Una breve reflexión

The artist most renowned for China Wind pop, Jay Chou, was born and raised in Taipei. Jay Chou started playing piano from the age of four and he specialised in western classical music in high school. He showed an early talent for song writing and composed the melodies for his entire first album and some of the lyrics. The success of this album, which he released when he was nineteen, paved the way for him to become ‘Asia’s hottest pop star’ (Drake, 2003, n.p.).

‘Blue and White Porcelain’ was written by Jay Chou with lyrics by Fang Wen-Shan and was released in 2007 on his eighth album On the Run. This was the moment when Jay Chou’s signature China Wind style was clearly established, and fans and the media then came to expect that there would be one or two songs of this style on all of his albums. Like most of Jay Chou’s China Wind songs, this song uses a major pentatonic scale and various Chinese instruments. For example, while it is accompanied by arpeggios on electric guitar, strings, drums, the guzheng zither and Chinese flute lead the melody in the prelude, interlude, and ending.

The layers of strings (including erhu, guzheng, and synthesised strings) create variation between different parts of the song. More and more layers of strings are added, thereby

building up the song. In the last repetition of the chorus, the strings play the melody in unison with Jay Chou’s singing on some lines.

Unlike some Mandopop ballads that seek expressivity in the vocal range by hitting high notes, ‘Blue and White Porcelain’ is a gentle song with a relatively shorter vocal range. Jay Chou’s singing voice throughout the song is tender and soft. He adds some techniques that are rarely heard on his other songs. For instance, the distinguishable ‘sliding tone’ can be heard in the chorus. Everett and Lau (2004) described this skill as gliding between two notes in a continuous motion, which indicates a relationship between intonations in Chinese languages and opera singing.

The first two lines of the chorus of ‘Blue and White Porcelain’ exemplify how the lyrics and sliding note functions. The words in bold are where Jay Chou sings sliding notes.

Table 3. Sliding Notes and Lyrics of the Chorus of ‘Blue and White Porcelain’

As Chinese poetry usually has a fixed number of words for each line, contemporary popular lyrics occasionally use this format to structure rhythm and rhyme. Although most China Wind pop lyrics do not rigidly apply this rule throughout the whole song, parallelism

sentences, such as the above, are often found somewhere in the songs, more often than not in the chorus. Jay Chou’s occasional sliding notes give a hint of traditional operatic singing without overpowering the solid slow four beat R&B ballad structure.

‘Blue and White Porcelain’ won ‘Song of the Year’ at the 2007 19th _{Golden Melody Awards}

in Taiwan, one of the international Chinese-speaking community’s most influential music awards. It was also nominated as the ‘Best Arrangement of the Year’. Baby Chung (鍾興民), the arranger of ‘Blue and White Porcelain’ and many other China Wind songs, including

‘Nunchucks’ (2001) and ‘Orchid Pavilion’ (2008), often works with both mainstream pop musicians and film composers, and is known for being fluent in arranging music pieces for Western orchestration as well as Chinese plucked and bowed string instruments. The use of instruments in ‘Blue and White Porcelain’ is very similar to the combination of Jiangnan

Sizhu. ‘Jiangnan’ is the traditional name for Southern regions such as Jiangsu and Shanghai;

‘Sizhu’ literally means ‘silk and bamboo’, referring to string and wind instruments. With only a few exceptions, both the lyrics and instrumentation of most of Jay Chou’s China Wind songs reflect a southern version of Chineseness, which employs elements from Han culture around Jiangnan, south of the Yangtze river after the Song Dynasty (10th_-13th _century).

Table 4. outlines the orchestration for ‘Blue and White Porcelain’. It highlights the type of instrument sounds used in the song and how Baby Chung’s arrangement for the string layers gradually builds the foundation for the vocal and creates a Chinese atmosphere.

The lyrics reflect a sense of beauty in the description of the scenery and use Chinese art forms as metaphors, such as paintings of court ladies in the Tang dynasty, calligraphy in the Han dynasty, and the porcelain, all of which are used as metaphors for romantic love. The chorus is as follows:

The azure colour is waiting for the misty rain I’m waiting for you

The chimney smoke rises gracefully

Separated by the river, millions of miles apart The base of the vase is inscribed with calligraphy Imitating the graceful old dynasty

Just pretend I am longing for my meeting with you The azure colour expecting the misty rain

I am waiting for you

I try to touch the moon’s reflections in the water Blurring the ending

As if the Chinese flower pot is passed on over generations Caring only about its own beauty

Your eyes carry a smile.7

天青色等煙雨 而我在等妳 炊煙裊裊昇起 隔江千萬里 在瓶底書漢隸仿前朝的飄逸 就當我為遇見妳伏筆 天青色等煙雨 而我在等 妳月色被打撈起 暈開了 結局 如傳世的青花瓷自顧自美麗 妳眼帶笑意

In the music video, a present-day antiques auction is taking place in which a blue and white porcelain vase is up for sale, while a man and woman experience déjà vu reflecting on their

7 _{English translations from Jay Chou Studio (http://jaychoustudio.com/), adapted with the assistance of Tadgh}

previous lives in ancient China. Blue and white porcelain vases are suggested as eternal and significant for this relationship, which has spanned centuries. As in many of Jay Chou’s songs – including ‘Hair Like Snow’ (2005), ‘East Wind Breaks’ (2003) and ‘Orchid Pavilion’ (2008) – there is little attempt to offer insights into Chinese modernity or the present state of China, but rather the focus is on an imagined past that is ancient and sophisticated. In these music videos, a nostalgic Chineseness is often romanticised. This same Chineseness is commercialised (Ching, 2000) and becomes a pan-national product circulated through the music industries.

Fung (2008) suggests that Jay Chou’s Chineseness is ‘safe, compromising, and non- confrontational’ (p.79) in relation to the PRC, while Chung (2011) implies that the cultural content is intentionally ambiguous, seeking a Chinese atmosphere with which most ethnic Chinese residing outside the PRC can identify with. While listening to China Wind pop music, an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) is invoked. To some interviewees in this research, the music creates a sense of nostalgia and belonging to a supposedly ‘5,000-year- old culture’, and to them this sense of belonging creates an imagined bond between the audience. This understanding of Chinese culture as one entity is also a common nationalist narrative employed by music talent shows such as The Voice of China. It also overlooks the fact that Chinese culture has been re-authorised and institutionalised. This imagined

community can consist of members from the different ‘symbolic universes’ of cultural China – Taiwan, Hong Kong and ethnic Chinese communities around the world – each member having a unique political history and playing a different role in the formulation of national discourses. As the later chapters will reveal, not all the audience shared the same view regarding this ‘imagined community’. Irrespective of such differences, a globalised pop music industry has facilitated the sale of pan-national Chinese music products to these divergent communities (Chua, 2001).