Su Yang: A rock singer and his folk artist friend

Su Yang: A rock singer and his folk artist friend

China News Weekly reporter/Kui Yanzhang

Published in China News Weekly, June 24, 2019, No. 904

In a lecture hall, a professor said to singer Su Yang, "Your music, I think the combination of flowers and rock and roll, is innovative, but not original enough." Su Yang replied to him, "I can't sing the same, they grew up herding sheep, the living environment is different from me, I am a factory and mine disciple, I have to stand in Suyang's perspective and sing Suyang's life."

This is a scene from the documentary "Big River Singing", which records Su Yang's scene at the Harvard University sharing meeting. Among the literary and artistic youth, Suyang has long become a joint code. This Yinchuan singer grafted the folk music "Hua'er", Qin Cavity and modern music in the northwest, reorganized and improved it, and formed a highly iconic personal work. Not only did he attract much attention at domestic music festivals, but this dark man from the northwest also began to be invited to participate in cultural events around the world. During the sharing session at Harvard, Su Yang was working on a cross-border art project called "The Yellow River Now Flow", and he held exhibitions, lectures and other activities in New York, Brazil, Beijing and other places to introduce people to the folk culture of the Yellow River Basin that once influenced him.

The Yellow River flows today

As early as 2016, Suyang has begun to prepare for the "Yellow River Today". Lovells, the founder of the film company Sky City, learned about it and planned to make a documentary for SuYang. This documentary is the prototype of today's "Big River Singing". At that time, it was conceived as part of Suyang's "Yellow River Flow" plan, and it could also be put on the theater line and become an independent film work.

In the spring of 2016, Lovells brought in Su Yang, Tsinghua University professor Lei Jianjun, and Ma Lantern Pictures producer Bao Xiaogeng, who met at an old teahouse near the Renmin University Gymnasium to discuss the filming of the documentary.

Lei Jianjun proposed to shoot not only Su Yang himself, but also the musical matrix behind Su Yang: folk artists in the northwest. To some extent, it is those artists who have made Suyang, but those people have been annihilated. Su Yang made a list, and they identified the next four subjects: shadow puppet artist Wei Zhongfu, storyteller Liu Shikai, zhang Jinlai, head of the private Qin Opera Troupe, and Ma Fengshan, a flower singer.

"The so-called musical matrix is not about a specific single person, it is not like this. Maybe I've been listening to these messy things for a long time, and then you pick them out, and the affected ones are a few systems, flowers, shadow puppets, storytelling, and Qin cavity. After the screening of "Big River Singing", Su Yang sat on the side of the road in Beijing and told China News Weekly.

In terms of shooting methods, Lei Jianjun proposed to shoot in the way of video anthropology and edit in the way of drama films. The former guarantees a sufficient depth understanding of the subject's life, while the latter ensures the watchability of the film. Previously, Lei Jianjun's Tsinghua University Qingying Studio had filmed works such as "Himalayan Ladder" and "I Repair Cultural Relics in the Forbidden City" in this way.

Before filming, Lei Jianjun called in Xiao Xuan, a scholar of musical anthropology, to conduct fieldwork on the four artists who were about to be filmed. At the same time, he found two of his own students, Ke Yongquan and Yang Zhichun, who are studying at Tsinghua University, and He Yuan, a director who works at the Institute of Image Anthropology of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, to serve together as the director of "Big River Singing".

Xiao Xuan has long studied flowers in the northwest. When she received lei Jianjun's invitation, she was drinking and singing with the flower singers at the Erlang Mountain Flower Festival. She quickly agreed to this, "there is no precedent for music anthropologists to participate in film production in China, and this attempt will help music anthropology to get out of the ivory tower and connect with reality." She recalls China Newsweek.

In the summer, Xiao Xuan formed a team of four teachers and students from Tsinghua University, Zhejiang Conservatory of Music, Soochow University, and Shanghai Conservatory of Music to go to the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River to eat and live with folk artists and begin a three-month fieldwork.

Xiao Xuan is in charge of the storyteller Liu Shikai. Liu Shikai initially refused to accept fieldwork unless Xiao Xuan helped him convince the local government to give him some government performance projects. To this end, Xiao Xuan ran to the local government many times to help Liu Shikai solve this matter, and the investigation really began.

The research team continuously transmitted images and text materials back to Lei Jianjun and the directors. Some information surprised Lei Jianjun: Liu Shikai, a storyteller, was a contractor in his job, and Ma Fengshan had been the village director.

Lei Jianjun also noticed an anthropological phenomenon from the research materials: "At the major ceremonies of the people in the Yellow River Basin, they are all invited to play. And the southwest is mainly dance."

