Lisa Ono Is Singing on Valentine's Day Again, but People Don't Love Her Like They Used To

Has the singer been overexposed, or has the whole "small and fresh" style of consumption gone out of fashion?

A month ago, billboards along Shanghai's Huaihai Road were already carrying posters for Lisa Ono's 2016 Valentine's Day concert.

This is the third year in a row that Lisa Ono has played Shanghai, and once again she has been booked for Valentine's Day, when the urge to spend runs high. Shanghai was the final stop of her 2015 tour, and the most important one.

"Lisa Ono tickets have always sold well," says Ai Xi. Her company, Beijing Niandai Weilai Culture Communication Co., Ltd., is promoting six dates on this year's tour, and says it is confident in Ono's popularity. Otherwise, she says, the Shanghai show would not be at the 8,000-seat Shanghai Grand Stage (Shanghai Gymnasium), as it was in the previous two years.

Actual sales may have been weaker than Ai Xi suggests. Damai.cn showed the tickets as sold out only on February 12, 2016, two days before the show.

What Were Her Early Fans Really Buying?

Leaving aside her music-festival appearances, Ono's tour ticket prices have held steady since 2009: from about 100 yuan, with VIP seats capped at 1,280 yuan. The Japanese singer, who grew up in Brazil, seems to have a firm sense of what her music is worth. Her style blends Brazilian samba with American jazz into a "new school" of jazz, and fans call her the "Queen of Bossa Nova."

In China, jazz is a niche genre. "JerryJazzy," a Zhihu user and jazz fan, thinks that jazz, being mostly instrumental, sets a certain bar for listeners, and that China's thin musical culture means people seldom talk about it. That is why jazz stays niche, and also why it carries a special allure, like a "high art."

"Back then, listening to Lisa Ono felt pretty fresh, very artsy, that kind of thing," says Lin Liwen, an advertising planner. She first heard Ono in a café next to Beijing Foreign Studies University. In 2003, Ono released the album Dans Mon île (Left Bank Chanson). Chanson is French for "song"; in Chinese it is transliterated as xiangsong, and it loosely covers the retro, nostalgic or bourgeois-bohemian jazz you often hear in bars and cafés.

Lin is a textbook early Chinese fan of Ono. She describes herself as someone who can spend a whole afternoon in a café. In college and just after graduating, she also loved Wong Kar-wai, Sartre and Beauvoir at the Café de Flore on Paris's Left Bank, romanticism, artsy things, the idea of a soulmate. Lisa Ono was one of these.

Ono gave most people a friendly way into jazz, that "high art." She has covered the jazz standards Don't Know Why, My Funny Valentine and Moonlight Serenade. Jazz proper can feel foreign; Ono's versions are much easier to digest.

In 1999, on Dream, the album marking ten years since her debut, Ono used swing and bossa nova to reinterpret classic American film music from the 1920s to the 1940s, songs that come with sentiment built in.

"There are many versions of these classics, but Lisa Ono's may be the easiest to take," says Huang Sui. Ono's versions, she says, have "a sense of keeping you company, without the sadness." Huang was one of the first members of the Douban group "Lisa Ono," under the username "Pea Princess."

An Qi, who had just seen Ono at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou, was moved for much the same reason. "Her voice has that faint, lazy quality. However tired you are, when you hear that soft murmuring tune, all the weariness melts away." An Qi calls Ono simply "Lisa." Following her example, she took up classical guitar; she recommends this "healing singer" to friends and goes to Ono-themed "music salons" in Guangzhou.

Holidays amplify this healing power, and Ono has timed her visits to match.

Last February, the Xinmin Evening News wrote: "In recent years, Lisa Ono has spent almost every Christmas, New Year and Valentine's Day in China. Her packed schedule often leaves her missing her children back in Japan."

Ono's team wants to ride the holiday spending wave. "If you love her, take her to see Lisa Ono on Valentine's Day. Savor La Vie en Rose together and spend a romantic evening together." After three straight years of booking the Shanghai show around Valentine's Day, her concerts have also become a place to propose.

Here the two things fit neatly together. Learning to attend a concert by a foreign singer in a niche genre is much like eagerly learning to celebrate "Western holidays": both make you feel in the know.

How Lisa Ono Suddenly Took Off Between 2005 and 2009

Ono released her first album, Catupiry, as early as 1989, but she only began to catch on in China after 2000. A major force behind this was EMI, which she joined in 1997. The label, with long experience releasing jazz, gave her more opportunities.

