30 Years of Chinese Rock: What Kind of China Do Their Songs Show Us?

We took 100 albums from 30 years of Chinese rock history — 927 songs in all — as the material for our analysis.

Would it be interesting to look at how China changed over these 30 years through the songs people shouted out?

The answer may be "no."

Over these 30 years, time for rock singers seems to have frozen at a single point; they changed far less than China did. Put optimistically, that may mean young people's confusion, and their hopes, are much the same from one generation to the next. Put pessimistically, it may have to do with rock singers losing their influence over these 30 years. Judging by the lyrics alone, the singers' language is as thin as it ever was.

We took 100 albums from 30 years of Chinese rock history — 927 songs in all — as the material for our analysis. Because China has no reasonably authoritative rock charts or awards, we picked the songs using a mix of measures: album sales, streaming play counts, the number of users who tagged an album, concerts, and critics' reviews.

The answer to our first question may be no, but asking it turned out to be interesting.

The First Decade (1986-1996): "Suddenly I feel the world in front of me isn't where I belong — in 20-odd years all I seem to have learned is patience"

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chinese people who had spent years in a spiritually barren, tightly repressed political climate were suddenly met with a flood of new culture. The shock produced a "culture fever," and rock was one part of it.

As the music researcher Jin Zhaojun, now 58, remembers it: when that generation heard rock, it stunned them. So the truth could be said out loud, and said this simply — except that this simple thing had never occurred to them; it had been locked away before they even began to think it.

Among the Chinese rock musicians of that era — Cui Jian, Tang Dynasty, Black Panther, Zhang Chu, Dou Wei, He Yong — the noun phrases that appeared most often across 250 songs were "let me" (147 times) and "world" (97 times), followed by "sun" (96), "girl" (77) and "feeling" (61).

In the age of collectivism, songs like Let Us Row Our Oars, from the film Flowers of the Motherland, were full of phrases like "let us." They paid little attention to what one person felt; everything was for the collective. Rock, in a sense, is the self-expression of individual feeling — music intensely attentive to sensation, individualist music.

These musicians, for instance, sang boldly and freely:

"This feeling makes me feel so good" (Cui Jian, A Piece of Red Cloth) "Quick, let me cry, let me laugh" (Cui Jian, Let Me Run Wild in the Snow) "Let me caress you as much as I like — don't be cold to me" (Dou Wei, Moment of Feeling) "Let me feel your tenderness" (Dou Wei, Sorrowful Dream) "Don't make me a bird with a home; don't make me listen to your nagging day after day" (Zhang Chu, Rise to Fame Overnight)

The musician Liang Heping once recalled in the independent documentary China's 20 Years of Rock and Roll: "Before Cui Jian, the songs we heard, and what they expressed, stressed 'we'; 'we' dominated. 'We are of one heart and mind,' 'we walk down the great road' — there was a lot of that kind of 'we.' Even when there was an 'I,' it wasn't the personal 'I' we understand now. It was always tied to the country and to the larger social setting — 'I offer up oil for the motherland,' 'my motherland,' always on that premise. Then Cui Jian came out and made a sound: 'I have been asking, on and on.' That was the first time in several thousand years that Chinese people spoke facing themselves."

The arrival of "I" marks the fall of collectivism and the rise of individualism. The problem that comes with it is that you really are on your own now, so you have to face a changing world by yourself — and in that era what this mostly produced was bewilderment and discontent. "World," of course, is not only about the outside; it is also about the inside ("inner world," "your world"), which again ties back to the individualism of "I."

