In the Chinese music scene, the name Lin Junjie is the top singer-songwriter, and he is also the earliest initiator of "Walking CD". But if you put Lin Junjie and Jay Chou together, you will find a very cruel truth:
Lin Junjie's influence is indeed far inferior to Jay Chou, if Jay Chou is a god, then Lin Junjie belongs to the strongest sequence under the god. In particular, Jay Chou has the influence of the national era, and has already broken through the field of music, far surpassing Lin Junjie in business, star effect and other fields. So Jay Chou and Lin Junjie are both the top music creation talents in Chinese music, and Lin Junjie's singing skills are obviously better than Jay Chou's, and they also hold many high-quality music, so why is Lin Junjie not as godly as Jay Chou?
Today, from a professional perspective, there are four answers:
1: Lin Junjie's music is groundbreaking and creative compared with Jay Chou, and his overall contribution to the Chinese music scene is not as good as Jay Chou. Even Tao Zhe and Wang Leehom's musical creativity is higher than Lin Junjie's breakthrough promotion of Chinese music. So in fact, Jay Chou≥ Tao Zhe> Wang Leehom ≥ Lin Junjie, but Lin Junjie still belongs to the queue of Jay Chou's three, and he still crushes the behind: Xue Zhiqian, Hua Chenyu, and Li Ronghao.
2: Lin Junjie's music is too focused on the Chinese lyrical style, which has not been breakthrough enough for more than ten years, the audience is limited, and the difficulty of singing the work is too high, and too much attention is paid to vocal ability, but in terms of rhythm, rhythm, music style, and melodic performance, it is difficult to produce an easy imitation like Jay Chou, resulting in a small degree of singing.
3: Lin Junjie's music team is far inferior to Jay Chou's music team, Lin Junjie is a Singaporean, and Lin Junjie suffered a big loss due to the company's operational mistakes in the early days, and Jay Chou is a Chinese. And the most important thing is that Fang Wenshan, as Jay Chou's royal word, makes up for what Jay Chou and Lin Junjie lack the most - oriental cultural self-confidence. In addition, Jay Chou's arrangers Zhong Xingmin, Hong Jingyao, and Lin Mike are all Chinese ceilings in the field of arrangement, while Lin Junjie's arrangers are actually more than inferior to Tao Zhe, Wang Leehom and others.
4: Lin Junjie's compositional performance has not made some breakthroughs at the bottom, and it still exists: the employment thinking that he will sing whatever the market needs, rather than having a groundbreaking artistic creation. This leads to the fact that Lin Junjie can tell a set of rotten street routine chords and write a brilliant melody, but Lin Junjie does not want to change the market routine chords of rotten street. Jay Chou is different, Jay Chou will use his own music theory, key, scale, and classical thinking to change the bad bottom of the routine chords.
The following is a detailed explanation of the above four points:
1: Jay Chou, Lin Junjie, Tao Zhe, and Wang Leehom have made breakthroughs in Chinese music, and Lin Junjie is the lowest;
If a singer wants to complete the driving force for the entire market, it is mainly through the following three aspects:
- 1: As a music producer, the singer proposes a new original music art style;
- 2: The crushing leadership of market feedback.
Among these two points, there are still obvious differences between Jay Chou and Lin Junjie, and even for Tao Zhe and Wang Leehom, Lin Junjie's performance is a little weaker.
In terms of the original music art style, the most important thing is that the singer created his own Chinese products rather than imported products, which is that Tao Zhe and Wang Leehom are also American nationals, but their culture is Chinese, but Lin Junjie is a little bit different from the understanding of Chinese music culture because of Singapore's nationality. In addition to Lin Junjie, the three have the following original Chinese driving performances:
Jay Chou proposed: culturally confident Chinese rap (rooted in Miao Hong, maverick), created the first nationally accepted Chinese-style music (a collection of masterpieces, huge influence, and a breakthrough in breaking the circle), and created a classical pop music style (a breakthrough in composition professionalism, raising the composition standard of pop music in one fell swoop).
Tao Zhe created and proposed: the Chinese road of R&B in one fell swoop. As early as 1993, Tao Zhe began to do R&B music in Chinese music, and it was not until 2024 that Tao Zhe began to truly achieve perfect market feedback on musicality, and liking R&B has also become the ultimate choice for music students in the music professional field.
