Media file:
mus. 2.4
Title:
Red is the East and its Pop Covers (II)
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

Red is the East and its Pop Covers (II)

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).

In one such song, published on a CD entitled Remembering Mao Zedong (怀念毛泽东 Huainian Mao Zedong) in 1990, which one hears here, constant harsh interjections in the percussion may at first suggest irony, even criticism; the mindless singing and the brutal percussion beats may be interpreted as reminiscences of the Cultural Revolution as a time of unthinking cruelty. But this ironic strand is immediately dissolved, as in many other songs of its kind, in the subsequent solo section, which is solemnly presented and harmonized in canon. One can almost picture the singer with tears in his eyes and burning heart—in just about the identical musical gesture and idiom also dominant during and before the Cultural Revolution in the service of Mao’s appraised “Revolutionary Romanticism.”