Eargod's Top 100 Songs of 2021

[feihong]

Yesterday, famous (?) Chinese music blogger Eargod released his 2021 list of best songs: https://weibo.com/1344386244/L8kIRobt3

 

Embedded into the post is a pretty well-done supercut video containing a snippet of every song in the list. Most snippets feature the song's main hook and gives you a good idea of what genre the song falls into. It seems like most of the songs can be found on YouTube. Those not on YouTube can still be found on Google.

 

The list this year is pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. First, there aren't too many superstars on this list, so it's a good list for getting into indie or perhaps even underground Chinese music. Second, the name of the list itself has evolved a bit, changing from 华语年度100首最佳歌曲 (Chinese language annual 100 best songs) to 华语地区年度100首最佳歌曲 (Chinese-speaking regions annual 100 best songs), probably to reflect  the fact that there are quite a few English-language songs on the list this year.

[feihong]

What makes me think some of the music is underground is that I can barely find any information at all on some artists or tracks. For example, 《无尽》by KillaTreeZ/Illusional Flavor. Even searching on Baidu yields no useful results whatsoever.

 

On another note, it can be hard to listen to the full version of some tracks because of copyright restrictions. You might easily find the page for it, but when you click on Play, it just shows you message saying something about 版权.

[杰.克]

Shame its not a top 100 popular songs. I'd prefer to hear the bangers and superstars tbh

[feihong]

On 12/29/2021 at 2:39 PM, 杰.克 said:

Shame its not a top 100 popular songs. I'd prefer to hear the bangers and superstars tbh

Careful what you wish for. Here are the 10 hot songs of 2021 according to Tencent: https://youtu.be/XkDV5MLYe3Q

[杰.克]

When I listen to Chinese music, I want to listen to the most popular, well known, and discussable songs. I barely have enough taste and sophistication in english to listen to "indie bands", so when it comes to a foreign language - give me the simple belters that i can chat about with the largest majority of my friends.  Thats my mindset anyhow ?

[PerpetualChange]

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Tl8Jgh50L9ozbnTGba4sH?si=tgORRftcQbSLHkBWXkxRiw&utm_source=copy-link

 

 Looks like somebody has already assembled what could be found on spotify into a playlist.

 

I'm very excited to listen to this as most mainstream Chinese pop music does not appeal to me very much.

[feihong]

@PerpetualChange Wow, I can’t believe that many are on Spotify! Times sure have changed. I noticed that there’s actually one track that can only be found on Spotify—敕勒川 by 马条 (at least as of this writing).

[feihong]

Eargod usually puts out a related list of 10 best live music performances, but this year he skipped it: https://m.weibo.cn/status/4720443364212784. The reason is that music shows this year were a bust, so he couldn’t think of more than two or three great ones. This echoes my own experience, as most of my Chinese TV watching consists of music competition shows. This year I watched 中国好声音, 宝藏歌手, 我的音乐你听吗, 中国潮音, and some others I sampled but couldn’t stick with. Some of them started out pretty well but all were underwhelming by the end.

[abcdefg]

@feihong -- 请问一下 -- 

Do you mind if I ask how you became such an expert on this music? For a long time now, I've been in awe of your comprehensive knowledge and understanding of these several related genres. Your grasp of this obscure corner of Chinese culture is very impressive; in fact, it's encyclopedic. Are you yourself a musician, by any chance? Do you sing or play in a band? Are lots of your friends musicians? Has pop music been an obsession since childhood? I've been wondering a long time now, ever since beginning to read your pop music lyrics blog, so please pardon me for asking. If the question is too personal, please just ignore it and I promise not to bug you about it any further.  

 

BTW, I think that the lyrics of pop songs give a great insight into the latest "youth slang," not just hip words and phrases, but how to use them to best effect, how to fit them into context. One danger I've discovered is that when I try to pull this off in daily speech with ordinary native Chinese adults, they sometimes look at me funny, since I am not a kid with a skateboard, and I don't have purple hair or baggy pants. But even then, this kind of material has been a great conversation starter. Plus dropping some of these "lyric phrases" is a sure antidote for sounding too "textbookish."

