The author | Maureena
Editor| Li Chunhui
The 32nd Golden Melody Awards were announced, but unfortunately there were few viewers. The Golden Melody Awards, which were once regarded as a musical event across the Taiwan Straits and the three regions, are now more and more like the enclosure of Taiwanese musicians. Even mainland singer Tan Weiwei was shortlisted for the "Best Chinese Female Singer", but he was not able to bring more attention from mainland netizens.
It is difficult for music bloggers to broadcast the whole process live that night, but most of the awards have only a few hundred reviews. However, the award guest Chen Shanni's testimonial of "What is a music producer in live science popularization" unexpectedly won 13,000 retweets, becoming the traffic bearer of the Golden Melody Awards night.
Maybe you don't know that Chen Shanni has won many blockbuster awards such as Best Album, Best Female Singer, Best Album Producer, Best Group and so on. But you must have heard her songs at some stages of your life: Zhang Xinzhe's "Thinking of Your Night" in the 90s, Lin Xiaopei's "Annoyance"; Millennium Weizai's "Fancy Years", Xie Tingfeng's "Perfume"; and a series of hot songs such as Zhou Bichang's "Close Friends" and Wang Xinling's "Adventures of the Heart".
And even if you are familiar with these songs, you still don't know what she did as a producer in the process of the birth of these golden songs.
The reason why Chen Shanni's speech resonated was that in the final analysis, it was the cliché: where did the golden songs in the Chinese music scene go. On this question, we have found many "big" answers: the kitsch of short videos, the kidnapping of capital, the blindness of the rice circle, the pandering of musicians...
Now, we have a more specific solution to the production link: is it because the living space of music producers is squeezed, which leads to the fault of the golden song?
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="50" > product manager for music</h1>
Chen Shanni spent about 120 seconds at the Golden Melody Awards to explain the profession of "music producer", which is simply summarized: setting the tone and making decisions.
Setting the tone is to determine the positioning of an album. The album is not a one-on-one arrangement of ten songs to put together, but requires the music producer to take the singer to decide "what theme we want to do with this album". However, in today's status quo of singers maintaining exposure with singles, the importance of "setting the tone" is more difficult to perceive than in the past.
Making decisions is more trivial work. After deciding on the theme of the album, the producer selects the song that matches the theme among the hundreds or more songs received to promote the production; decides how far the arrangement and recording are completed. As Sunny Chan puts it, balance the expectations of the record company with the dreams of the musicians; decide whether to use an upright or a platform piano; and say, "You can, from time to time" to everyone.
These two events run through the work of the music producer, and finally present an album with a holistic concept, ten songs that seem to be independent and follow the transition. It has sections that compromise with business and point to hit songs, as well as slightly experimental content that highlights the stylization of singers.
Of course, if the relationship between the producer and the singer is long, there will be more functions in the production. Some producers will take over the work of arranging and mixing music, such as Zhang Yadong; some producers will even work as agents.
A good music producer can make a great singer. Without Brian Eno, Goldplay would not have had the legendary album "Viva La Vida" (of course, Coldplay was also expelled from the rock ranks); Faye Wong's Chinese album "Impetuous" released in 1996, without Zhang Yadong highlighting Faye Wong's characteristics with the overall concept of "freedom", I am afraid that the road to Tianhou would not have gone so smoothly.
Singers are artists, record labels are businessmen, and music producers are hybrids. He must know both what the public's preferences are, and what the singer's personal characteristics are, and fuse the singer's colors in the popular melody to make it a "so-and-so golden song".
People who don't like Faye Wong will always say that Faye Wong is just a Chinese version of the cranberries lead singer Dolores. But these people also have to admit that there are so many people who are influenced by British rock and imitate Dolores, but Faye Wong sings her own style. This is inseparable from the music producers, including Zhang Yadong, to explore Faye Wong's personal characteristics and vocal function. A good music producer may know "who he is" better than a singer.
This is enough to explain why the popular golden songs of 20 years ago have their own styles, rather than the cookie-cutter of today's Vibrato Divine Comedy. You know that the only person who sings "Black Liuding" is Dr. Tao, "Even the Words Can't Be Clear" is Jay Chou, "The Only" belongs to Wang Lihong, liang-style love songs can only be performed by Liang Jingru, and it is Sun Yanzi who sings love songs out of the taste of the intestines.
For professional music producers, especially those who are at the tip of the pyramid, such as the Bao brothers, Luo Dayou, and Xiao Worms, it is not difficult to control the public's preferences for many years in the industry. Why Jay Chou's first album was a hit that year, in addition to being related to Wu Zongxian's promotion and his own talent, is also related to the fact that he worked as a producer for many singers before he entered the industry and had a control over the public aesthetic.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="20" > how the golden song disappeared</h1>
Why are the new songs of traffic singers with a large number of fans becoming more and more incomprehensible? And all kinds of divine comedies on short video platforms are always dismissed as "big folk songs", and the speed of the short video platform is faster than the popularity? The absence of music producers is one of the reasons for this strange phenomenon.
At present, most of the new songs of traffic singers are either written by the singers themselves or produced by overseas teams. In short, emphasize originality and emphasize high standards.
The impact of Jay Chou's appearance on the Chinese music scene may be more profound than imagined. After Jay Chou, singers, especially the new generation of singers who grew up listening to Jay Chou's music, have their obsession with "creation" deep into the marrow. It is understandable that traffic singers have been labeled too much, and personally working on the album is a way to prove themselves. But most traffic singers really don't understand the masses of the people.
