During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, hundreds of singers in the entire Chinese music scene crowded together on the song "Beijing Welcomes You", but there was a ruthless man who sang a three-minute song "Thousands of Mountains and Rivers" - he was Jay Chou. In Jay Chou's body, we can easily feel that he is an exception everywhere in Chinese music through the announcement of the official media:
- 1: Southeast Satellite TV's official media released Jay Chou's work "Shanghai 1943" was included in Taipei's third-grade textbook.
- 2: Sichuan Satellite TV's official media released Jay Chou's works "Listen to Mother's Words" and "Snail" were included in the third-grade textbook of Chinese textbooks for primary schools in the mainland.
- 3: The official media of Strait Satellite TV released Jay Chou's work "Piano Injury" was included in the textbook of mainland middle schools, and "Mr. Magic" was selected as a kindergarten music textbook.
- 4: Shenzhen Satellite TV's official media released that Jay Chou's works were included in Japanese Chinese textbooks.
If a singer can break out of the materialistic entertainment industry with his works, successfully step into the education industry, and include teaching materials that educate children, this means that this singer must be an era. And if the corresponding grade of the included textbook is lower, it means that the influence of the times is greater and more difficult. This is no longer simply the quality of music, but the precipitation of the times.
The overly brilliant achievements make us have to face the fact that Jay Chou's strength and brilliance are unmatched by Jay Chou's own existence at the moment. Compared with the above works, Jay Chou's latest work "Christmas Star" is like the works of two singers, and the richness cannot be compared at all. So how long will it take for the next peak Jay Chou to appear? How many years will a Chinese orchestra be able to produce a Jay Chou? Then the essence of this question will change into three specific questions:
- 1: In the next few years, a Chinese orchestra will be able to produce a nationally recognized music superstar?
- 2: In the next few years, a Chinese orchestra will be able to produce an epoch-making composer and music production genius, and have the perfect music producer, with the top ability of lyrics, arrangement, and composition, and all this must be possessed before the age of 24?
- 3: In the next few years, Chinese orchestras can return to the benign market environment of the traditional record era?
The sum of these three questions is a complete Jay Chou: In the benign music era of the peak record era, there is a 24-year-old young man who has become an epoch-making music superstar recognized by hundreds of millions of people across the country with his perfect genius composition and music production ability, top lyrics and arrangement, and hundreds of high-quality works. From the perspective of the industry, how long will there be another Jay Chou in the Chinese music scene in the future, and the answer to the question is very clear: there is a high probability that there will not be another Jay Chou, only the next Mao Buyi.
How long will it take for the Chinese music scene to produce another Jay Chou in the future, the answer: probably never again.
We will take the above three aspects as a specific analysis, how many years in the future can there be a superstar in the Chinese music scene that is recognized by the whole people? The key to this problem is: the irreproducibility of the times.
The year 2000 is very special: in a village in the vast rural area, every family has a high probability of enjoying the entertainment of film and television music, whether it is their own home or going to a friend's house. At this time, the way in which the whole people have access to information channels is very simple: television media. At this time, DVD and CVD are a trend of entertainment. Therefore, traditional records are a very prosperous and high-profit industry at this time, and the quality of music is relatively high by several companies such as Rolling Stone Records. Jay Chou was born in this era.
In 2005, the way of collecting entertainment information for the public began to be enriched: TV media channels were still the mainstream, and the popularity rate increased. In addition, telephone, mobile phone, text message, and Internet have become auxiliary channels attached to television media. At this time, the dominance of television media reached its peak. Jay Chou's peak period was the introduction of the "Nunchuck" and "Qili Xiang" albums in 2004, which established the status of the mainland in one fell swoop.
However, after 2005, the Internet era began to gradually replace TV media, and the channel information in the Internet era was completely uncontrollable, and individuals began to have the right to choose music, rather than a passive choice. As a result, because of the public's different musical literacy and music aesthetics, it has led to the rise of Internet celebrity songs, DJ style, and retro style, and the traffic has directly carved up the market positioning of traditional records. Traditional records began to die, and large numbers of singers began to lose their jobs.
