(Southern People Weekly reporter Jiang Xiaoming/Photo)
Zhou Yunpeng is a singer, poet and writer. Born in Shenyang, Liaoning Province in 1970, he suffered from an eye disease at an early age and lost sight at the age of nine. He has released albums such as "Breath of Silence Like a Mystery", "Chinese Children", "Walden" and so on. He has published a collection of poems "Spring Blame" and a collection of essays "Green Train". In 2011, he won the People's Literature Award "Annual Poetry Award" for his poem "Love That Can't Talk"; In 2022, he participated in the variety show "We Folk 2022" and won the overall championship.
In January 2023, Zhou Yunpeng moved back to Beijing from Dali, Yunnan. This decision has been planned for a long time. In recent years, agent Dayong often feels that Zhou Yunpeng "always doesn't want to go back" after each tour, and the band's bassist Xiaomu is the complete opposite of him - even if there are only two days between the performance and the performance, he has to rush back, and is often laughed at by Zhou Yunpeng that he loves home.
"Flow is an instinct, just like migratory birds migrate. People who stay in one place for a long time need to go to another place. "Zhou Yunpeng and his mother have lived in Dali for 10 years, and the house was bought in the mountains, so they don't often have the opportunity to go to the lively ancient town. In early January, musician Liu Shuang went to Dali to perform, and Zhou Yunpeng invited him to dinner in Guzhen. The two met on the variety show "We Folk 2022", and in Zhou Yunpeng's memory, it was the first time that "so many folk people got together". During the dinner, the two talked about Beijing, and Liu Shuang persuaded him to move back and offered to help him find a house.
"Breath of Silence"
From the beginning of the heart to the relocation across the city, it was only a month before and after. Back in Beijing, Zhou Yunpeng lived in the same neighborhood as a few new friends he met while recording the show, and everyone occasionally gathered, except for the necessary dog walks in the morning and evening, he stayed at home most of the rest of the time, reading and practicing the piano, in preparation for the next national tour. Eating and drinking rely on takeaway, neighbors rarely meet each other, landlords live abroad - the contract is also done online, he is satisfied with such convenience and even some indifference. "He likes big cities like Shanghai and Beijing. You can take good care of your life without leaving home. Unlike in Dali, because I live in the mountains, sometimes I have to wait for hours to even order takeout, and the delivery fee is higher than the cost of meals. Da Yong said.
Today's Beijing is very different from the one it was when Zhou Yunpeng left more than a decade ago. At that time, he was not financially wealthy, rented in a self-built house, and the landlord lived next door, and often went into the house to inquire about privacy, "You can't mess with him." "He often remembered his life in the countryside when he was a child, but whenever a stranger came to his home, the whole village knew." It's not indifferent, but it's painful, and there's no privacy. We all think that hell is a sea of knives and fire, but in Sartre's play "Confinement", the three protagonists get along, hate and curse each other, and no one can do without the other. Others are hell. One afternoon in mid-March, as yellow sand rolled out the window, Mr. Zhou sat at his home in Beijing, wearing a pair of black sunglasses as usual, and talked about his decades of migration in a flat tone.
"Chinese Child"
He started wandering on a green-skinned train. When he was a child, he lived in Tiexi District, Shenyang, and the roaring green train roared by, starting from his hometown Shenyang to Tianjin, Beijing, Dali, Yinchuan, Golmud, Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco... Most of my life is in flux, and there is no confusion in a foreign land. When he returned to his hometown to perform, he found that it had changed a lot, with galleries and museums erected, many factories converted into live houses, and the Tiexi district where he lived as an hour had a Liverpool feeling. After his father's death, he rarely returned to Shenyang except to perform. "Falling leaves are unnatural. Where the wind blows down the leaves and floats, it's natural. It's the same with people. Why do you always live in your hometown, it may be a kind of cowardice. A good boy is determined to be everywhere, and a good daughter is too, and people should be home everywhere. He said.
