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On the second night of Cui Jian's Shanghai Blue Note special show, the scalper was "caught", and the middle-aged fans who were waiting to buy scalper tickets to enter were disappointed. Cui Jian's last special performance in Shanghai was the 2012 "Blue Bones" tour, a large venue at the Shanghai Gymnasium. If the next time is still so long apart, the middle-aged fans who missed it are afraid to become old men.
There is a strange phenomenon in the domestic niche performance market, no matter what age the musicians on the stage, it is always young people who come to Live House and music festivals. Cui Jian is a rare exception. Before a friend went, he said, "I want to see Cui Jian's uncles more than I want to see Cui Jian."
When Uncle Grandpa was bored in his youth, he found solace in Cui Jian's unparalleled strength and the same loneliness and bitterness. Now it becomes dragging the little fart child to see Cui Jian, the father sings excitedly, and the child yawns and politely greets the mother in front of the camera. Back at home, the mother asked the child: "Is the old Cui trumpet blowing well?" "It's ok. He's old and almost retired. ”
If Cui Jian heard this child's evaluation, he might be very happy. His rock and roll was originally born to shoot the front wave to death on the beach. Later, he did jazz, such as a game in which children build blocks and constantly deconstruct and reorganize. Cui Jian brought traditional rap to rock and roll very early on, unleashing the power of language. Children are born with this trick, and when they speak strangely, they can occasionally touch the magic switch, bringing unexpected effects.
Cui Jian scene This article picture Ni Zhengdong photographed
Watching Cui Jian's interview and interviewing Cui Jian, you will think that he is a very serious person, upright and awe-inspiring, and has been thinking. He is also such an image on a long and large stage, and at first glance he is a person with a sense of mission and a belief in the power of art beyond ordinary people. For example, Cui Jian believes that "with Jazz, life will be very fulfilling." He always gave decisive meaning to various musical genres. His belief in music is very simple, just as the poet believes that if everyone had a guitar, even if it was only used to play simple chords and recite poems, it would make people very happy. This unicorn belief in today drives Cui Jian to constantly try new things, some of which are almost performance art.
One year at the Chishui River Valley Music Festival, he performed his own large-scale sound and video work "Crossing the "Spring Festival"", the content is grotesque, using the original song of "Spring Festival" (Du Damel's directed version) to collage folk music samples and electronics in Guizhou and other places, and the horror baby stares at the audience on the 140-square-meter stage giant screen. Cui Jian came up and asked the audience "a profound question." When he said again, "I have 14 questions," the audience receded. "Those who can stay until the end are successfully crossed..." There are many local people in the audience, and when the women with baskets on their backs leave the scene, the absurdity arises. The dislocation of the atmosphere makes it an impressive festival experience.
The blue note is small enough to see the musician's fingers and Cui Jian's expression. The small space cannot hold too grand a narrative, which partially dissolves Cui Jian's seriousness. The venue added millions of new sounds, lights and two vertical LED screens to type his lyrics on it.
Cui Jian in the first game is slow to heat up, or Cui Jian who needs a little time to enter the Jazz compilation. The first song came up with "Fresh Rock 'n' Roll", borrowed from love chants, the lyrics are simply embarrassing: "When you are still young, you have to do it quickly / This is not love This is passion / This is a shock that the body gives to the decaying soul". When "Rock 'n' Roll" rolled out from deep in Cui Jian's throat, 2021 quickly receded in the direction of the 90s.
Too many people have analyzed why Cui Jian was so shocked at that time, and how he became the epitome of the new voice of the times and the collective consciousness. On Christmas Day 1984, Cui Jian and Liu Yuan were invited to a party at the Friendship Hotel by embassy staff in Beijing and Malagasy/French guitarist Eddie, hearing about jazz, bruce and reggae. The young people of Beijing who are in the red are looking for clues, self-taught, like the sages of all fields in China at that time, entering a state of hunger and thirst for new things.
The combination of barren information and extraordinary imagination, all of this has been grabbed by the thick history of the heel, giving birth to a complex monster. Cui Jian and his band made new music for the Chinese people, but everyone could understand it. The core of Cui Jian's musical thought, but anyone who has experienced the eighties in his youth, read several poems, and read several books can understand it. He sets a trap with naïve literature and simple and powerful music, allowing people to glimpse the last images of the era before the bubbles of matter blow up.
The protagonist in Cui Jian's song is all an image - incompetent, weak, confused, stalk neck waste firewood, words must be called love, forever in an era. Want to sing a few small yellow songs and enter a new generation, helplessly the old love is too heavy to charm the eyes, can only be like a flying dog in the black hole bumping.
Cui Jian has been writing continuously, but he knows that most people only remember the first two albums. After two albums, the stones pressed against the chest were swept away by the torrent of economic boom. People have more important things to rush, fresher stimuli beckoning in the lights and new homes.
Now you can look at Cui Jian and his music in time, whether the vitality is still there after leaving the era of broken shells. Blue Note two nights of special session, Cui Jian almost sang the song of every work. The members of the old Choi band were all jazz musicians, and "they looked down on me for playing rock and roll." It doesn't matter what lyrics he sings. They are the opposite of the fans, lightly packed, and talk about music.
Cui Jian himself has been drawing energy from the instinctive, improvised and unrestrained rhythm to counter the boring and tediousness caused by serious thoughts. He must have enjoyed it when he was immersed in music. Cui Jian's music, the more later the melody became, the rhythm replaced it. His rhythm comes from the language itself, so Cui Jian is indeed engaged in rapping, a kind of thing born out of Chinese folk rap, relying solely on the magic of language to captivate the audience and release the imprisoned devil. There is no clear distinction between this kind of thing and jazz, reggae, and hip-hop, and it's all about it, blurting out.
"Fish and Birds Love" has no female voice, and Cui Jian plays two roles by himself. The female vocals he sang were partially charming, more eerie than Yangima's version. The magic moment of Tolerance occurs in the last sentence: "But my throat makes a strange sound." He squeezed out of his throat an involuntary pain, a strange sound on the verge of destruction, about to be reborn. This sentence is repeated again and again, and the music dances around the back.
Musicians use jazz language and techniques against Cui Jian's native language, catching it, flattering it, and sometimes suppressing it, adding luster to it with beautiful brass phrases and amplifying its subtle implications. Cui Jian's lack of melodies is filled by wind music, glittering in a network of rhythmic weaving, and it is no wonder that Liu Yuan is the most popular, not only because of his status as a senator.
When the children grow up, if they live seriously, they should be able to hear Cui Jian's taste. On the first night, Cui Jian sang two songs from "The Power of Incompetence", which I liked very much, which were more timeless than other songs.
There is no difference between the people in "Buffer" and the protagonists of Pushkin, Salinger, and Fitzgerald, boredom, restlessness, hesitation, and emptiness mixed into wet mud that cannot be shaken off. The speed of the music is getting faster and faster, accelerating the awakening to the arrival of "madness is gone/fear has appeared". No matter what kind of life you live, this moment will always come.
The saxophone and drums of "Nineties" are extremely precise, and the looping phrases are very good, but Cui Jian opens his mouth that "the language is not accurate enough/cannot tell the world clearly.". Rock 'n' roll can't solve the problem, can't explain the world, neither jazz nor rap. The default rule is: the secret that mortal ginseng does not break, and there is no answer in the music. But music can make people feel more alive when they're alive. In Cui Jian's words: "This is not love, this is passion / This is a shock that the body gives to a decaying soul".
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Liu Wei