They sang, for instance:

"Suddenly I feel the world in front of me isn't where I belong / In 20-odd years all I seem to have learned is patience It's not that I don't understand — this world is changing too fast" (Cui Jian, It's Not That I Don't Understand) "The world without ideals, in my hands, looks more and more like a goddamn rat" (Cui Jian, Box) "The world we live in is just like a garbage dump" (He Yong, Garbage Dump) "Devils run rampant across the world; what crime have the immortals committed?" (Face, Fire of Babylon) "This world is at war, doling out wounds; this world is playing mahjong, killing time This world is busy building banks; this world is all dressed up, pompous and grand" (Wei Hua, The Old Forbidden City)

In rock lyrics, "sun" and "girl" — the two words that keep coming up — stand for ideals and love, two eternal subjects. Except that many readers tie the "girl" of this era to politics, and love songs get read as political songs. Take Cui Jian's famous Greenhouse Girl:

"I want to go back to the old place, I want to walk the old road; only then do I know I can't leave you, oh, oh, girl"

If you don't read it against its time, if you don't know what "the old place" and "the old road" stood for — then apart from being a love song, what political content does it have at all?

Unlike in the early days, Cui Jian himself later tied rock to politics on purpose. In the 1993 documentary Chinese Rock in Berlin he said plainly: art has a political responsibility, but no political purpose. He has another famous line: I don't know what I want, but I know what I want to resist. As Chinese rock developed afterwards, though, that posture of resistance moved from the center to the margins.

The Second Decade (1997-2006): "Let me play some happiness around you and sing for you till dawn"

Chinese rock entered its second decade in 1997. The next year, the release of the compilation album China Fire III effectively announced the end of the previous generation of rock. Again, among the musicians who defined the decade — Xu Wei, Zheng Jun, Wang Feng — the noun phrases that appeared most often across 360 songs were still "let me" (159 times) and "world" (105 times). What they meant by them was completely different.

The rock musicians of this decade still cared about "I" and the "world," but both became finer-grained: personal experience and feeling were the subject, and there was more emotion. The previous decade's grand link between individual heroism and the fate of an era was largely dropped.

The mood of the lyrics was brighter than in the decade before, and "sunshine" (83 times) joined the nouns. Among adjectives, the earlier generation often used "beautiful," "lonely," "strong," "crazy" and "painful"; this one brought in "happy," and "painful" became "sad" and "sorrowful." What stayed the same were the two motifs of "beautiful" and "lonely."

They sang, for instance:

"My mood is beyond happy, because I don't have to run from anything" (Hua'er Band, Don't Lie to Me) "Let me play some happiness around you and sing for you till dawn" (Xu Wei, Tonight) "Right now I am the peak of your happiness, walking every day through a chaotic world" (Xu Wei, Simple) "Because I'm happy, I act like a crazy fool" (Second Hand Rose, Because, Therefore) "Radiant with joy, we sing, walking through every patch of sunlight" (Catcher in the Rye, The Wizard of Oz) "Under the sun we dance together; under the sun everything is beyond wonderful" (Muma, The Room Without Sound)

And though it was still love and feeling they were expressing, the musicians of this decade did not stop at words like "girl" and "feeling" the way the previous one did. They were bolder and more direct, and the words that recur in their lyrics are "body" (46 times) and "dear" (28 times).

They sang:

"I remember yesterday, your soft body" (Xu Wei, Two Days) "Your body reflecting my body, endlessly soft" (Wang Lei, Heavenly Romance) "Actually you've never seen my body; actually it's just as beautiful as the soul" (Wu Hongfei & Happy Avenue, The Fish in Xiaolong's Room) "Dear girl, what am I going to do with you" (Zheng Jun, Tree of Life) "Dear, who will love you forever — the person we love is always only ourselves, loving a heart that can never settle down" (Sound Toy, Ai Ling) "When you hear that I'm leaving my hometown, dear one, you don't have to cry When you see thick smoke rising from the gunfire, dear one, you don't have to smile" (Zuoxiao Zuzhou, When I Leave You)

People who once cried listening to Cui Jian's rock cried over the country and the era. People of this decade who cry listening to Xu Wei's are more likely thinking of their own experience and feelings, hearing a song about themselves and taking comfort and encouragement from it. That is why a Xu Wei concert often feels like karaoke for ten thousand people, many of them in tears as they sing, remembering who they used to be.

