Before going to the scene, I heard from my friend that there were many posters of Hudev in the subway in Shanghai. "I can't imagine that many young people like Hudev now."
When he first came to the mainland to perform in 2006, most of the people who came to the scene were still remembering the folk song era. Now this group of people are also old, Hudev himself is seventy years old, only the song is not old.
Hudev has left a vast and frequent footprint here (not only in physical space, but also in Zhihu, Douban and TV programs). He seems to be back to his youth, leaving his hometown, making young friends, singing, drinking, and seeing if the world is really like a rock that can't be pushed.
Hoodev
1
"Why, why/ Can't go back to the road you stepped out of / Can't find the door to stay in my hometown"
- "Why"
The man who wrote Hoodef liked to mention his age. Less than sixty, sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, and seventy years old, it seems that age is also part of the legend of the "father of Taiwanese folk songs". The older he gets, the whiter his beard becomes, the more beautiful the mist that surrounds him. Like his birthplace of Taitung Dawu Mountain, the summit is covered with clouds and mist all year round and is regarded as a "holy mountain" by local ethnic minorities.
Hoodev's clouds come from his "in" and "not in" at all.
In the 1970s, Hu Defu and his two friends Li Shuangze and Yang Xian brewed a "folk song movement" to change the direction of Chinese music in his ost city teppanyaki shop. In the years when the "West Wind" completely overwhelmed the "East Wind", several young people turned the heavy pressure of the external environment into a driving force for introverted excavation of national culture, shouted out "sing their own songs" and really made a sound and left their works, which has been told countless times, and will not be repeated here.
Beginning with the writing of the first song, "The Child on the Back of an Ox," or earlier, a night party in Lost City, Hu Defu, a dropout of the English Department at National Taiwan University, inadvertently stood in the middle of an important stage and was present forever in this history.
His "absence" is more important than "being".
In 1974, Hoodev held a solo concert "Beautiful Rice Spike", and in 2005, he published his first solo album "Hurry". In the intervening thirty years, he saw the suffering of his compatriots in his eyes, could not turn a blind eye, and changed from a singer to a campaigner for the rights and interests of Taiwan's ethnic minorities.
After the Taiwan authorities implemented the policy of "mountain tribal leveling" in 1953, Hu Defu's people left their ancestral land and settled in The Village of Jialan under the mountain (Note: Jialan Village was formed by the migration of several tribes on the mountain and was named after the largest tribe, "Ka-Aluwan").
The "mountain compatriots" (i.e., "mountain compatriots") are inferior and have the connotation of ignorance and backwardness in the rapidly developing Taiwanese society. Leaving the tribe at the age of eleven, he read that Khudefu of National Taiwan University was "a phoenix flying out of the mountains". But it is always like this, the more you see, the less calm the mind becomes.
On June 20, 1984, an explosion occurred at the Haishan Coal Mine, killing 72 people. Hudev rushed to the scene to participate in the rescue, and the bodies carried out were mostly local ethnic groups. There is no way to say anything, only to sing. He wrote a song called "Why", became a "sensitive person", and disappeared from the public eye.
The catastrophe of the Haishan coal mine and a series of subsequent events - the closure of mines, the migration of ethnic minority miners in Taiwan to form the famous Three Warblers tribe, the survival of ethnic minorities entered the public eye for the first time, and the emergence of civilian relief forces... At a turning point in history in the form of tragedy, the emergence of change was accelerated.
"Why" and "Lukang Town", which was born two years earlier, both sing nostalgia, but they are not the same. The "we" in Why is a race that has been completely forgotten by Prosperity. "Brilliant fireworks/dots fell into the corner of us". Although the "I" in "Lukang Town" cannot return to my homeland, I still have romantic thoughts, are still young, and still have dreams.
2
This is the furthest distance
Come to the place closest to you
- "The Furthest Road"
As a child, Hoodev's name was Ara. His father's family name was originally "Makakaruwan", which means "most human". The family name Tuko, from which the word "Dev" comes from. The English name Kimbo he later used was the Japanese pronunciation of "Defu".
These names are like fragments of history, clearly illuminating the bustling crowds of the island. Thirty years later, when the white-haired Hudev reappeared on the stage, as if to compensate history (if history could really be "compensated").
From the boom of manufacturing in the mountains and forests to farming civilizations to the "money-drowning foot order", the usually slow course of historical evolution elsewhere fell on Hudev and his people at an alarming rate.
The theme of Hoodev's tour this time is "Life". I'm not used to it, the person on the stage is small, and the pictures of him on the screen are huge. In the photo, Khudev is in the mountains and forests, wearing national costumes and leaving an image of his tribe, and there are faces similar to his in the photo; there are also photos of him when he was very young, sword eyebrows and starry eyes, heroic.
The childhood of hunting cattle and almost dying, the young people who went to rescue the prostitutes with their partners and fought with The American soldiers, the middle-aged man who suddenly fell into poverty but did not accept defeat after being rich and beautiful, and finally became the old man in front of him, with a big heart, and whispered to the audience: "There are brave people everywhere in China, from Taiwan to the far west and the far east." ”
On the evening of October 22, at the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Concert Hall, Hu Defu brought Chen Jiannian and Wu Haoen. The two musicians and Hoodef come from the same village. When Hudev proudly told the audience that "our village won a total of 12 Golden Melody Awards", if you know a little about the history of this village, you will understand the meaning of this sentence better.
Outsiders may be angry, so thick history and suffering, into a beautiful trophy of the Golden Melody Award, is it worth it.
Listening to Chen Jiannian and Wu Haoen play and sing, one said to be "the guardian of traditional culture", and the other said that he was "a big singer and a small song". The song is carefree, and there is a happy heart in the Aral sea breeze, and they know that the efforts of their generation are worth it.
Chen Jiannian
Wu Hao'en
3
Plant trees to cool off future generations, and learn from our ancestors
Life is like a road, a moment west, a moment east
Hurry, hurry
- "Hurry"
The "bellows" in Hoodev's chest no longer emits a loud roar. The way he played the piano was gentle, and the whole person was like a layer of cellophane.
The songs are floating and heavy, with no beginnings and no ends. When the aged Hudev processed the songs in a more subtle way, no longer tapping the keyboard hard, and vibrating the surrounding air currents with huge cavities, their appearance changed. When external struggles and inner losses become the past, when personal improvements are made, when the times turn the page, and young people can sing easily and happily, can these songs still be heard?
"Buffalo, rice, bananas, magnolia flowers" suddenly flew into the heart.
A winding coastline leads to the ocean, backed by vast forests, nostalgic for the relatively primitive life form of human beings, trapped in the industrial civilization that is impossible to regress.
The mountains and seas in Hu defu's songs, mothers and forests, long roads and homes, meaningless lining words and tribal chants, blues with mountain song flavor, and clean rhymes of Chinese folk songs have been stripped away with the passage of time. He distilled the experience of the island into poetry, reflecting the general situation of the people. In this way, even today, there are still echoes.
Next year, Hudev will come up with a new set of 3CD works, "representing the real beginning". His "Call of the Valley" mainland tour is underway, having sung in Shenzhen, Wuhan and Shanghai, and will be in Xi'an and Chengdu in November.