Until the digital media era opened by Jay Chou in 2015, it was still because of Jay Chou that he had the Chinese historical moment of selling 7 million copies of "The Greatest Work". But this is not a good thing: because in Jay Chou's time, there will be no space where any genius can start from scratch - the high monopoly of network resources. Jay Chou's monopoly existence basically blocked the rise of the next Jay Chou out of thin air. The best is the scale of Mao Buyi, Li Ronghao, and Deng Ziqi.
Summarizing the above information, we can draw the following conclusions:
1: 2000-2005 was an era of soaring demand for mass entertainment and a single entertainment channel. In this era, everyone's entertainment is the same, with the soil where superstars can be born. Because the choice of the public is either A or B. An example is: Which of the Four Heavenly Kings do you like?
2: After 2005, the overall entertainment direction began to become individualized, and the traditional record market began to be precarious, and it did not have the ability to sell on a large scale. The simplest example is: before 2000, a top album could sell 1 million copies casually, but after 2000, the sales of high-quality albums also declined rapidly, and the sales of online divine comedy skyrocketed. Jay Chou's "Seven Miles of Fragrance" is only 400,000 copies. The liberation of piracy and network resources has greatly hit physical sales.
How long will it take for Chinese music to have another composer with epoch-making ability? Answer: There is still no hope.
The artistry of pop music is a market where commercialization is essential and composition specialization is the auxiliary. One of the biggest requirements is marketization, not the artistry of conservatories. Because art means a niche, and it is difficult for a niche to complete the epoch-making ability promotion. And Jay Chou's composition ability has achieved the most perfect coordination in commercialization and professional artistry:
1: Jay Chou has two years of work experience as a composer in a music company, and is very familiar with the process of music production and the industrial logic of pop music, and will not commit works on paper that do not conform to the logic of the market.
2: Jay Chou has a systematic classical music learning experience, starting from elementary school Jay Chou has been training piano for two hours a day, from Thomson to Czerny, from Bach to Chopin. This knowledge is intermediate in the conservatory, but it is a valuable professional competence in the commercial market.
As soon as these two are combined, Jay Chou creates a path that belongs only to him: a young man with systematic classical music education and composition talent, who has to go to a restaurant to wash dishes and find a piano, becomes a professional composer after participating in competitions, and begins to use his hours of musical knowledge to exert his light and heat in a commercial environment. The irreproducibility here is: the sense of class division.
Families with a systematic classical music education will most likely not go to a restaurant to wash dishes, and there is a high probability that there will be no talent for composition and not be discovered. More likely to become a music student, more inclined to instrumental music performance, rather than a professional commercial composition position. The real reason for Jay Chou's success - poor composition information, is as follows:
1: The crushing of the volume of the composition paragraph. The volume of passages in a normal 2000 composition is: ABAB structure, that is, the main song + chorus + repeat the main song + repeat the chorus ending. And the volume of the passages in Jay Chou's music works is: the complex structure of ABCA2BCDA2B2C. Added pre-chorus, and bridge, and the repetition of the main song every time it was rewritten. This means: the amount of work required to compose a song by Jay Chou is twice or even triple that of other singers.
2: The crushing of melodic quality. Generally speaking, everyone's composer is racking their brains about how good or bad the melody is. But Jay Chou is completely different, he can write 9 different melodies with the accompaniment of the same routine chords, and each of them is extremely brilliant - "Flurry Spring and Autumn".
3: The crushing of harmony, form, and music theory. While other singers are using third chords and seventh chords, Jay Chou has come to the casual functionality of surrogate chords, inverted chords, and hanging chords. Other singers are using the same key, and Jay Chou has long come to parallelism, harmony, melodic minor, and ethnic scales. The richness of the harmony has a rigorous harmony system, and the 2000 year has the quality of the arrangement in 2024.
However, in the current era, this information can no longer produce the priority of poor information, and the arrangement and composition are no longer so mysterious, in other words: Jay Chou's professionalism back then had a huge impact on the era at that time, and it was difficult to achieve it in this era. Because professionalism has reached the limit of what the public thinks, if you continue to be professional, then it will become a niche. The public's understanding of music has a very clear upper limit - Jay Chou and Tao Zhe.
To sum up, there is a high probability that there will be no second Jay Chou in the future, and there is a high probability that it will be a repeat reincarnation between the second Li Ronghao, the second Mao Buyi, and the second Deng Ziqi.