 

In Kunming, about 2010 to 2012, I knew a street corner, back behind a small hotel, away from traffic, where young people, teen boys and girls, would gather on Saturdays for music and break dancing. I made it a point to pass by a couple times, walking very slow and surreptitiously checking out the action. Did not want to stop and stare or make photos. But those glimpses into a different slice of city life were always interesting. Eventually the groups got too large and noisy, and the neighborhood police would gently disperse the players, saying things about "public nuisance." 

 

At some point, maybe half a year later, the job seemed to have been handed off to the Chengguan 城管, the same hated low-level civil servants who were responsible for roughly rousting sidewalk vendors and overturning or smashing unlicensed food carts. That shut down that particular street corner for good. I would imagine the players went somewhere else more private, but I was not in the know, and could not find them.    

 

[feihong]

On 12/31/2021 at 9:35 AM, abcdefg said:

Do you mind if I ask how you became such an expert on this music?

"Expert" might be too strong a word, but I have gone pretty deep down the rabbit hole. I think it all started in 2012 when I sat down to dinner at my parents' house and they started watching a new music competition show called The Voice of China. VoC did an amazing job of repackaging the great Chinese songbook for a new generation and, as a bonus, even explicitly catered to overseas Chinese like us (they actively recruited 华裔 to be on the program and the show even aired on local TV channels on the west coast). Even when I didn't enjoy the music on VoC, I was still glued to the screen because I'd never before seen a reality show where the politics were so front and center. For example, during the big finale of the first season, you could see the communist cadres filling the front rows, and the winner was of course the guy who sang the "I Love You, China" song. Later series like "The Singer" would even bring global geopolitics into the mix, like when all the Korean superstars were replaced with their Russian equivalents (marking the thawing of Sino-Korean relations and the warming of Sino-Russian relations that continues to this day). I'm sure some people would prefer their entertainment to have less propaganda in it, but I found it fascinating.

 

Another great aspect of Voice of China is that it highlighted the work of talented artists who, until then, had languished on the margins of the Chinese music industry. By searching for songs that were performed on VoC, I discovered the Douban Artists website, which was a convenient way to explore the burgeoning Chinese indie music scene. For a few years, my morning routine included opening the Douban Artists app and listening to the new songs on the Top 30 playlist while eating breakfast. The Douban Artists app is long gone (RIP), but it's more or less been replaced by the StreetVoice platform.

 

I should also add that there's no way I could've listened to all the Chinese music I did if I hadn't connected this hobby with another hobby of mine: programming. Nearly all of the Chinese music I listen to was downloaded and processed using custom software that I wrote myself, which automates the mundane tasks of transferring the files from the internet to my computer and adding metadata like title, artist, and lyrics. While writing the programs required a massive time investment, it allowed me to continue collecting a large volume of Chinese music without it utterly consuming my life.

 

And here I am now, 9 years later. I've translated well over a 100 songs on my Chinese lyrics blog, and I'm in the process of putting together another "top songs of the year" playlist (there's little hope of it coming out very soon, though).

 

On 12/31/2021 at 9:35 AM, abcdefg said:

At some point, maybe half a year later, the job seemed to have been handed off to the Chengguan 城管, the same hated low-level civil servants who were responsible for roughly rousting sidewalk vendors and overturning or smashing unlicensed food carts. That shut down that particular street corner for good. I would imagine the players went somewhere else more private, but I was not in the know, and could not find them.

I connect with this paragraph more than you know. The contradiction I face today is that while Chinese music is more available to me than ever before (all of it is out there, somewhere, on the internet), it's also become harder to find the good stuff. There's been a hard shift in music competition shows back towards the safe and bland. You feel this most acutely in the area of hip hop, where famous rappers fail to produce the kind of work that made them famous in the first place, or have even effectively stopped rapping. (There's arguably only one famous rapper on Eargod's list this year, and he's doesn't even rap in that song.)

 

But in the end, I strongly suspect that Chinese music isn't in any sort of trouble at all. I bet the cool kids have moved on and are getting their music from a place the adults don't know about yet. I don't live in the mainland and I can't even use any of the big music apps like QQ音乐, 网易云音乐, etc, so I have no idea how I'll ever find that place (and maybe that place is live houses and music festivals, in which case, I'm SOL). Guess I'll just have to keep my eyes (and ears) open.