"Always find a way"

I have to admit, I'm not a fan of Damien's faction. When I bought tickets for their concert, the main reason was that the tickets for Zhang Jingxuan's concert in the Red Hall next door were too hot to buy, and I didn't want to spend the whole winter vacation doing nothing and wasting time, so I bought a ticket for Daming's school. That's right, it's one. Compared with Zhang Jingxuan, most of my classmates are not familiar with the Daming faction, and many of them have never even heard of them. It's no wonder that Xuan "Uncle" is forty years old, just in his prime, and just released a new album this year, while Ming "Brother" and Da "Brother" are almost sixty years old, and they were active in the 1980s and 1990s. Long before our generation. It can also be seen from the ticket sales situation, Axuan sells the flight and directly sells URBTIX, but Daming sells it until the next day-this is the situation of Hong Kong people, and the difference is even greater for the mainland. In the mainland, it is impossible to listen to the songs of the Daming School without a little thought, and the reason is probably needless to say. There is no doubt that I can't find a like-minded person, and it is even doubtful whether I can call myself "good", so I can only go by myself.

When I bought the ticket, I was a little hesitant for no other reason. The ticket is really not cheap. The ticket of 780 yuan is enough for me to eat at school for a week. For the same price, you can buy mid-range ones at Hins Cheung's concert next door and still have some leftovers. But after thinking about it, I spent more than this amount of money on shopping spree in Eslite/Preface/Jianshan, and a few hundred more seems harmless. What's more, I've been in Hong Kong for more than three years and haven't been to any live concerts yet, so why not do it.

I came into contact with Da Ming Yi Pai/Anthony Wong, actually quite late. Pop music wasn't often listened to at home, and I didn't first start listening to Cantonese pop until high school. The first song is naturally Eason Chan's "Under Mount Fuji", and then Hacken Lee's "Half Moon Serenade". As for Daming's faction, there is no platoon yet. Quite magically, the first time I heard Huang Yaoming sing live was in Victoria Park on June 4, 2019, singing "Remember Guilty", and I didn't even know this person at that time...

The opportunity came later. During that time, I often saw someone mention a line of lyrics,

"I'm afraid this bright city/brilliance is here"

Or in newspaper articles, or in FB posts, they said that this is "Tonight's Stars Are Brilliant" by Daming's school. I searched on QQ Music and NetEase Cloud, the two platforms commonly used in the mainland. The version of "Tonight's Stars Are Brilliant" has the most views. The singer is not Daming, but Joey Yung. But on Spotify, there is Damien's original song. At that time, I could roughly imagine what this was all about, after all, we are all too familiar with this kind of thing.

The strange thing is that even though Huang Yaoming himself is nowhere to be seen on the mainland music platforms, his name still appears like a ghost in the comment section of different songs from time to time. From "Goodbye 2-chome" to "At Least You", from "the children and grandchildren spread the rumor that he and the secret me are in love" to "yellow is your surname / red is your love", a "rumor of love" "It was pieced together by the fans like detectives, and the protagonists were him and the lyricist Lin Xi. These rumors spread by word of mouth in the streets and alleys are naturally unrefined, and they can't be found on the wiki. The only way to spread them is to rely on the comment area of the music platform, which becomes a tacit code among fans. Everyone knows Lin Xi's name, and he has composed as many lyrics as there are stars in the sky, and quite a few of them are about love. From his works, he searched for sentences and found words that seemed to imply something, such as "Loving someone is like loving Mount Fuji", and then applied them to the emotional relationship between the two. Although it is quite ground-breaking, it has become a lot of fun for many fans anyway. Even someone like me who doesn't like gossip news occasionally flips through the comments.

