Note: This entry is cross-posted at my book blog: http://thezhus.posterous.com.
The previous excerpt I translated from the book of interviews with pioneers in Guangzhou’s reform-and-opening-up period looked at one small Cantonese restaurateur’s experience. This time, I’ll offer a glimpse at one aspect of the cultural changes happening at that time by translating excerpts from another interview from the same book. This one is with Lü Nianzu, one of the earliest pop stars from this period. I still remember some of his biggest hits, including the title song from a TV series about the life of a famous Kung Fu master from the early 1900s. The gist of the TV series was basically: Awesome Kung Fu master defends his country’s honor in a time of crisis by thoroughly and repeatedly pummeling cartoonish foreign devils from Europe, Russia, and Japan with his bare fists. Here’s a video of the title sequence, with the song performed by Lü Nianzu, a stirring, nationalistic/patriotic, and incredibly catchy tune called “The Great Wall Will Never Crumble.”
And here’s Lü Nianzu performing the song live on CCTV’s Chinese New Year’s Gala 1985, a performance that played a key role in making him a national star.
Lü Nianzu was special because he was among one of the first singers in mainland China to sing pop music in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, and during the 1980s Guangzhou was a hotbed for the burgeoning pop-music scene in China. Much of that, however, has disappeared since the 90s as pop singers who sang in Mandarin shifted north to Beijing, which offered a much bigger market, while those who sang in Cantonese moved south to Hong Kong and a potential international audience. Still, it is interesting to read about the early days of Cantonese pop on the mainland, which sprang up in the newly created music lounges that were a shiny novelty in China and an appalling sight for many with more traditional mindsets (singers walking around on stage with the microphone?! Perish the thought!).
Here’s the interview excerpt:
When reform and opening up first began in Guangdong, there were many foreigners and out-of-towners who came to Guangzhou for business trips or to work, and most of them stayed at the Eastern Hotel. At the time, the Eastern Hotel was a pretty high-class place, not a place that commoners could go into. Because reforms had just begun, in the entire city of Guangzhou there were basically no recreational facilities or venues. Even a high-class place like the Eastern Hotel didn’t have any recreational activities. Therefore when those people got off work in the evening, they were bored and could only sit at the hotel and stare at the ceiling.
In order to provide its guests with some decent recreation and diversion, the Eastern Hotel renovated its existing restaurant to create a music lounge where people could gather to drink tea and listen to live music. The new restaurant had a standalone stage and relatively modern audio equipment. During the day the restaurant served food, and at 9:30 at night, it turned into a music lounge.
The creation of the music lounge at the Eastern Hotel caused a big stir in Guangzhou and a lot of people wanted to go. But at that time, music lounge wasn’t something just anyone could attend. You must have a “homecoming certificate” to be able to buy tickets. A “homecoming certificate” is a special certificate that the government issued to Chinese in Hong Kong or Macao who were coming back to China to visit their relatives. After the Eastern Hotel, the second music lounge to appear was at the China tourism bureau’s Overseas Chinese Tower, because at the time many overseas Chinese who were coming back to visit were staying there. Therefore, in some ways, you can say that the music lounge grew out of trying to enrich the night life of the overseas Chinese who were coming back and the Chinese from Hong Kong and Macao who were working in China.
I remember that back then the Eastern Hotel charged five yuan for a ticket, and the Overseas Chinese Tower charged three yuan per ticket. At the time our monthly income was 36 yuan, so a five-yuan ticket was a very extravagant expense for many people back then. Nonetheless, there were a lot of people who came to listen to music. Basically you couldn’t buy a ticket on the day of the show.
When the music lounges first started, a lot of people couldn’t accept them. At the time they saw us as a scourge. For instance, in the past the microphone on stage was fixed in place. But it was different in the music lounge; you could hold the microphone in your hand and walk all around the stage. The newspapers made a big bruhaha over this. A lot of culture critics bashed us, saying we were learning the ways of capitalists. They felt that the stage is a dignified place and that it’s not dignified to walk around with the microphone. In addition, at that time the songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan naturally had a different style than those from China, so someone said the songs we were singing were “simply wasted notes.”
Later even the Cultural Department got involved and began to monitor and regulate the lounges, including imposing some restrictions on the performers’ attire, on-stage demeanor, and song selection. For instance, for every five songs that a performer sings, at least one of them must be a folk song. Each night the Cultural Department also sent a small team to come check for violations. Fortunately, the lounges weren’t subject to any really strict regulations.
At the time I was an actor in the Guangzhou Theater Group. The plays we performed included some songs, and I would occasionally do some singing. I remember singing in a play called “The Prodigal Son”. Perhaps because of my interest in music, in my spare time I would sing the songs from the plays and record it. Later someone discovered that I could sing pretty well, so they hooked me up with a gig at the music lounge.
Back then, you could make 10 yuan for each performance at a music lounge. At a time when our monthly salary was just 36 yuan, 10 yuan was a rather big figure for me, so it goes without saying that I was thrilled!
When we first started, because none of us were familiar with pop music, we performers looked everywhere to collect songs, such as some of the pop songs being sung by stars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and some Chinese songs from the 1950s. At that time the special economic zone of Shenzhen received the biggest direct influence from Hong Kong and Macao. When we went to Shenzhen, we saw a lot of Hong Kong TV shows. The first time I heard the Hong Kongnese sing a song in Cantonese, I was stunned. I had heard Cantonese operas, but had never heard a Cantonese song before. It was a duet by Luo Min and “Fei Fei”, and it was very pleasing to the ear, so I really wanted to learn. The songs I had heard up till then were basically all red revolutionary songs, and love songs like this was pretty rare, so they were a new sensation to me.
