These days, because of a variety show, singer Ma Wei is on the hot search, and the hot is not his folk songs, but his outfit. A hot search thus disturbs people's memories of folk songs, and the familiar melody lingers in the ears, but why it feels as if the folk singers have "disappeared".
I don't see "Nanshan South" occupying the screen, I don't see "Chengdu" wandering the streets; I don't see the literary and artistic youth muttering "Go to Dali", I don't see "Miss Dong" without a story; folk songs are no longer the private collection of a small minority, nor is it a collective carnival of the public. I can't help but ask, what happened to the ballad? Where have the folk singers gone?
Ditto on the hot search, there is another singer Chen Grain. As before, she rejected the label of "folk singer". In fact, Ma Wei also wanted to get rid of this label, he had worked with the Wenque Band, not as soft as before, but more uninhibited and calm.
In recent years, there has indeed been some quiet inside and outside the folk circle, and the musicians who have been dubbed "folk singers" seem to be tacit, without waving the flag and shouting the spirit of folk songs, nor shaking hands with the market, they are just silently looking for the initial singing impulse. What they want to return to is independent music itself, not prisoners of a certain musical genre.
A few years ago, the talent singer sang "Nanshan South" and "Miss Dong", and Zhao Lei himself sang "Chengdu" on the variety show. For a time, the so-called niche folk songs came forward, and before the public could share the freshness of the moment, they were tired by the sameness.
Several guitar chords weave "away"—girls away from the worldly fireworks, idyllic time in the small town away from the hustle and bustle of the city, and self-transformation away from reality. These folk songs are sentimental, nostalgic, yearning, and at the same time inevitably hollow and diseaseless. The sameness can't help but let the "folk songs" fall into the cage of labeling, and guitars, girls, and ideals have become synonymous with folk songs. There are even articles that use big data to inform listeners of the routines of folk singers, which is a bit embarrassing.
And when we talk about folk songs, what do we think of first? Childhood memories of "Shake, shake, shake to Grandma's Bridge"; the wandering voice of "Don't ask me where I came from"; the white-clad fluttering years of "Will You Remember Tomorrow"; the Southern Girl who "Chews Gum and Talks About Ideals"; the urban nostalgia of "The subway at half past ten, finally everyone has a seat"; the life of "All this is not as bad as imagined"; the blind cinema where "the most outstanding minds of this generation will be destroyed by madness"...
We can think of too many familiar melodies, they are about ideals, love, freedom, about the beauty and reality at your fingertips, and about the distant places. They did impress us at some point, comforted us in distant days, and accompanied us to embrace the moon and fall asleep. They don't even have a clear division of musical genres, and they don't have a so-called chain of musical contempt, but they tell us that folk songs are by no means limited to guitars, girls, and ideals, and perhaps it is our own limitations that solidify folk songs into labels.
Some people say that the popularity of folk songs has made it bound by the market, become routine, lose its original sincerity, only the masses, without culture, folk singers have betrayed their original folk spirit. In fact, the spirit of folk songs should not be the stereotype of the public, which binds folk songs. At the same time, some musicians should not only dance in a certain type of music, which restricts music.
Folk singers can only be themselves if they transcend themselves. In 1965, Bob Dylan, who was already the leader of the folk songs at the time, made a betrayal of the folk songs at the Newport Folk Music Festival. Everyone expected that our dear Bob Dylan would still hold an acoustic guitar and a harmonica and sing the well-known "Blowin' in the Wind" with everyone to experience the sentimentality of freedom.
But this time, Bob Dylan brought in an electro-acoustic band that sang what's called pop rock. The audience was momentarily stunned and booed. For a long time the public did not forgive Bob Dylan, the traitor of the ballad.
In this regard, he had an unusual calm and sobriety. The book Like a Rolling Stone chronicles his confession in 1965 when he announced his transition from folk to rock:
"The folk music scene has always been a paradise I had to leave, just as Adam had to leave the Garden of Eden. ...... The road ahead will become dangerous, and I don't know where it leads, but I'm still on it. What was about to unfold was a strange world, a world of thunderstorms with jagged edges of lightning. Many have gone astray and never got back on track. I bravely stepped forward into this vast world. ”
Bob Dylan is like this, and so is singers like Chen Who openly reject the folk label. When Chen Grain debuted, he was burned with an album "Ru Ye" with a rough production but extremely vitality and wildness, and one of the "Wonderful Ability Songs" won the favor of the majority of Wenqing with a simple chord and a small love minor confession, and since then, everyone has labeled Chen Grain as a folk singer.
But in fact, Chen Rei rejected this label at the beginning, and she even wrote the three words "anti-folk" on the introduction of Shrimp Mi Music, and the music has been doing a balance between the distillation of primitive vitality and commercial specifications.
Last year, she released a new album "Migration", which has the meaning of retrospection, looking for possible meanings and feelings in the stories of life that have passed. The first song, "Mist Comes", a simple guitar chant, makes people trance is "Wonderful Ability Song", and then immediately turns to the popular tune, as if she is in dialogue with her in the past.
Chen Said that the album may have reached the so-called industrial standards, she felt very complete, I think, perfect is that her music can still be wild, but also popular. The commercial market seems to have given her more challenges and possibilities than before, the noisy reality is more conducive to her self-examination, and the folk label should not be a constraint.
In early May, the Internet listed why the folk singers we know well disappeared from the public eye. But if you turn on all kinds of music players and listen carefully to each of their works, every lyric, you will find that some of their folk singers have not actually left their music. On the contrary, creators like Chen Have pushed the boundaries and are expressing their thoughts and daily lives in their own direction, and they are going farther and farther. It's just that we're drowning in a cacophony of information, or that the music they make is less and less like "the folk songs we know."
Ma Wei wrote a "Kingdom of Youth", no longer singing the praises of the sunny days in the south, but criticizing the young people who could not smile bitterly; it was no longer a dull chant, but a powerful question. Zhao Lei found his place again, recognizing himself as "Little People", but no longer self-pity and narcissism, but gladly accepted his predicament, which was the beginning of growth. Zhong Lifeng released "Portrait of a Young Artist", he is still a person who loves to read, retains the innocence and romance of a poet, and has adventures and humanistic thickness in the songs. Cheng Bi not only sang about the innocent heart of Toshitaro Tanigawa, she also sang about Zhang Zao's regrets... The singing people are still singing.
Audiences grow and get tired of stylized music; singers grow up and get tired of labels. But the good thing is that music is free, and people are free.
When Ma Wei gladly accepted his elimination and still nagged on the social platform; when Chen Grain was as sensitive, jumping, and accidentally writing out popular memory points as always; when Su Yunying was still with an aura, singing "I want to collapse at this moment, sleeping in a green shade, I have an immortal spirit in my heart, because I still love a lot"; when I open the player and am surprised to find that the folk singers I am familiar with singing unfamiliar melodies... My eye sockets were a little moist, and it turned out that they were constantly breaking the stereotype and trying to restore the original impulse to sing. It turns out that the people who write the songs do not have "false canons", and the people who listen to the songs are "really ruthless".
What will happen to folk songs over the years? There may be no answer to such a question, or there may be an answer in the first place. Folk songs may be about singing freely, recording life sincerely, and facing oneself bravely. Perhaps, over the years, folk songs have begun to escape from "folk songs" and have opened up new and infinite possibilities.