He analyzed that this may stem from the fact that since ancient times, the royal power of the Yellow River Basin is the most important force, and the most important force in the Southwest Basin is the theocracy. "The interaction with the royal power in the community needs to be fixed with drama so that more people can be called by the royal power." But when you want to communicate with theocracy, you just sing, and what he can't see, you have to dance. ”

Before filming, the scholars and directors involved in "Big River Singing" did not preset the shooting direction of this documentary, but recorded the fragments and materials of their daily lives during the year in the more than a year of eating and living with the subjects, waiting for them to slowly and naturally ferment.

Rock singer

At the beginning of the filming of "Big River Singing", everyone wanted to explore the spiritual source of Suyang, a singer who combined contemporary and traditional, rock and folk singing, but the beginning of Suyang's musical career was not because of the folk music of the northwest, but because of the song "Spanish Bullfighter".

It was the end of the 1980s, and Su Yang was only 17 years old, still a student at the Shaanxi Provincial Installation Technical School. One day, one of his classmates played a song "Spanish Matador" on a guitar. He had never found the music so good, "very roughly emitting a particularly real kind of martian-like note that vibrated on me." Years later, Su Yang, who has become a professional musician, recalls this.

After that, Su Yang began to soak around his classmates who had guitars all day, rubbing their guitars to practice. Soon, Su Yang sold his canteen meal ticket for 20 yuan and bought a second-hand guitar from a classmate.

When he graduated, he went to work as a small worker at a construction site in Longxian County, Shaanxi Province, sifting sand, ash, carts, and bricks every day, earning a dollar of seven cents and five cents a day. One evening, he passed by the family home of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of Longxian County after work and saw a man teaching others to play guitar. Su Yang walked over to chat with them while playing a song called "Juvenile Delinquents" During the chat, Su Yang learned that the other party had won an award in the Xi'an guitar competition, and now works in Longxian Bank, waiting for the opportunity to transfer back to Baoji.

The man and Su Yang said, "You have a good sense of music, you come back to me, I can introduce you to Xi'an and participate in the cave walking group." The next day, the two had a drink, and then the other wrote him a letter of introduction, asking Su Yang to find a friend of his in Xi'an.

Su Yang took the letter of introduction and entered the Xinlei Orchestra in Xi'an. But the new buddy's salary is only 60 yuan, and it is difficult to survive. When a Henan cave walking group passed through Xi'an, Su Yang left the Xinlei Orchestra and joined the national cave walking tide.

He later described the experience as a bit like the literary troupe in Jia Zhangke's film "Platform". Eat and live on the stage, cold cover linoleum cloth. Don't eat in the morning, eat a bowl of 3 yuan dumplings at noon, eat less in the evening, and grumble after the performance.

In the 1990s, rock music became popular in China. European and American rock music spread to Suyang's ears through Beijing and Xi'an. The year after the "Magic Rock Three Masters" concert in Hung Hom, Hong Kong, Su Yang formed a rock band called "Transparent Band" in Yinchuan. At that time, he had long hair.

The band's stage style and style were heavily influenced by Western rock music of the time and were popular but not very profitable. "In the band, no one can run it, only knows to rehearse, perform, and no one does anything other than the performance, and if you have a little money, you can rush together for a drink."

At the end of 1999, Tang Chao, Zhang Chuhe and Chao Chao went to the Ningxia Gymnasium to participate in the "Century Wild Ride - Chinese Rock Forces Concert". The performer called Su Yang's band over and performed one by one. Less than a month after the performance, Su Yang announced that the band had disbanded.

At that time, Su Yang's son had reached the age of elementary school. The child's class teacher felt that it was not appropriate for him to have long hair to pick up and drop off the child. The next day, he cut off his long hair and shaved a flat head, a style that remains to this day. Around this time, Su Yang's interest in rock music gradually shifted to northwest folk music.

The sound of the earth

One day at the beginning of the new century, Su Yang was chatting about music at a friend's house. Friends collect a lot of CDs and love to listen to blues and jazz. Su Yang asked him, "Can you give me Zhang more primitive?" For example, I remember the American TV series "Roots" in which there is a song of the hometown sung by black people during their enslavement? ”

A friend turned him over a field recording of black music. As soon as he listened, for some reason, he suddenly remembered the rice fields near Yinchuan Tongxin Road where he lived when he was a child.

Su Yang came to yinchuan at the age of 7. It was late one night in 1976, and he and his mother arrived in Yinchuan by train from Wenling, Zhejiang. The father rode a 28 bicycle and took the mother and son to a family home on Tongxin Road in Yinchuan City. Previously, Su Yang's father immigrated to Yinchuan in the late 50s to work in a nitrogen fertilizer factory.

The next morning, Su Yang pushed open the door, and in front of him was only a few rows of houses, and in the distance was an endless stretch of loess. Throughout his childhood, Su Yang did not have the opportunity to hear much music. Only occasionally, when passing by the farmland next to the family home, you will hear farmers in the fields singing Ningxia minor tunes and intermittent folk songs.