Walden
Animal instincts
Zhou Yunpeng first went to Beijing in 1986. He was 16 years old and ran to Tianjin alone without his parents and moved to Beijing, "I had the impression that it was a very hot summer, and I had to buy a popsicle after walking two steps." It was his first solo trip, and he found that "you can go anywhere, so if you can't, ask someone." This gave him full confidence when he was blind.
Suffering from an eye disease at an early age and utterly blind at the age of 9, the last image in his vision was "an elephant in a zoo playing the harmonica with its nose", which he later said was probably the original motivation for him to play the piano and write songs.
Worried about his life, his father arranged for him to go to a school for the blind early to learn massage, feeling respected, but he thought that this kind of work was not aesthetically pleasing and not the life he wanted. Later, he was admitted to the Chinese Department of the College of Special Education of Changchun University, and after graduating from university, he was assigned to work in a salad oil factory, did not have to go to work, occupied a place for the disabled, and received a salary of 150 yuan per month. The father was satisfied with this, "We will save money for you to marry a daughter-in-law in the future." He became even more angry and felt that he was making ends meet.
May 26, 2012, Taizhou, Zhejiang, Zhou Yunpeng and Xiaohe sing folk songs (Visual China/Photo)
He had another vision of his destiny. At the age of 25, he took up the guitar given by his parents and came to Beijing again, this time staying and making a living selling songs. After singing for a day, I earned more than 20 yuan, and calculated 600 yuan a month. "It's a lot in 1995." That's when he realized that he could support himself with music. This is not out of the creator's confidence, in fact, there is no choice. "Music is the best job for me, both from the perspective of survival and interest. God has rewarded you with this bowl of rice, then you will eat it well. This experience was written by him in "Theater for the Blind" and included in his first album, Breath of Silence (2004):
There is a child who is blind at the age of nine / lives in a theater for the blind all year round / listens to those movies from morning to night / relies on imagination to supplement the places he does not understand / he imagines that he has learned to play the piano / has learned to sing and can write poetry / traveled all over the world with a guitar on his back / street art played and sang in a bar...
At the beginning of the singing, he rented a house in the Yuanmingyuan Painters' Village, ran a poetry folk magazine "Low Bank" with friends, and also wrote poetry, mixing with a group of artists, mainly eating, drinking too much to talk about art, but survival is the most urgent problem. Beijing is like a "big cauldron", steaming this group of art lovers from other places, "After cooking for a long time, I want to jump out to cool down." "Zhou Yunpeng worked hard to make money, lived by eating salted water and boiled noodles, and the money he saved was used to travel, went to Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Tibet and other places, drifted everywhere for a while, and returned to Beijing." Living elsewhere, people always think that it will be good to change places, sometimes it may be an illusion, change a place for soup without changing medicine, you are still you. But you don't have any other way. "I think it's an animal migration instinct." ”
For a few years, he was obsessed with writing and singing, only as a means of making money, and did not have a deep relationship with the group of people who later stayed in the "river bar", which was regarded as a new folk song settlement in China. Their work was very musical, and at that time I didn't know that I had to be a singer, I didn't devote myself to music, and I wondered if I would write in the future. ”
At the beginning of the century, the Wild Children Band opened a "River Bar" on Sanlitun South Street, where they played improvised music and performed with Xiaohe, Wan Xiaoli and others, and Zhou Yunpeng often haunted the River Bar as an audience, when he sang mostly other people's songs, but at the River Bar, he heard that his friends could only sing their own songs all night, "as if he had found himself" - he later said when he was a guest on a radio show.
Music critic Guo Xiaohan wrote, "In these people, you can see that contemporary folk songs are not the product of industrialization, but grow naturally - foreigners are inspired by music, come to Beijing to fulfill their dreams, and gradually have the consciousness of 'singing their own songs' from the cover of bars." They wander around city corners, trying to find an outlet, and then the river bar appears, giving strangers a spiritual home and a place to party. ”
Zhou Yunpeng summed up that state as "utopian musical communism" and "cannot be converted into RMB to pay rent." "At that time, he was poor, he couldn't pay rent, he couldn't afford to drink," and his financial hardship made him anxious for several years. Later, he recalled that it was all "day and night, like an underground river", and it was not until 2007, when he released his second album "Chinese Children" and began touring, that he felt that he was roughly out of this state.