Wang Leehom proposed: The Chinked-out style of hip-hop music and Chinese folk music is actually a bit more conceptual than practical. Zhang Jie also put forward this style idea. However, Leehom Wang's tracks "The Sun and Moon in My Heart" and "Heroes of the World" were nominated for Grammy Music, and they still achieved a breakthrough in professional Chinese music.
So what does Lin Junjie propose? It seems difficult to describe, if you have to say that Lin Junjie's originality is prominent: it is vocal music. Lin Junjie put forward a very important thing in vocal music: singers need to use vocal music as a long-term investment and long-term learning in order to maintain their high-level competitive state. In terms of vocal music, Lin Junjie has made a great contribution to Chinese pop vocal music. But this kind of contribution only appears among the niche audience of Chinese music: vocal students and amateur vocal music lovers.
So in essence, Lin Junjie is a unique vocal contribution, and Jay Chou, Tao Zhe, and Wang Leehom can all be written into the history of Chinese music pop contributions, and there are still very obvious differences between the two groups. We appreciate JJ Lin's singing voice far more than his musical contributions.
2: Lin Junjie's music style is too focused and lyrical, but in fact, the lyrical music style has long been out of the mainstream.
Music style, this is a very concrete audience diversion in the commercial return of pop music. Since the era of the Four Heavenly Kings, from 1993 to around 2013, the mainstream audience of Chinese music pop music has always been - Chinese lyricism. Adagio, love songs, delicate, and tender music production ideas have become the mainstream audience area with the largest commercial returns, and Lin Junjie's body has been in this field from 2004 to 2024.
Even Lin Junjie's best work "Song for Nobody" is also a lyrical breakthrough work, Lin Junjie's timbre is too exclusive to the lyrical style, the timbre is delicate, tender, and has a warm male color as soon as he opens his mouth, and Lin Junjie also deliberately increased his own singing characteristics. This has led to, slowly, Lin Junjie has become a little inseparable from the lyrical music style. As a result, Lin Junjie's new work is far less good than R&B for the professional field.
The real problem with the style of music is the complexity of the music. Because the essence of pop music is the market economy, and the market has obvious cycles, and the cycle of pop music is: aesthetic fatigue. When the overly simplistic lyrical style dominated for 20 years, the demand for music needed a little bit of stimulation. Jay Chou has firmly grasped this point, from "Nunchuck" to "Lady" to "Black Humor", Jay Chou is very exciting in the market. However, Lin Junjie just lacks some unexpected works, and is too lonely in the lyrical style.
3: Music team, Jay Chou has been doing it himself since the first album, and he is his own music producer
In terms of music team, Jay Chou's music team is almost invincible. Jay Chou himself is the best composer in Chinese music, because Jay Chou has the professionalism of classical composition, but he does not have the routine thinking of pop music, between classical and pop, Jay Chou is a very free play.
In addition to composition, Fang Wenshan can be said to be Jay Chou's biggest nobleman, because Jay Chou's cultural level is low, and Chinese music is a music market that values lyrics the most, and most of our Chinese's understanding of music is talking about lyrics, rarely saying that composition is too professional. And Fang Wenshan provided Jay Chou with unparalleled cultural confidence, and even became the trend of the times. From "Nunchucks", "Compendium of Materia Medica" to "Blue and White Porcelain", the kind of self-confidence provided by Fang Wenshan perfectly makes up for Jay Chou's lack of business temperament, and makes Jay Chou's ruffian "I'm hanging" have embodied traces and gimmicks.
The final arrangement is to allow Jay Chou to complete a very big peak of Chinese music in the market professional field of pop music, the first arranger began to be known to the public because of Jay Chou, and Jay Chou alone created the classic works of three arrangers. In comparison, Lin Junjie's team is a bit difficult to compare with Jay Chou. Whether it is Lin Junjie vs. Jay Chou's composition, or Lin Qiuli vs. Fang Wenshan's lyrics, or the unknown arranger vs. Zhong Xingmin, there are differences in grades within the industry.
To sum up, Lin Junjie is a very perfect singer and a top singer-songwriter, but in the same era, only one person is allowed to become the only strong man - Jay Chou. I hope that there will be better breakthrough works in Jiejie in the future.