainstream media's eyes were turned to Zuo Li, but people did not care about the original singing of this song, I was facing the screen at that time, not that he sang badly, is it to say that the folk song really wants to be brought to fire like this?
Even from online to offline, it is not difficult to encounter a familiar folk melody during the noisy Spring Festival holiday, the clothing stores and restaurants in the streets and alleys, the mobile phones of strangers, the radio stations in taxis, girls, distant places, zebras, cigarettes and other things are intertwined into a specific subcultural symbol in the sound of guitar sweeping strings, so that all folk song fans can look at each other and smile and recognize each other.
At the intersection of 2018 and 2019, Li Zhi ended his career as an independent musician for more than a decade and signed a large company. In an interview with Zhizu GQ magazine, one of the reasons he gave was that "there is no room for income growth, but the cost increase cannot be stopped", and the other reason that appears the most is tiredness; at the end of last year, Zhang Weiwei, who had written "Rice Shop" and "Silver Hotel", opened the public account "Silver Hotel", in the first article "Opening", he said to find a "new expression" and announced the suspension of all performances; Zhao Lei took the guitar to the stage of "I Am a Singer". Many people who are not familiar with folk songs suddenly realized: "It turns out that "Chengdu" was sung by him. Park Shu also appeared frequently on TV shows, and there was a suspicious zero in the bullet screen who sincerely asked: "Is he crying again?" ”
The generation of folk singers who once created brilliance, some low-key retreat, some frankly embracing business, some repeating the melody they wrote many years ago, and most of the newly born folk songs every year are trapped in a greater repetition. From the niche to the masses, folk songs have been used for many years, and the replacement of one mass culture by another is often a matter of fleeting moments. For example, in the hottest short video software at present, ordinary people prefer to listen to lively music than folk songs.
Even the Korean girl group BlackPink uses Douyin to interact with fans.
Folk songs are not sincere anymore
Folk is more of a social concept than other music genres — after all, most fans, even the singers themselves, can't draw a clear line for folk at the technical level. A guitar, a harmonica, plus a few other simple instrumental accompaniments, gentle melodies, poetic lyrics, looping back and forth, little by little to open the listener's heart.
Listening to folk songs, many times not by the music itself, but also by a certain emotion. In the words of Internet entrepreneurship, folk songs are a form of music that is easy to "tell stories", and the singer's life experiences resonate with the listeners, bringing the first listeners to the folk songs.
In 2013, on the scene of the "Good Songs of China" program, Zhao Lei sang his own "Painting" on the stage, and the tutor Liu Huan on the stage suddenly selected this song, and he excitedly repeatedly praised the lyrics of this song as "the stroke of God". Looking at this "Painting" now, just from the lyrics, it is much better than the "Chengdu" that made Zhao Lei popular.
"Paint a moon for the lonely night sky / Paint me singing under that moon / Paint a big window for a deserted house / Draw another bed / Draw a girl with me / Draw a lace quilt again / Paint a stove and firewood / We are born to live together... I did not erase the eraser of quarrels / only a pen with a lonely painting" This kind of poetry that grows out of a difficult life is naturally more touching than "walking on the streets of Chengdu", no wonder Liu Huan can't help but praise.
Nowadays, the folk songs that have survived independence are also going to go the way of the draft.
That is, just five years ago, although Zhao Lei had a reputation in the music circle at that time, he had not yet reached the point of becoming a household name later. He rented a courtyard in Beijing and lived with his father. When he felt lonely in the middle of the night, he picked up a pen and wrote down his truest feelings at that time: "Paint a moon for the lonely night sky..."
I don't know if it is because the base of the work is constantly expanding, and the sincere power of this folk song that initially conquered people's hearts is rapidly dissipating. Images of the South, women, tears, tobacco, guitars, etc. that are repeated countless times in folk songs have been repeatedly ridiculed by some netizens through big data to prove the routine of folk songs. Some people have relentlessly ridiculed that there are generally only three kinds of distant places sung in folk songs now: the south, the north and Beijing, and there is always a girl who cannot be chased.
Not long ago, the female singer Hua Congee's "Thief Will Go", because of the "Heavy Rain in Shuzhong / Guanwai corpses everywhere / Your laughter is like a vicious dog / Disturb my heartstrings" Lyrics are really confusing and criticized, excited Hua Congee and netizens after a bit of verbal remarks, only two weibo were deleted. Of course, the extreme personality of this singer himself cannot hide the lackluster of the song itself, and the song itself cannot stop its fire on the Internet.
The stereotyped creation lowered the threshold of folk songs, which was not high, and singers and listeners rushed in, once reaching the point where "where there is well water, there will be folk songs", and also exerted this kind of sentimentality to the extreme. But sitting in a college dormitory, lying in a rental house, walking down a long empty street, and being moved by folk songs seems to be getting fewer and fewer moments.
Zhao Lei sang the tavern, but the folk song lost its way in the boiling of people.
Beautiful songs are easy to write, and sincere songs are rare
Niche groups, once the boundaries on which folk song listeners live, hide in the Douban group online and the dim little bar offline, in groups of three or five, whispering, sharing favorite music, exchanging each other's touches. They pay lip service to hoping that folk singers will become popular as soon as possible to get out of the predicament of life, but they often secretly enjoy this privacy.