In 2003, the year of SARS, the river bar closed, and Zhou Yunpeng remembered that many musicians around him went to the west, but they basically returned to Beijing in a circle and bragged with everyone. "Because in terms of making music, your 'market' is still in Beijing." In the following years, "Beijing introduced several policies to restrict outsiders from buying houses and cars, housing prices rose, and traffic jams frantically." He wrote in his essay collection Green Train (2012). With this as a node, a group of musicians scattered all over the place, some moved to Shanghai, some moved to Dali. In 2010, Zhou Yunpeng left Beijing and went first to Shaoxing and then to Dali.
"I can't always get what I want"
But Shaoxing and Dali did not form a climate similar to that of the river bar period.
"The atmosphere of the River Bar is related to the life state of the person, your life is going on all the time, and those things are unrepeatable." Musician Kogawa said. Unlike the migration of his folk friends, he believes that he has not been demanding on the environment and has lived in Beijing for more than two decades.
Xiaohe and Zhou Yunpeng met in 1996, when Xiaohe was a resident singer in a bar in Changsha, and Zhou Yunpeng frequented it, and the two quickly became acquainted. Also in Changsha, in the fall of 2022, the two and a group of folk friends got together to record "We Folk 2022". "Old Zhou was quite relaxed when recording the show, and during that time he quit drinking, and his complexion and singing breath were very stable." Later, Xiaohe was eliminated early and returned to Beijing first.
After Zhou Yunpeng moved back to Beijing, many friends praised him for his good condition. He felt that he could not take it too seriously, "A good state is still presented by writing more works." "He's written less songs lately. I always keep a diary and always carry my laptop with me wherever I go. When asked if he was anxious when he was uninspired, he quickly denied, "Not being able to write songs is not called anxiety, making music itself is quite happy." The real anxiety is physical pain, or lack of money. ”
In 2016, Zhou Yunpeng had a serious illness, multiple cerebral thrombosis, and stayed in the hospital for most of the month. The ward was full of sighs and groans, and he lay on the hospital bed thinking frequently, "People still have to accept their lives, do they still want to drink a lot of wine?" After recovering from the illness, he quit smoking and drinking for a while, and successfully adopted a guide dog. Later, when he returned to Dali, because he had to walk his dog, he lived a morning and evening walk and a regular schedule. This kind of daily life was copied to Beijing, and there was a walking path next to the community where he led the bear for half an hour every day.
When he wasn't performing, he stayed at home most of the day, "and sometimes [he] drank some wine when he was tired of reading alone, and he had a large mouthful, and he drank a glass of whiskey in two sips." Da Yong said. Now, he has a string in his head that waries of alcohol and does not drink it during performances or recordings. There was even a drinking group, Yu Xiuhua, Ma Tiao and others were among them, but everyone often chatted about quitting alcohol and becoming persuasion.
One day in 2022, Xiaohe received an apology call from Zhou Yunpeng, in which Zhou Yunpeng confessed, "I drank too much yesterday and said bad things about you in front of others." Speaking of this, Xiaohe smiled, "He is very sincere and will not say some flattery to make you happy." ”
In 2022, Zhou Yunpeng released his sixth album "Walden". Music blogger Er Di commented on the song of the same name included in it, "What should people pursue in life, Zhou Yunpeng borrowed Thoreau's expression to write a soothing and tranquil life exploration with philosophical self-questioning." This is not only Zhou Yunpeng's reflection on experiencing the suffering and impermanence of life, through philosophical classics to relieve his own predicament and face the essence of life, but also Thoreau's hidden feelings, through the perspective of a blind musician to strip away the world's distractions. ”
Over the years, Zhou Yunpeng's albums have not been released frequently, and only one is released every few years. Since the release of his debut album Silent Breath in 2004, Xiaohe has been the producer of his album. "Old Zhou's style has not changed much if he only listens to the singing, but from "Chinese Child" to "Walden", the imagery, sense of space and depth in his songs are becoming richer and richer." Xiaohe said that Zhou Yunpeng was a poet by his side.