Personal experience was the mainstream, but that does not mean Chinese rock had no songs about politics and society. Those songs were simply pushed to the margins and became an undercurrent, and the method shifted from the previous decade's direct criticism to mockery and irony.

The music critic Li Wan once put it this way: Zi Yue's "common people watching the show," Catcher in the Rye's "hutong mischief," Youdaoshe's "sexual politics," Second Hand Rose's northeastern errenzhuan opera, Zuoxiao Zuzhou's and Top Floor Circus's "flogging the corpse in public," and the sidelong jabs of Tongue, PK14 and Carsick Cars — each took a different posture, with a different substance.

The one exception was Pangu, whose lyrics were blunt, aggressive, even violent and extreme. In Democracy for the Poor they sang:

Why can't the poor have democracy Why can't the poor decide things for themselves They say poverty cannot bring democracy They just want the poor to suffer forever …… Take revenge until we have democracy for the poor

The Third Decade (2007-2016): "In the end time gets all the glory; standing between light and shadow, looking up"

If you have followed music for a long time you may have felt this, or heard it said: rock keeps getting more pop, and pop keeps getting more rock. Pop-rock, pop-punk, folk-rock — the labels keep arriving one after another. So what is actually going on? What counts as real rock?

The popular-culture scholar Motti Regev calls this unavoidable trend pop-rockization. In his view it is not a phenomenon confined to China: as early as the second half of the 20th century it had already taken over the development of Western popular music. It produced a set of norms for writing music and making albums, and rock became an aesthetic:

Based on the use of electricity, electronic sound equipment, amplifiers and intricate hand-crafted studio recording techniques, it is a constantly changing set of practices and stylistic imperatives for making popular music, together with an "untrained," natural technique of vocal expression.

So you often hear a pop album say it has added rock elements; rock has become raw material anyone can use. Faye Wong is an outstanding example — early on she borrowed from the alternative rock of Tori Amos and The Cranberries, and rock became a tool and a resource for writing pop. Alternative rock came out of the post-punk bands of the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s; it was called alternative because it was so niche. Then it gradually went mainstream, most famously with Nirvana.

Rock itself also lost much of the fierce critical edge and spirit of resistance it once had, and moved closer and closer to pop. In streaming, so-called pop-rock usually takes the top spots for plays within the rock category. On Xiami Music's chart of album plays under rock, No. 1 was Maroon 5's V, with 63 million plays. No. 2 was Hua Chenyu's Alien, with more than 45 million.

In the end rock and pop became relative terms with a tendency to merge, and the arrival of all kinds of genres and styles made the music of this period feel more varied — and, unlike the two decades before it, it had no obvious figureheads.

Omnipotent Youth Society, Diu Huo Che, Namo, Escape Plan, Queen Sea Big Shark, GALA, Miserable Faith, Li Zhi, Xie Tianxiao, Second Hand Rose, New Pants and Jiang Xin all released work in this period, pointing in different directions.

Across 317 songs, the most frequent noun phrases were still "world" (149 times) and "let me" (127 times), followed by "feeling" (90), "time" (78), "life" (69), "friend" (65) and "mom" (55). Singing about time, life, friends and mothers shows how much wider rock's subject matter had become in this period: it covered every corner of daily life, the ordinary life of oneself as a modern person. Even "girl" (38 times), that classic motif, mattered less than before.

They sang:

"I hope I'm special, that I won't give up as time passes" (Jiang Xin, I'm Not Just Any Flower) "In the end time gets all the glory; standing between light and shadow, looking up" (Sound Fragment, Morning in a Strange City) "I want to know the true meaning of life, want to know why I'm even alive" (Wang Feng, Empty) "How can you see life's brilliance if you don't hold on to the end — better to burn freely than to linger on" (GALA, Chasing the Dream) "Don't lend money to a friend and you lose the friend and the money; lend money to a friend and you lose the money and the friend" (Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Money Song) "Mom threw her out of the house; mom dumped it under the overpass" (Gadiao, Two Moms)

The biggest reason for this trend — pop turning rock and rock turning pop — is probably the two-way traffic between the depoliticizing of music and its commercialization.

