Jay Chou, sooner or later, he will have to "collapse his personality"

Text: Linghu Boguang

Recently, there was an incident in the Chinese entertainment industry, that is, Jay Chou and Kunling bought tickets to see Taylor Swift (that is, Mildew) in Australia, but said on social networks that they were invited by the Mildew team to watch it, and it was exposed.

There may not be any netizens who don't pay attention, but a monstrous scolding war has been set off on the Internet.

I won't summarize this process here, Bo Guangjun is not a person who likes to write this kind of article, and if you observe this experience, you will find that there are still many fans and passers-by who are defending Jay Chou by netizens, but there are already a lot of scolding all over the world, and it is difficult to listen to the speech.

I have also written a lot about Jay Chou and Chinese music before, and the answer is actually very simple, in this era of highly disseminated information, Jay Chou's "character is about to collapse", this persona collapsed because he loves to show off for others, but in the past two years, whether it is a new album, a concert release, and then last year's "Christmas Star" has been unable to keep up, but his attitude is still the most powerful.

This disappointed many fans and passers-by, and also made many people who originally talked about Jay Chou show off and began to pour water.

Jay Chou is indeed the "last king" of the Chinese music scene, but he is indeed overrated

Jay Chou's special value lies in the fact that he has become a brand, his combination of music style and commerciality is unique, plus the mainstream Chinese pop music scene after 2010 is not good, after the 8090 generation has become middle-aged and has mastered the right to speak on the Internet, so he was put to the sky.

He is a bridge in the 80s, 90s, 00, his long career and the ambition to still not just become a good memory of the past (although this also makes him scolded every day Jiang Lang exhausted and his later life is not guaranteed), as well as the strong vitality and popularity of his works (whether it is the bell in the opposite direction that turns red or the confession balloon that is scolded every day), so that he has not yet been eliminated by the new era.

Everyone can have their own secret treasures when listening to music, but we also need a common language, we need concerts, we need chorus, we need Jay Chou. Mainstream singers like Deng Ziqi and Xue Zhiqian have not given up, and are still trying to find their place in the new era, but compared with Jay Chou, they are still a little worse after all.

At the same time, the mainstream pop music scene is really too bad, and the reasons have been written before.

Now no matter film and television, novels, music, almost any cultural form is pursuing short, flat and fast, and now the pace of society is getting faster and faster, who rarely allows you to engage in a bunch of complicated things? Jia Ling, Happy Twist and Chen Sicheng remake foreign IPs = realistic gimmicks The owners of bad movies can make money, and the cool articles written by online writers also make money, and the saliva songs you look down on listen to hundreds of millions of dollars, and you still despise this and despise that?

This is all voted by the common people with their feet, those musicians who were ten years earlier and the so-called professional music critics, they are really good in the field, but they are just a disgusting posture from above, if they really understand what the people like, they would have earned a lot of money.

In the future, a song will be less than a minute, or even dozens of seconds, more than ten seconds, believe it or not?

I don't think it's a step backwards, that's the result of fully adapting to the market. "The Great Gatsby" says: When you despise someone, you have to know that not everyone has your superior conditions. You can watch a long video quietly, listen to a song quietly, and honestly thank your family, after all, many people are busy from morning to night, and they don't have the leisure to enjoy the spring and snow.

Chinese music is not finished, but many people have not made progress

Now the music is much richer than before, and the music style is becoming more and more abundant, but many netizens should find one thing. That's QQ Music, the annual list of short videos is full of saliva songs and divine comedies, you don't like to listen to it. Then it's on the annual list of well-known music critics, and it turns out to be all complicated songs, and you don't like to listen to them.

The former has already been talked about above, the problem of information development, the latter, I have had a guess before why the list is always a song I don't like, not that the Chinese music scene is over, but that it is becoming more and more difficult for us listeners to receive really good songs.

I am willing to interpret this conclusion in a more straightforward way: our current music software (NetEase Cloud, QQ Music, etc.) is becoming more and more difficult to push to the good songs we want, this result is very simple and direct, but there are many direct or indirect factors.

First, the number of songs is increasing, and it has reached a new level of magnitude, which makes it more and more difficult for us to get a good number of songs among many songs.

The second is that the threshold for the production of songs is getting lower and lower, in other words, the production of songs is becoming more and more rough and even deformed

Third, short video platforms in the 4G era have dispersed the independence of songs as a separate category of entertainment.

