Media file:
mus. 2.3
Title:
Red is the East and its Pop Covers (I)
Source:
Heidelberg catalogue entry, DACHS Archive
Courtesy:
Heidelberg University Institute of Chinese Studies
Keywords:
Red is the East, contemporary China, Pop, Jazz, red sun, Red Sun Fever, Mao`s words, Red is the East, music

Red is the East and its Pop Covers (I)

In the 1980s pop and rock versions of the old revolutionary songs praising the sun began flooding the Chinese music market, a trend culminating in the “Red Sun Fever” (红太阳热 Hong Taiyang Re) around the centenary of Mao’s day of birth in 1993: millions of tapes and CDs with pop, rap, jazz, and rock versions of the old songs in praise of Mao were being released almost by the day. Within the span of a few months’ time in 1991 more than one million copies sold, and the movement did not subside but continued to grow, with 14 million sold by 1993, 72 million by 2006, and 80 million by 2008 (ill. 2.5 a-d; Barmé 1999, 186; Lee 1995, 99).

Some of these songs epitomize the romantic apotheosis that is part of earlier propaganda versions of “Red Is the East.” One remake of Mao quotation songs published in 1991 on a CD entitled Quotation Songs by Mao: A Medley of Rocksongs in Praise of a Great Man (毛主席语录歌伟人颂摇滚联唱 Mao Zhuxi yüluge weirensong yaogun lianchang), which one can hear here, begins with a kitsch version of “Red Is the East,” played on a slightly out-of-tune Chinese glockenspiel backed by a choir reciting lines from the original text of the song: “The fact that China has brought forth a Mao Zedong is the greatest pride of her people” (中国出了个毛泽东, 这是中国人民的骄傲).