In 2004, EMI brought Ono into the Chinese market, releasing three albums over the following year: My Angel, Romance Carnival Vol. 1 and Romance Carnival Vol. 2. That same year, Feng Xiaogang's film A World Without Thieves used Ono's cover of Édith Piaf's La Vie en Rose as its opening song. As the film became a hit, the song spread with it.

In an era when Leehom Wang, JJ Lin, Nan Quan Mama and Jay Chou were the mainstream stars, Ono stood out against their youth and energy.

By 2007, Ono was a headline act at the Shanghai International Jazz Week. Also on the bill were the Italian jazz singer Maria Pia De Vito, the British jazz balladeer Carol Kidd and the Swiss jazz band Union, but Ono was clearly the star. Alice, an online user who was there, wrote on the Cafeteria forum: "After the show, at the stalls on Yandang Road, everyone was hunting for Lisa Ono albums, and the French-language Chanson sold best."

Huang Sui flew in from Nanchang for the show, and burst into tears at Ono's very first note. She was a radio DJ in Nanchang at the time, and often slipped Ono's songs into her programs as a personal indulgence.

"White-collar work is tough, and her songs can recharge you," says Huang. She felt she should bring Ono to more people.

During these years, cafés, the natural home of chanson, multiplied in China. In Hangzhou, for example, the number of cafés grew ninefold between 2003 and 2013. Starbucks had long since gone from a dazzling novelty, when its first store opened in the China World Hotel in 1999, to a badge of bourgeois-bohemian taste. Costa Coffee entered China in 2006. Four years later, China Resources bought Pacific Coffee, founded in Hong Kong in 1992, and it became a new force among coffee chains. Liangan Coffee and UBC Coffee, which at one point had branches all over the Yangtze River Delta, also rose at that time and joined the ranks of upscale casual restaurants.

In 2005, Left Bank Coffee, owned by Taiwan's Uni-President, released an ad starring Gwei Lun-mei, then a newcomer. Along with Parisian street scenes and coffee, it featured "Lovely You," a song from Romance Latino, the album Ono released that summer.

As more and more cafés sprang up, they all played Lisa Ono to seem authentic. As long as cafés stayed much the same, Ono seemed set to last. So even in 2015, when "Lan Yu," a graphic designer from Singapore, walked into the "Innocent Era" bookstore-café by West Lake in Hangzhou, she heard Lisa Ono once again.

In 2005, besides cafés, the easiest place to find Lisa Ono was Douban, the newly launched hangout for arty young people. According to Douban, after Douban FM launched in 2010, Ono's songs collected a total of 600,000 "hearts." If you had hearted bossa nova or jazz songs, its algorithm would recommend similar ones.

Another figure Douban "lifted up" was the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who probably appeals to arty young people in the same way Ono does. His books portray the inner lives of young people whose decadence and confusion need healing. Besides the jazz in his books, Murakami once ran a jazz bar, Peter Cat, and his favorite writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is known as the voice of America's Jazz Age. Many young people caught a glimpse of themselves in all this; many more deliberately tried to fit the mold.

At first, Ono was what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "distinction" in taste: a marker for the few.

But EMI was soon delighted to see her become a piece of popular culture, spreading from arty young people to the masses. Alice likened the 2007 Jazz Week to a "sauna concert": "a dense black sea of people," he wrote. And the craze soon spread outward from Shanghai and Beijing.

How Did Her Reputation Go Sour?

Many people link Aoi Teshima with Lisa Ono. Both are icons of arty taste, and they often come up one after the other on Douban FM. But Teshima seldom appears in public, in Japan or in China. Her most recent show was in Shanghai in August 2015, at Mao Livehouse, the venue arty young people prefer.

Ono is different. She has released no new album since 2009, yet that was the year she began touring China, starting with Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Shenzhen. She may always sing the same few songs, but fans still pay. Her tours have also reached deeper into second- and third-tier cities such as Wenzhou, Zhuhai and Wuxi.

In an earlier QDaily Research Lab poll, "What Do You Think Lisa Ono Goes Best With?", the most-liked answer was "mainstream people who think they're niche." Apart from those who had never heard of her, scornful answers also ranked high: "a café in an eighth-tier town," "older office workers who love flaunting their artsy side" and "the old-town strips of Lijiang, Dali and Fenghuang."

People's view of Ono has changed.

In 2012, Lin Liwen moved from Beijing to Shanghai. "When I heard her playing all along Huaihai Road, I dropped her. It was so annoying..." What she could stand least were the mobile stalls selling pirated discs on street corners. Probably to stand out from their rivals, the vendors thought it clever to blast Lisa Ono through loudspeakers.