Most of these traffic singers have overseas migrant work experience or been trained in domestic companies that have been born out of the Korean trainee model, and their musical literacy and understanding of music are absolutely higher than those of ordinary people, but they do not have the ability of music producers to blend pop and art, and lack of long-term observation of public tastes, resulting in new songs being cutting-edge enough, but they are not popular in the mass market.
Asian countries, including Japan and South Korea, have an obsessive yearning for the European and American music markets, and this yearning is also reflected in the fact that traffic singers are willing to cooperate with overseas production teams.
As mentioned earlier, music producers must have a long-term observation of the market and a precise control of audience preferences in order to produce golden songs. The works delivered by overseas production teams are often jobs born in the form of "creation houses".
This kind of multi-person participation is the "Creation House" mode
The so-called "creation house" is a new production model that has emerged in Europe and the United States in recent years, with more than a dozen producers getting together, you write choruses, I do arrangements, he writes the first few bars of the first paragraph, she is responsible for timbre control, and so on.
This model ensures the output speed, but requires the singer to have a strong voice and control over the camp, and can accurately tell the producer of the creation house what I want or what I don't want, otherwise it is a job where everyone can sing and listen. Coupled with the lack of long-term observation of the Chinese market by overseas production teams, the matter of setting the tone finally fell back to the singer.
The songs of traffic singers may be guaranteed in artistry, but due to insufficient understanding of public tastes, the possibility of a pandemic is missing; and short video platform songs such as Douyin Shenqu rely on poisoned melodies to form a short period of dissemination, but they are less artistic and become "big folk songs" that are forgotten after listening.
Whether it is the Douyin song chart or the Kugou 500, if you are not a long-term user of this type of platform, you will feel that you have entered a new world when you open the chart. The names of the TOP singers are unfamiliar, and the songs that have been played millions or even tens of millions of times sound familiar.
"Everyone has the right to speak up," the music platform says, and it's really pushing for it. The emergence of a variety of production tools and the optimization of recommendation algorithms have made it necessary for singers to knock on the door of record companies before they have the opportunity to go to the market, as in the past, and a computer or even a mobile phone may produce a song.
"You can sing without music theory", something that could not have happened in the past is becoming a reality. The companies behind the singers of the hits have changed from traditional record labels to MCN agencies, which scrape data to learn what melodies and lyrics are the most brainwashed, and then mix them into the market.
Singers on the short video platform are no longer singers in the traditional sense, but more like "tool people" selected by MCN agencies. A song has only a few seconds to become popular, if it can't be red, replace the next one, no one will have to think about what kind of melody and work the singer's voice is suitable for, and even music producers are no longer needed.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="49" > who is to blame</h1>
Can a renewed focus on music producers solve the problems we have now? Unfortunately, the lack of golden songs and the longer and longer intervals between top singers may be the inevitable development of the times.
Music producers were ignored, but those gold medal producers did not collectively withdraw from the jianghu that year, and many of them still maintained long-term cooperation with singers, but the golden songs disappeared. Even for Zhou Dong, the popularity of "Say Good Don't Cry" is difficult to compare with his works such as "Qilixiang" and "Listen to Mother's Words" from decades ago.
At the end of the day, it's the way people appreciate music that's changed. The reason why the golden song is remembered is not only good, but also because it carries emotions.
Around the turn of the millennium, entertainment was relatively scarce, and listening to songs became one of the main ways for people to relax. It is normal for an album to be repeated several times or even dozens of times, and listening to it more can naturally feel "where the song is good". Especially for students, listening to songs is almost the only pastime after class.
After the millennium, the popularity of home computers and the development of the mobile Internet have led to richer entertainment products, which are constantly distracting people's attention and leaving less and less time for music.
In the past, people would set aside an afternoon or even a day to enjoy an album over and over again, learning to sing word by word with a lyric book, and music participated in people's lives. Now music is more like a background sound, it is BGM on the commuting road, under the attack of instant messaging tools such as WeChat and QQ and social platforms such as Weibo and Douban.
It goes without saying which one makes a deeper impression and listens carefully and casually. It is precisely because of the change in the way of appreciation that the creators pursue to capture the audience in a very short period of time with a simple and rough poisoned melody, even at the expense of artistry.
In the past, singers needed to go through record companies to go to the market, which in itself was a guide to the public aesthetic. "You think you chose to listen to a certain singer's song, but your choice is actually the result of deliberate screening by the record company." After years of screening by the record company, the musical aesthetic has been invisibly adjusted, and the music producers have prejudged when controlling the aesthetics of the public.
Now that the monopoly of record companies has been broken, everyone can be a singer, and music is no longer a product of elite screening and put into the market. Even experienced music producers have a hard time reconciling such a complex mass taste.
In the face of this series of changes, the record companies that have lost their power still rely on copyright income to survive, and they are not eager or have no way to regain the right to speak; while the emerging platforms that hold the traffic code lack the accumulation of music expertise and talents, allow the Divine Comedy to flourish, and even take "not understanding music theory will become popular" as a highlight of publicity.
In fact, not only the Chinese music scene is impatient in pursuing short and fast, but also in the global music scene. Billboard 200 also features hits that all sound familiar.
Just as the rise of self-media has led to the disappearance of "old editors", the absence of music producers and the demise of golden songs are only the appearance of the problem. The deeper level is the change of the media, and the practitioners in it have not yet been able to find a way to combine the old and the new when the change comes.
But readers who have watched more shocked bodies will eventually remember the benefits of in-depth reporting in those years. Give the music scene a little more patience and time, and the return of the golden song is unknown. At least look at this year's several original music synthesis, although it is not hot, watching its creation is enough to make people feel terrible.