The day he heard the field recording of black music, he vaguely recalled a song sung by the peasants in his childhood when they went to the rice paddy field: "Ningxia River, two points, east of the Yellow River and west of Helan Mountain, Jinchuan Yinchuan Rice River." Later, he learned that in Ningxia, only the vicinity of the Yinchuan Plain is the land of fish and rice, and many places in yinnan and yinbei are more droughts for many years. Among them, many place names are related to water: large puddles, grass mud puddles, shouting water.

"I don't know how others feel when they see it, I think it's very bitter, how can it be Jinchuan, Yinchuan, and Miliangchuan?" Su Yang said that he went on to write down words like "Ningxia Chuan, two pointed ... Millet yellow, shandan dan flowers bloom rich on both sides of the strait, looking forward to only hoping that the meal does not rely on the sky."

One day in 2004, Su Yang was watching Qin Lu at the Yinchuan Funing Street Theater Club, and suddenly came up with an idea, "If I perform in such a place, will I be accepted?" "Most of the customers of this theater club are middle-aged and elderly, and on weekdays, the stage is played in the Qin Cavity, and the people under the stage are playing mahjong.

He decided to try it out, and after saying goodbye to the owner of the theater, they erased the folding plays "Zhou Ren Huifu" and "You West Lake" that had been performed on the blackboard at the door and wrote "The Sound of the Earth - Suyang Band". After that, he also deliberately found someone to print the ticket, 20 yuan per ticket.

In the evening, only a few of his friends bought tickets, and there were very few people in the theater club. When he began to sing, a miracle occurred: people who came to see for free blocked the streets. Residents and migrant workers from nearby streets gathered around the door. The police received the complaint, rushed over but did not order the singing to stop, stood there and listened before leaving.

The reaction of the audience in this performance allowed Su Yang to vaguely find his own musical direction: drawing nourishment from folk music and singing about the life he saw. Since then, Suyang has increasingly gone to counties and villages in the northwest to find the real "sound of the earth" from folk artists.

Su Yang hates the word "caifeng", and his interaction with folk artists is a way similar to that of friends. Ke Yongquan, the director of "Big River Singing", was responsible for filming Su Yang. He remembered that every time Su Yang went to the home of storyteller Liu Shikai, he would buy two bottles of wine at the commissary and carry a carton of milk. It reminded him of when he was a child and went to relatives with adults.

The ordinary daily life of folk artists

In June 2016, the filming team of "Big River Singing" set out along the route that Suyang once looked for folk artists. Among them, director Heyuan is responsible for filming storyteller Liu Shikai and Zhang Li, head of the Qin Cavity Troupe. Photography cuts in from an everyday perspective.

Perhaps because of this shooting method, in "Big River Singing", it is difficult to see the common facial narratives in the stories of folk artists such as inheritance and innovation, life and perseverance, backwardness and modernity, and they are more in the filming of the ordinary and trivial daily life fragments of the four folk artists.

Before filming, he saw Liu Shikai at an event with Yuan. Liu Shikai was very addicted to smoking, and left the bookstore halfway through and went downstairs to smoke. He Yuan remembers that Liu Shikai, who is 58 years old, has been thinking about making money. When smoking, Liu Shikai also took the time to tell another folk artist that he was a contractor and that the other party could come and work with him.

Liu Shikai was born in Yulin County, Shaanxi Province, which was once the most popular place for Folk Songs in Shaanxi. His father was a well-known local storyteller, and he listened to his father from an early age. I learned a little. Later, the local cultural center saw his talent for books and recruited him to join. In 1976, he returned home to farm.

He married around the age of 20 and later his wife died of illness, leaving behind a two-year-old child. In order to raise children, he began to go to various villages in the northwest to read books during his winter agricultural leisure. When he was lecturing in Yanchi County, Ningxia, he met a woman who later became his second wife, and the two gave birth to 3 children.

He once stopped telling books, running brick factories, contracting projects, and became a well-known 10,000-yuan household in the 1980s. Ten years after marriage, Liu Shikai's second wife died of postpartum depression. He brought up three sons and a daughter by storytelling and contracting projects.

Now, he has moved the graves of his two wives together in Yulin, Shaanxi and Yanchi, Ningxia, and plans to bury them with them in the future. He Yuan remembered that on the day of the burial, Liu Shikai looked at the coffin and said, "I may be a bare stick in my life, but when I die, I will become the emperor, and two wives accompany me, with my left arm and right arm." ”

He Yuan felt that Liu Shikai's best storytelling work was "Liu Shikai's Biography". "Sing his experiences from childhood all the way to his current life." From this point of view, Liu Shikai, like Su Yang, is expressing his true life in a local tone, just like the Yellow River around them is singing.

China News Weekly, No. 22, 2019

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