Until one day, the ringtone of everyone around them was replaced by "Zebra Zebra" and "Miss Dong", and the old fans said quietly: "When I listened to Song Dongye, you didn't know who this fat man was." "To make oneself clear.
Unlike fans, Song Dongye's niche period did not have a good life. In 2013, when Song Dongye was twenty-six years old, his first album "Anhe Bridge North" was released, and before that, his name was not known to many people, just a fat boy in Beijing who was too ordinary to be ordinary. When he was thirteen years old, Song Dongye's parents divorced, and he often went to his grandmother's place, which became the famous Anhe Bridge, where he spent a lot of happy time. After graduating from a college in Beijing, Song Dongye traveled for his life, and later met Ma Wei and Yao Thirteen and began to make music together.
Song Dongye's non-professional origin is not uncommon in the folk circle. Yao Thirteen graduated from Wuhan University majoring in clinical medicine, Li Zhi dropped out of southeast university after studying automation, Zhou Yunpeng was a graduate of Changchun University's Chinese major, and the above-mentioned flower porridge graduated from Central South University of Forestry and Technology. Compared with other types of popular music, folk songs do not need to be so complex in songwriting, nor do they need a complete entertainment industry system as a publicity support, and many people have gone out of a successful road alone.
Li Zhi has a song called "Rehe", which is not about Rehe in Hebei, but about Rehe Road in Nanjing. In the song, it is only five yuan to cut the hair here, which touched many people, and some ran to the walls on both sides of Rehe Road and painted the head of the brother. In the end, these graffiti were cleaned up by the relevant departments as nonsense scribbles, and the discouraged student who came to get a haircut could no longer be seen on Rehe Road.
This seems like a paradox: folk singers use the grind of life to create music that strikes people's hearts, and with these music to get rid of the tribulations of life, but when Ease and new fans surround them, some old fans gradually leave the scene because they have lost their resonance. Of course, folk singers should not naturally suffer from poverty and hunger, but with the blessing of commercial packaging, they are getting farther and farther away from the original folk audience.
Li Zongsheng once said: "Beautiful songs are easy to write, and sincere songs are rare." "That's true.
There seem to be fewer and fewer sincere singers, so in recent years, old singers such as Li Zongsheng and Zhou Huajian have begun to become popular.
The New Long March road of folk songs
"Exploring Qingshui River" is very popular, one version is sung by Zhang Yunlei, a cross-talk actor of Deyun Society, and another version is sung by singer Xiaoyue Boss. Boss Xiaoyue also has another masterpiece, "SiFan", although it has been removed, but almost everyone in the folk audience knows it. Many years ago, Xiaoyue's boss also mixed with the screen name of "Six Winds and Cruel Moons" in harmonica stickers, sharing piano skills from time to time, and bar friends have left messages "big gods".
From a folk god to a famous folk singer, Xiaoyue Boss has completed a standard folk singer-like advancement, but this does not mean that the so-called professional singers can be recognized. In a music variety show in 2018, Hua Chenyu relentlessly commented in the face of The performance of Boss Xiaoyue: "This is the music of 20 years ago." It caused a small war of words between the fans of the two sides.
In fact, in addition to the mainstream music industry, large and small chains of contempt have also been formed within the folk music circle. Zhou Yunpeng at the top of the despised chain, with a song "Love That Can't Speak", won the 2011 People's Literature Award Poetry Award, and the Su Yang, Low Absinthe, Zhang Weiwei, Yao Thirteen, and Yi Wet Band in the middle of the despised chain integrated into the regional elements, satisfying the imagination of urban people about the distance, as for the folk songs at the bottom of the despised chain, they are still repeating cheap love or suffering, or adding some ancient elements that are not different.
There are also singers, such as Chen Grain, who have begun to reject the label of folk singers consciously or unconsciously.
If the memory is good enough, you should not forget that in the twenty years before the current folk song fever, there is a folk song fever, and the protagonists of that trend are Gao Xiaosong, Old Wolf, and Ye Bei, which are campus folk songs.
In the era of white clothes fluttering, the classic appearance of folk songs is long hair and wooden guitar.
In January 1994, an album called "School Folk Songs" was released, and the later famous "You at the Same Table" and "Brother Sleeping on My Top Bunk" were included in it. The cover of the tape reads "Every song comes from a moving story, and every story takes place all around your life," set in a college lecture theatre. Everyone who has experienced college life should have no resistance to such an album. In the campus folk songs, in addition to the entanglement, there are other emotions belonging to young people. For example, Xu Hanqiu's two poems", "Chang Hao" and "Unnamed Lake is an Ocean", can still feel a distant, strange and powerful temperament.
After the early nineties, the state was no longer responsible for assigning jobs to college students, and the employment pressure was suddenly pressed into the campus, facing the blue-faced and fanged job market, the basis for leisurely singing no longer existed, and campus folk songs became a thing of the past. In this regard, Zhou Yunpeng summed up the decline of campus folk songs as a change in social structure. You see, in the face of the changing times and the pressure of life, folk songs are also not resistant.
If viewed in a broad sense, folk songs are probably the oldest form of music. The national style in the Book of Poetry is a folk song, the Qin and Han Lefu poems are folk songs, and the northwest folk songs collected by Wang Luobin are also folk songs. Folk songs are not always gorgeous, and simplicity and relevance are its long-lasting background color.
I hope that in this era of "too many songs and not enough ears", folk songs sung because of sincerity will not die because of insincerity.