The epidemic broke out, I was trapped at home, and the courses were transferred to online. The atmosphere at home is quite depressing, and listening to music has become one of the few pastimes. The VPN is intermittent, Spotify and YouTube cannot be accessed, and only QQ and Netease Cloud can be used to listen. As a very rebellious person, the more banned I am, the more I have to search. I thought that searching for "Da Ming Yi Pai" would turn up nothing, but I never thought I would find an "album" called "Da Ming Generation". Quotation marks because no one has ever put out an album like this (at least not on physical disc). This album is "collaborated" by more than a dozen singers, of course there are no Liu Yida or Huang Yaoming, and it is a cover compilation. "Story of the Stone" was sung by Kelly Chen; "Tonight's Starlight" was sung by Feng Hanming; "I Should Be Happy Today" was sung by Huang Qiusheng (he was not banned); "Forbidden Color" came from Lan Yibang; "Angel on the Road" From Cen Ning'er; "Do You Still Love Me" was even sung by the lyricist Pan Yuanliang, and there are some relatively small groups. This is obviously not an officially released work, more like it was collected and produced by Daming's fans. The most incredible thing is that this album was created on December 10, 2017, long before Damien's faction was banned (April 10, 2019). I really don't know why the founders have such foresight, and they have planned ahead a year and a half ago, and I really admire it. But now Tencent seems to be eyeing it. The name of this album has changed to "***", but you can still find it by directly searching for the three asterisks. There is also a similar album "Small Pox" on NetEase Cloud Music. The name is obviously taken from their song of the same name (homophony), but the number of songs included is slightly smaller than that of "***". As for Mingo or Tat Ming's other singles that have not been included in the album, it is even more difficult to find. For example, "Happy Together" is a cover of Leslie Cheung, "Vortex" is a cover of Hins Cheung, and "So Far So Close" is a live version of Chang Xinzhe's "I am a singer" program. It’s a bit funny to say that there are actually two live singing videos of Huang Yaoming’s “So Far So Near” on QQ Music, one is the commemorative concert for the 10th anniversary of Leslie Cheung’s death, and the other is Huang Weiwen’s Concert YY concert in 2012. The singers of the two videos are both signed "Leslie Cheung", as if the brother came back from the dead. "Leslie Cheung" sang on the tenth anniversary of his death, which can probably be regarded as a kind of contemporary performance art. Of course, if it was "Anthony Wong", I probably wouldn't have had the chance to see it either.

As mentioned above, I am not a fan of Damien. When Huang Yaoming announced on FB that he would replay the two albums "I'm Waiting for You to Come Back" and "Do You Still Love Me", I went to find out and listened to it from beginning to end, and then found that I almost didn't understand anything. Among the two albums, the only ones that can be called familiar and can be sung are "Tonight's Starlight" and "Forbidden Color". I have the impression that I have heard them before, and only "Old House Burning Letters" and "Do You Still Love Me" . Others are totally underwhelming, either because they aren't stylistic or too progressive, and I'm not even as familiar with them as I am with a few newer songs ("Guilty of Memories," "When That Day Comes," "Everywhere in the World Today"). When I went to the scene, the sound effect was noisy, and there was no subtitle prompt, I'm afraid I couldn't hear what they were singing at all (and it was indeed the case).

Because of hesitation, most of the tickets I bought very late were either sold out or the seats were too poor. I finally bought tickets for the second show, which is the day of the winter solstice on December 21. Other people’s families stay at home or go out for dinner during the winter solstice, or go out to watch a concert alone, probably only a “homeless person” like me can do it. It is a long way from CUHK to Yiguan in Wanchai. It takes four trains to take the subway, and you have to walk out of the station. It takes more than an hour in total. However, taking the cross-harbour bus on the evening of the winter solstice is basically looking for death. After eating early at 6:30, I set off. The only wish before leaving was that the concert would not be held too late. I have an exam at nine o'clock the next morning, so I can't sleep too late. So I secretly decided that if it was not over at 10:30, I would leave early.

At about 7:45, I arrived at the gate of Yiguan, and there were already many people waiting. Judging from their appearance, most of them are middle-aged or even elderly people. There are very few young people under the age of 30, and there are only a handful of students like me. Thinking about it, the two records of this replay are both ten years older than me, and my father was even in college at that time, so he might like to listen to them.

My seat is on the left facing the stage, on the upper row near the top of the hill. A piece of pure music was played in a loop (I later found out that it was the famous old Shanghai song "I'm Waiting for You to Come Back"). After I sat down, a few middle-aged men came next to me. They seemed to be in their fifties. They must have been fans of Daming when they were young.

After 8:30, the concert finally officially started. The lights dimmed and a flight listing appeared on the big screen. It was the old Kai Tak Airport, and the flight departed from Hong Kong, and the destination was Los Angeles, Vancouver, Melbourne, and so on. Then, the screen changed and returned to the current Hong Kong. The music started, it was "Tonight's Stars Are Bright", and two people in police uniforms came to the stage.

This is the first time I saw Liu Yida and Huang Yaoming in real life. I don't know if it's because the Yi Pavilion is smaller than the Red Pavilion, they look a lot bigger than I thought. As the song reached its climax, fireworks exploded over Victoria Harbor on the big screen, and a bright red ribbon fluttered in the air. Under normal circumstances, the background of this kind of red ribbon is the Tiananmen Gate Tower, but for some reason, it does not feel inconsistent to replace it with Victoria Harbour.

In the middle of singing, at some point, Huang Yaoming suddenly said that he wanted to share some reading thoughts. He turned and took out a piece of paper, and said that he was watching Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem recently. My jaw almost dropped in shock, and a strong sense of foreignness emerged spontaneously. It seemed that it was not Huang Yaoming standing on the stage, but Professor Luo Yongsheng, the torture room of good youth, or someone else. This kind of serious work appears in popular culture, and the most reasonable place is also Huang Zihua's stand-up comedy, concert? can not imagine. This seems to be the age when everyone reads philosophy, perhaps because the frustration of the external society makes people tend to introspect and gain spiritual freedom in reflection on themselves and society. It may be a bit of a "spiritual victory method" to say this, but people are thinking animals, and the freedom of the spiritual world is often more precious and unobtainable than the freedom of the external world.