In 2019, Zhou Yunpeng, 49 years old, published his first novel collection "Stupid Stories". Many of the stories in the collection are about aging. When I asked him about his views on aging, he calmly replied that birth, old age, illness and death are all acceptable to people. "The wisdom and calmness of old age cannot be replaced by youth, the most terrible thing in old age may be poverty and disease, and death is not terrible."
Compared to the post-millennium decade, the violent events of his life have become thin in the past decade. The edges were no longer there, and he found himself calmer, "You know what is helpless, you can only accept it." "I especially like Rolling Stone's 'You Can't Always Get What You Want,'" life isn't so used to you." "About love, about health, about friends, earlier he thought he could change something, and now," I can't always get what I want." ”
In March 2023, Zhou Yunpeng wore sandals and walked his dog in the evening when Beijing poured spring cold (Southern People Weekly reporter Jiang Xiaoming/Photo)
Creation is the only hope and biggest nightmare of all musicians - dialogue with Zhou Yunpeng
Be at least honest in music
Southern People Weekly: You once said that "the new folk song is like a community, any era will have its own artistic community, a large group of people have been underground for many years, and now they are popping up and growing on the ground." What do you think is the right soil for you to grow and create?
Zhou Yunpeng: Being in a comfortable place is not necessarily good for creation, there are some soil you may not be comfortable with, but you can write songs. Just like love, falling out of love is a failure for love, but it is a nutrient for writing songs, if love is consummated and the two get married, they may not be able to write songs. So the question is contradictory. You ask which soil is more suitable for creation, for me Beijing is easier to inspire creativity, it is more diverse, but Beijing's happiness index is not necessarily higher than Dali. Happiness and creation are paradoxes.
Southern People Weekly: Many things have been blocked in the three years of the new crown epidemic, what is the impact on your personal life?
Zhou Yunpeng: During the epidemic, the performance was only one-fifth of the previous performance, but I have a certain amount of savings, and I am financially fine, so I will not be too embarrassed. I love to travel, I haven't been abroad in recent years, I go around in the country, very depressed, but the whole world is depressed, what can I do? You have to do it. At that time, I had to do nucleic acid when I went out, and then one day I suddenly announced that I didn't use nucleic acid on a plane, and I had a feeling that the world was renewed, and now it is back to normal, but I feel abnormal. In 50 years, will they believe in this?
Southern People Weekly: In a previous interview, you said that you didn't like people advocating other people's adventures in a safe place. The grand is not often, the concrete is long-lasting, do not despise personal life. Is it also the pandemic that makes you think about this?
Zhou Yunpeng: I forgot where I wrote articles discussing why Chinese folk songs lack protestability, and I think it is the responsibility of the media not to keep making folk songs reflect social reality. As for personal life, I think the most truthful thing is not the grand narrative, but the details of personal life, such as what to eat in the morning. Details speak louder than everything, don't live that empty life, talk about national affairs, the situation in the United States every day, watch the news and whine.
Our lives are about details, not empty values and meanings. Works without details are empty lyricism, and it can't be said that they are bad, just not very good. Ma Fei's "Ama Ni Wonton Shop" is very detailed, that is the real ballad.
Southern People Weekly: You've said on many occasions that the core of folk songs is to release goodwill.
Zhou Yunpeng: For example, the song "Chinese Children" is very decisive in its criticism. It's not about the form, the song is actually out of good intentions. With so many children burned to death in the fire, I can imagine the pain in their parents' hearts. But we haven't written more songs like "Chinese Children" either. This kind of song is not easy to write, people can't always be angry, life is usually very routine.
Southern People Weekly: Folk songs have no obligation to do social criticism?
Zhou Yunpeng: No one has the right to demand what folk songs should do, these are autonomous. Sometimes there are too many moral kidnappings of folk music, thinking that folk songs should be criticized and satirized, but Taiwanese folk songs are very lyrical and beautiful. Marx once said that "the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons", and a musician cannot always provide you with the weapon of criticism. You can't use a work of art as a tool, and it must be critical.