On one side, a looser political climate, the rise of individualism and the dismantling of the mainstream ideology meant that what rock resisted seemed no longer to exist. Rock could no longer make the deafening noise it made in that politicized era, and it could no longer touch a public nerve or wield the influence it once had.

On the other, commercialization put rock under the constraints of capital and made it readier to please a mass audience, and the power of money inside it kept growing. Money gave rock better production conditions and helped it develop; it also made some rock lose the original impulse to be true.

Shen Lihui, founder of Modern Sky, went so far as to stress in an interview: "If you don't have money you're not a Rock Star, you're just a musician. Which Rock Star doesn't have money? Even with money you can still be an ass, even with money you can still be badass — as long as you don't become money's slave, you can still make even better work. Money is a test question."

So by now, even when the subject is still loneliness, the loneliness you hear has a whiff of affectation.

This catering was not confined to the rock of the past decade; even the generation of musicians we imagine as independent worked under the same constraints. In a 2002 interview Zhang Chu said plainly: "The first album, West Out of Yangguan, was true to me, and I loved it. The second, Lonely People Are Shameful, began to be a little calculating — crowd-pleasing, you could say. When I was making the third, The Factory That Builds Airplanes, I was facing the question of how to grow up myself, so it came out more serious. But at the time I wanted to meet my own standard and also couldn't help pandering to the media and the public. It was very contradictory."

One point deserves special mention: "life" appears so often in this period's lyrics largely thanks to Wang Feng. Across his three albums Brave Heart, Faith Flying in the Air and Born to Wander, the word appears 38 times, more than half the total. Next came "feeling" (45 times) and "meaning" (28 times). The most frequent adjectives were "shattered" (20 times), "lost" (16) and "alone" (14).

Without reading the lyrics closely, an outsider might take Wang Feng for something of a philosopher, occupied with life and meaning, private confusion and loneliness … But by this point a star reaches the public through many more channels. After every hoarse, full-throated "blooming," the confusion is handed on to his listeners; this "thinking" is not only consumed, it also seems to leave nothing behind — like the title of one of his songs, Empty.

We also found plenty of people trying to explain rock, and on the whole their thinking is interesting

Wang Di, who had worked with Ding Wu and Cui Jian and produced He Yong's Garbage Dump, angrily denounced in 1992 the absurdity of people loading every kind of opinion onto Chinese rock: "Rock and roll is everything except music."

In 2006, the music critic Zhang Xiaozhou said: "To me, rock and roll is a more intense, more turbulent attitude and way of life, one that comes with a strong urge to remake yourself and change the world. Rock has to be able to stir up argument, to put questions to other people, to society, to the era, to provoke — even if it makes people angry. That is what real rock and roll is."

In 2014, asked the same question, Cui Jian answered: "All forms are bullshit; nobody has the right to sanctify rock and roll with a fixed definition. Once rock becomes commercial, once it becomes a formula, I'd rather say my music is freely created music. Whether or not it's rock really doesn't matter."

Interestingly, Shen Lihui said something similar in an interview this year: he thinks the essence of rock is about change and staying the same. It isn't that only one fixed formula counts as rock; rock is still about change. And the listeners and fans he considers ideal are people who can bring change and breakthroughs to the world, people like Steve Jobs.

Reflected in rock musicians themselves, that change may be best typified by Xu Wei's much-discussed song this year, Life Is Not Just the Drudgery in Front of You.

What is worth savoring is that its lyricist, Gao Xiaosong, was once a leading figure of campus folk music — back then it was that lyrical style that thoroughly dissolved the rock style of the 1980s. Now, picking it up again, Gao Xiaosong has become an internet celebrity of this era and a purveyor of fast-food knowledge, the man in charge of answering all the old confusion, bewilderment and anger. To today's internet consumers, some of those answers have come to look rather ironic.

Cover image from www.zaoing.com and www.clzg.cn