Because I had built a pretty solid musical foundation at the theater group, when I learned these songs and performed them in the music lounges, I generally did pretty well and was often the closing act. Speaking of learning the songs, there is also an unforgettable experience related to that. Back then learning the songs mainly involved listening to tapes, but in Guangzhou you basically couldn’t buy such tapes. A friend of mine, after she went to Hong Kong, used her first month’s salary to buy a tape player and several tapes of Liu Wenzheng for me. I was really moved. She really helped me learn so many songs and made it possible for me to leave an impression on the music scene.
As far as pop singers go, we were the first group in the nation who dared to take on that challenge. There was a lot of pressure, and my theater group also criticized me and cut my pay. But I wasn’t afraid of anything back then. Perhaps ignorance was bliss. I was trying to make some extra money to help the family, and that motivation kept me going. Typically, each night around 7 p.m. the theater group would stage a play, and the subsidy for each play was about four mao (0.4 yuan). The music lounges generally started at 9 or 9:30, so after the play, I would rush to the music lounge to sing. When I was a performer at the music lounges, it was a great help to my family. Each month I could make two or three thousand yuan. Back then 3,000 yuan was probably unfathomable to many people. Through that, I quickly became a “Man of Ten Thousand Yuan”. On our street, we were the first household to buy a color TV. At the same time, I was among the earliest people in Guangzhou to have a motorcycle.
Perhaps because I sang pretty well, Li Huayong, Chen Gaoguang, Chen Dong, and I were dubbed the “Four Kings” of Guangzhou, and you could say we were kind of famous in Guangzhou. After you got “famous”, all the music lounges wanted to hire you, so sometimes I would do three or four shows a night, and I’ve been to the Overseas Chinese Tower and the Overseas Chinese Restaurant. Sometimes it was tough running all around. …
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Perhaps because everyone saw that music lounges were big money makers — they were charging 10 yuan ticket — a lot of restaurant and hotel owners saw this opportunity and opened music lounges. … In the blink of an eye almost all the hotels in Guangzhou had opened music lounges. More unexpectedly, this caught on at the Guangzhou Song and Dance Troupe, the folk music group, and other trade groups. Even the Guangzhou acrobatics group formed a pop music troupe. But the one that was the best and the most influential was still the Eastern Hotel.
Later, even the common citizens could buy tickets to listen to pop music. I remember the first time I performed at a venue that was pretty public — it was at the Friendship Theater. It was also the first time they had invited a star from the music lounge scene to perform on a big stage. That really caused a huge stir in Guangzhou, and tickets were sold out quickly, because people had never heard pop music before. The day of the show, there were almost 10,000 people there, and my rendition of “Childhood” caused an eruption of screams, whistles, and applause from the audience.
The storm that was the Guangzhou music lounges caused rumbling around the country, because at that time, for a lot of people, walking around on stage with a microphone and singing pop music was very new, very hip, so a lot of people came from other places to Guangzhou to see this. CCTV also thought the music lounge was something new and came to Guangzhou to report on it. …
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Back then the singers who were born in Guangdong generally tended to sing in Cantonese, because a number of them didn’t have very standard Mandarin accents. But I grew up in the north and lived in the south, so I was pretty fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. …
Later, when I began performing in the interior of the country, for some unknown reason, the people there loved to hear Cantonese songs. Perhaps they felt this was hip and that listening to Cantonese songs meant they were “with it,” even though nine out of ten of them couldn’t understand the songs. Because the lyrics, singing style, and pronounciation of Cantonese songs are very different from Mandarin, before I sang a Cantonese song, I had to briefly explain the lyrics to the audience. It’s really hard to picture the craze for Cantonese songs back then, especially in the Hunan area. If you don’t have any Cantonese songs in your repertoire, you might as well not go there.
For me, singing was a very enjoyable thing. Later, I felt that my prospects for development in the theater group weren’t that great, and the market for stage plays was starting to wither, so I left the theater group and joined China Records. During this period, I went on numerous tours with the company’s performing troupe to various places in China and left an influence around the country. I also released a lot of albums, which all sold one or two million copies. Nowadays most stars would have done really well to sell 200,000 albums. I think perhaps the reason my albums sold so well back then was that piracy still wasn’t as rampant. Even though people were recording and copying cassette tapes back then, it wasn’t as well done as now. And back then, the common citizen could also afford a legit tape at five or six yuan each.
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At the end of the 80s and early 90s, music lounges were gradually replaced by karaoke. Many of us in the first wave of lounge singers don’t perform anymore. … I sang for about 10 years and have also quit. In 1991 I left the music scene and went to Guangzhou Television Station and became a TV host. Even though I occasionally make an appearance on some CCTV “lookback” specials, I very rarely sing these days.
Most of Guangdong’s performers have gone elsewhere, and the locally produced music has gradually vanished. … Almost no one sings in Cantonese anymore. …
As for the reasons for the decline of Guangdong’s music scene in recent years, firstly, I think it’s related to our market. Even though there’s a big market, Guangdong performers can’t command big money for performances. Some of the famous stars from Beijing get 200 thousand yuan for an appearance, while a star from Guangdong would have done well to get 20 or 30 thousand yuan.
Second, I feel that there’s not much unity in the Guangdong pop music scene. There’s no unifying force. Many of Guangdong’s popular singers, songwriters, and composers have all gone to Beijing to build their careers, because Beijing’s market is bigger. It is, after all, China’s center of politics and culture. It not only has a lot of cultural resources, but has also gathered top talents from around the country. This is very advantageous, whether for individual development or the advancement of the industry.
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