Fourth, in such a huge library of songs, today's market-led way of screening music (popularity) is too single and backward, and there are many artificial operations (hitting the charts and swiping lists) in the market-led way, which disrupts the healthy competition in the popularity charts

Fifth, the "information cocoon" effect formed in the era of big data makes it difficult for people's listening taste to evolve greatly after the formation of the cocoon, which is my purely subjective opinion, and I must first throw out an anti-zzzq point of view: songs are good and bad, but in my opinion, this is like learning mathematics, people's ability will evolve from addition to multiplication, then people's music taste should also evolve in a higher direction after listening more

But the emergence of the information cocoon has delayed this process indefinitely, and the push of songs will always be trapped in this small circle, and when the "good songs" of the song market are pushed into your music circle, if it is a higher level than your circle, then you will gladly accept it, but if it is a worse song (for me most), then we will sadly come to a point of view: the Chinese music scene is finished.

In the Chinese music scene, there is no need for the next Jay Chou at all

What kind of card point transformation, the content is wonderful, the BGM is appropriate, and then this video is popular, and many people imitate the remake when it is popular, this BGM has been used many times, brushed once, I think it looks good, and I will brush it N times, big data will start to push these Internet celebrity songs to you, and what we hear is these Internet celebrity songs.

In the past, we were in a golden age, and there were a lot of enduring songs, when we got tired of the Douyin Divine Comedy, we began to recall the songs of the past, and when we grew up, our mood began to change, and when we were young and young, it became a sweet memory, and we began to have a sentimental filter (of course, these songs are good) and the comparison became separated.

In the past, these songs may have only been listened to by young people, but now middle-aged and elderly people have also begun to contact the Internet, and they tend to some "songs" with outrageous bitterness, which are extremely earthy. Nowadays, entertainment methods have become diverse, some people do not have music listening software in their mobile phones at all, and some people can not use music software for several months, and only listen to the music in the video.

In fact, there are very, very many types of music nowadays, and people's appreciation is also different, whether it is ethnic, classical, electronic, pop, jazz, R&B, metal, antique, rap, rock, folk, pure music, some people can enjoy mountain songs, some people can't. There are still so many people, and there are more options, and there are fewer people per option.

In short, I still think that there are a lot of good songs now, and only by slowing down and looking for them can we find treasures. In the past, the music scene was the result of public screening, but now you need to dig slowly and sift it yourself.

Jay Chou, sooner or later, he will have to "collapse his personality"

The next important thing in Chinese pop music is not to repeatedly put Jay Chou on the altar, nor is it the so-called "personality collapsed" to criticize, let alone look forward to the next Zhou Wang Taolin, but to find a way to change the way we get music, the new Zhou Wang Taolin has already been born, but he or she is drowned in the wave of the short video era and cannot get a chance to speak

Or maybe he has been infected by the short video era and made songs that he/she doesn't like, then in the face of such a huge song library, perhaps the only way for us to find him or her at present is to try to improve the quality of music screening within the Chinese music scene: to find good and objective song awards.

I don't think it's a bad thing, it's completely dialectical. The rise of emerging technologies has provided the most extensive people with the objective conditions to break through the creative bottleneck, so as to truly break the monopoly of record companies on artistic creation, and the right to create may finally return to the hands of the widest range of people.

The question is, "Can everyone create their own music?" The problem is that "the level of music that everyone is making is not enough". Therefore, what needs to be done is to improve the level of aesthetic education of everyone, and not let this aesthetic education become the exclusive right of a few. Just as in the former Soviet Union, every citizen has an unprecedented level of art, can enjoy ballet, know how to play sports, and learn music.

Instead of the current Russian electric shake that has no aesthetic sense in Russia, all kinds of short video divine comedy and saliva songs are rampant in the Chinese music scene.

If we were able to do that, would we still miss the so-called "golden age" when only a few companies had the right to release records?

Judging whether "gold" is "golden" or not only by the highest peak of a certain era is incomplete. Let Jay Chou become a "trendsetter of the times", and then because of some things, "Jay Chou's personality collapsed", the hidden logic behind this is that most of the remaining people have to follow, which is to annihilate the subjectivity of people's extensive participation in creation.

Looking back at Jay Chou's gods and controversies now, is such a "golden age" really worth nostalgia for?

Returning to Chinese music itself, I do not deny the fact that the current level is low, but through a dialectical perspective, we can fully see the new life that is being bred: the current flood of saliva songs is because people only have the level of saliva songs, but what if everyone's level comes up?

For example, the decentralized music creation brought by virtual singers has freed a considerable number of people's needs to listen to songs from traditional album songs, which is an exciting good thing.