Ballads can convey the true life and values of the author, it does not have to be righteous or noble. For example, Ma Fei's "I Can Chua", do you say this song is noble? But it can't be called mean. Neither mean nor noble, in an intermediate state, this is how ordinary people live. Honesty is the first thing in folk songs, it should reflect the lives of ordinary people, not moral judgment, and no moral elevation.
Southern People Weekly: Honesty itself is not easy.
Zhou Yunpeng: Of course it's not easy. We always say "tell the truth" and "tell the truth" verbally, and the subtext seems to be that people often do not tell the truth. Honesty is a luxury, you can't demand that you tell the truth to everyone in life, but at least be honest in music.
Southern People Weekly: What do you think is the most significant, or your favorite song?
Zhou Yunpeng: It's still "Chinese Child", although I don't want to sing it. Isn't there also a criticism in the Book of Poetry such as "Shuo Rat Shuo Mouse, No Food for Mei"? It at least reminds everyone of what happened in Karamay and Sharan towns.
One afternoon in March 2023, Zhou Yunpeng sits in his apartment in Beijing's East Fourth Ring Road, waiting for an interview (Southern People Weekly reporter Jiang Xiaoming/Photo)
No day has ever saved oneself, and no day has ever destroyed oneself
Southern People Weekly: What has been the most important thing for you in the last decade?
Zhou Yunpeng: The album is also out, and I have been to many places abroad, and there has been no love or loss of love in the past ten years, so I feel that there is nothing most important. Maybe people will fall into a bottleneck period in middle age, and what happened in this decade is not so exciting and intense, and their mentality is not so intense. There were some unpleasantness, but nothing huge. You don't feel like one day has saved you, or which day has ruined you.
Southern People Weekly: What counts as a huge unpleasantness? Does that multiple cerebral thrombosis in 2016 count?
Zhou Yunpeng: Count. Physical illness is really desperate, it is not like mental pain, there is an aesthetic pleasure, bitterness, loneliness is sometimes quite beautiful. But when you are not feeling well, it is really uncomfortable, what is the point of toothache? It can only dry pain, it does not bring a sense of nobility or redemption.
Southern People Weekly: What's the hardest thing since making folk songs?
Zhou Yunpeng: Creation is the most difficult, it is useless for you to be in a hurry, sometimes you have to be measured, you need to relax. Being able to write a good song is the biggest achievement, if you write a song like "Rice Shop", you can ensure that sales can also become better and life can become better. It's even more amazing to be able to write ten songs like "Rice Shop". Creation is the only hope and the biggest nightmare of all musicians. Our way out is to create.
Southern People Weekly: When you write a song that you're happy with, you know it's good right now? For example, which song?
Zhou Yunpeng: You will feel that this "child" will be quite productive in the future, or this "child" is not very good. When I wrote "Walden" and "Love Without Talking", I was also excited and had the desire to sing it. As with having children, you naturally want to be close to "him" and communicate with "him". Every time I sang these works, the response was quite large, and I was more willing to sing, as if watching "him" grow.
Southern People Weekly: Is there any hope of writing a song like "Love That Can't Talk"?
Zhou Yunpeng: This kind of song is not something to come by. First you have to have another vigorous relationship, and then fall out of love. This kind of song is based on an unhappy life, but an unhappy life is not something you want to pursue.
(References: Zhou Yunpeng's essay collection "Green Train", "Listen to the Silence at Midnight", Zhou Yunpeng's poetry collection "Walking Ears".) Media reports "Zhou Yunpeng: A Blind Man and His Ballads", "Seeing: Interview with Zhou Yunpeng", "Dialogue with Zhou Yunpeng: Can Contemporary China Find Any "Poetry"? "Zhou Yunpeng in Beijing: Dead Celebrities Look at the World I Can't See" and "Zhou Yunpeng: Grasp Spring". Radio program "Music 543|Interview with Zhou Yunpeng, Xiaohe, Wan Xiaoli". ）
Southern People Weekly reporter Wang Jiawei Southern People Weekly intern reporter Liu Huan