Lin's aversion stems first from a kind of forced popularity. "It's not just Lisa Ono. I push back against anything that goes mainstream." She cites Maximilian Hecker, once a niche artist, who has played concerts in China almost every year since 2006, and "it's all overplayed small-and-fresh stuff."

Ono has worked harder to please Chinese audiences. Her shows usually run 120 minutes, mostly in concert halls and theaters around the country, the kind of indoor venue with seats. Besides songs from her albums, she plays and sings Evening Primrose and Jasmine Flower at nearly every show.

This commercial push eventually got somewhat out of hand. Besides touring, Ono often took paid side gigs at commercial events. In 2009, she appeared at the top-six-to-five round of the talent show Happy Girl. In 2013, she joined Voice of Asia as a judge for the Asia division, and also worked with other musicians on the theme song for the film The Ming Calamity.

In August 2014, Ono teamed up with an up-and-coming musician, Li Gaoyang, for a Jiumen Mid-Autumn Festival concert. The audience had to travel to a resort in Shunyi, on Beijing's outskirts. One concertgoer recalls: "Everyone who went was stopped and made to fill in a form, and afterward someone would call to sell you an apartment."

Nobody likes to see their hobby tied to something too commercial. That goes double when the hobby is bound up with art, taste and a self-image of refinement: the fall feels even steeper.

"Lisa Ono really does keep coming. I think she should rein it in," says even Huang Sui. At one Ono concert at the Shanghai Gymnasium, she smelled KFC. "It was nothing like the fresh, natural Lisa I first saw."

Some people have begun to lump Ono in with "piano prince" Richard Clayderman, an embarrassing childhood memory for many. He plays the same few pieces over and over, tours China every year, and when tickets stopped selling in first-tier cities, he moved on to smaller ones.

In fact, if you set yourself a slightly upscale tone, someone will always buy it. The flip side is that constant cheapening ruins the reputation you started with.

Ono is going down this road too. "She's getting more and more tacky," says Lin Liwen.

It's Hard for People to Love Lisa Ono Now

Even if Ono weren't so desperate to keep playing concerts, the market would no longer treat her as kindly as before. That was settled from the start.

When people say their favorite bands are the Beatles, the Eagles or Led Zeppelin, they may also worry that lots of other people like them too, and that popular culture can never escape the commonplace.

The difference is that those bands are true classics, and Ono is not. She is a cover artist. Her 2000 album Pretty World covered songs including John Lennon's Yesterday and the Police's Every Breath You Take; by then she was no longer only singing jazz.

Beyond her role as a second-hand conduit for classics, many people now see Ono as merely an entry-level singer. Huang Sui describes her current view of Ono with two words: "sugar" and "bridge." Ono is both a seasoning and a bridge that led people to the classics, but she is not the destination.

"Gradually I found that the things I couldn't take at first are the more precious ones. Wine is good when it's astringent; tea is good when it's bitter and then turns sweet," says Huang. "Now I find her range fairly narrow. She has a few fixed 'ingredients' she uses on every song. The songs sound nice, but they're rather simple."

Changing tastes are also leaving Ono behind.

Bourgeois-bohemian taste has shifted a great deal in just a few years. The European-style cafés of the past are giving way to Nordic minimalism, American industrial décor and family-friendly spaces. In these cafés you might hear folk, or even rock.

More and more people have also turned against "chicken soup for the soul," the feel-good inspirational stuff. They have perhaps realized that real courage means seeing the world as it is and facing it. This mood has swung to the other extreme: content meant to depress. So the "dark" animated series BoJack Horseman became a hit; it hides nothing, and its honest self-doubt strikes a chord with many viewers.

In 2013, people also coined a term that would once have been unthinkable: lüchabiao, or "green tea bitch." It targets calculation dressed up as innocence, affected elegance and vulgarity that thinks itself refined. Ono isn't quite that, but she is easy to file under it.

For individuals and for the times alike, Lisa Ono has gone out of style.

Ai Xi disagrees. She explains the Valentine's Day concert's weaker-than-expected sales this way: "It fell on the first day after the Spring Festival holiday, and many office workers hadn't come back to work yet." Her company is already busy planning Lisa Ono's 2016 tour.

(Ai Xi is a pseudonym.)

Cover images from Tencent Entertainment, Douban, vonjakobvineyard, sxshangdao and yangqiu