Before singing "I Burned Letters in My Old Residence That Afternoon", Huang Yaoming said that a video was "disappeared". I knew what was going on because I had seen the news report of the first scene, and of course I could roughly guess what the "disappeared" thing he was talking about was. A few days later, he posted the video on FB. The video seems to be silent, only one photo after another slides across the screen and then disappears into nothingness. The photos are old and new, some are from the "Song of Democracy for China" in 1989, and some just happened in the first few months of this year. Of course, I think that if this video was not shot in advance, but after a few days, there would be a lot of extra material, and we would all have a stronger feeling for the word "disappeared". I used to feel that "disappearing" was only for the "big shots" with big names (at least in Hong Kong), but it wasn't until I witnessed a "unassuming murder" on campus that I realized that I had fallen into aphasia. There is a sense of surreality in a trance, oh, so it is.

The rhythm of ¾ beat sounded, it was "Forbidden Color". Thanks to Eason Chan's DUO concert, this song may be Daming's most famous song in the mainland. Wong Yiu Ming asked, "After 30 years, has the world changed for the better?" I smiled wryly. On July 6 this year, after the WeChat public accounts of sex/gender-related clubs in several universities were closed, I once shared this song in Moments. But apart from its original theme of sexual equality, the song can now be used for something else.

Frankly speaking, I didn't like the phrase "Let me disappear in this night of wind and rain / I can be reborn in a certain dream age", not because of the word itself, but because its evasive attitude is a bit too pessimistic. Although the three versions I've heard (Huang, Lan, and Chen) all sing with a sense of sadness and pain and arouse sympathy, I have some reservations about the self-destructive escape. After all, the "Dream Age" cannot be realized by waiting, but by the efforts of countless people. But after so many things in the past few years, I can completely understand emotionally. Since I can't do anything myself, it doesn't make sense to talk about "action". So I comforted myself, witnessing is also a kind of responsibility, watching the six-color rainbow on the big screen covered by a blood-red shadow.

Why do you demand that the most abundant thing in the world—the spirit—has only one form of existence? […] The only color this "freedom" allows is a shade of grey!

It was past 10:30, and I still didn't leave early. On the one hand, it was not polite, and on the other hand, I wanted to see the new work at the end. As the concert drew to a close, two new songs arrived as scheduled, "My Boyfriend" and "Everywhere in the World Today". "My Boyfriend" is like Lin Xi's usual style of laughing and cursing about current affairs, let's not show it for now. "Everywhere in the World Today", according to the lyricist Pan Yuanliang, is the sequel to the old song "Should Be Happy Today". "Should be very happy today" was written in 1988 before the return. "One sentence.

Compared with the previous work, "Everywhere in the World Today" is still brisk in terms of style, but it does not have the sense of desolation of the previous work in terms of meaning. I heard this song when it was released last year, but the live experience is still different. Perhaps it can be understood in this way that the song "Happy" is about a lonely person who has all his friends separated and stays alone. The reason for staying behind is either that he can't let go of old memories, or he still has feelings attached to it. And in "Everywhere", the last person finally let go of the past, broke up, gave up, and left. It is very difficult to give up and cut off. As "I will not go home in this life", "being a new immigrant / cut off the first half of my life / find a new motherland / start a new life", is like surviving with a broken arm. But as long as the faith is still there, relying on a little light at the end of the tunnel, they will probably "always find their way."

As a person who is used to marathon writing (or procrastination), I started writing this article on December 26th, and when it was almost finished, it was December 31st, the last day of 2021. I dare not look forward to next year, after all, the uncertainty is too great. When I came to Matters for the first time in August 2019, I had just entered the university for one year, and I will graduate next year in a blink of an eye. I'm not sure whether the master's degree or even the doctorate degree will stay in Hong Kong (after all, the application result is not up to me), let alone the more distant future. Looking back on my three-and-a-half years of college career, I also feel a sense of being coerced by the torrent of the times and unable to control myself. But in any case, I still think it is a blessing to live in such a city and study at such a university at such a time. Compared with all other possibilities, it is not necessarily good and positive, but it can indeed be said that it is an honor to meet "Sheng Zang".

The title of this article was originally "Here is the glory", but it seems that too many people have already made this conclusion, and it is a bit boring to talk about it again. And the pessimistic mood has been exaggerated too much, and I am not lacking in this. Looking around, I took the phrase "Continue to sing/Continue to find/Always find a direction" as the title to encourage everyone.