Fragments of Life | Still listening to music?

One day after the confirmed COVID-19 recovery, the room was cleaned and disinfected as an isolation room. A stack of CDs was found on a large bookcase, including CDs from the disbanded Japanese idol groups "Arashi", Hu Xia and Lin Yujia. I just put these CDs into another storage box.

I remember that Hu Xia's CD was the last CD I bought, and that was seven or eight years ago. Now I not only don't buy CDs, but I don't even listen to songs. But in the past, I was a child who loved to listen to music. When I was a student, when I was free and doing homework, I would listen to the radio on the radio.

Listening to the radio is a time that I enjoy a lot. I listen to the daily song requests from listeners, and the weekly gold hits charts.

At that time, except for heavy metal, heavy rock music, and songs like Huangmei, which were not within my listening range, I could accept most of the genres. At that time, I listened to the music because I didn't have much spare money to buy records all the time, and I always listened to the radio.

At that time, my parents didn’t give me much pocket money, just RM1 per day. I was not a vegetarian at that time, so I used to buy a ham bread for 100 yuan or rice noodles for 50 cents during the school break at 10 am to satisfy my cravings.

If you want to buy records, you need to save your pocket money little by little. In many cases, it takes two months to buy a singer's cassette, so you usually buy one or two blank cassettes and record them with the cassette radio. The songs played on the radio, although the recorded sound quality is not good. But you can keep listening to your favorite songs on a loop, and when you get tired of listening, you can record new songs over and over again until the cassette breaks.

You can buy a lot of cassettes at one time, after getting the red envelopes in the New Year. At that time, I would buy three or four cassettes at a time. To be honest, three or four cassettes are not much compared to the cassettes you want to buy, so do your homework before buying, and see that singer's new album is the most worth buying. At least half of the ten songs are in the genre I like. Otherwise, only the title song of the entire album is good, it would be a big loss.

At that time, it can be said that when you wake up, you turn on the radio. When you go home from school, you turn on the radio as soon as possible. When there is no program on the radio, you put the cassette on and indulge in the singing of the major singers all day long.

There is no fixed style of music I like, but I tend to be brisk and lyrical. Until one day I heard a song on the radio that made my ears lit up. It was a style of music that I had never heard before. The singer's singing was characterized and recognizable. The first time I heard so many true and false voice transitions in a song, it was special and it caught my ears.

That song is Tao Zhe's "10:30 at the Airport".

The radio DJ introduced it to the R&B genre. I've fallen in love with R&B ever since. "10:30 at the Airport" should be the pioneering work of Chinese R&B, right? And I believe that this song is not out of date until now, and it can also lead the way.

In the era when the Internet was not so developed, I relied on a "slow" connection to surf the Internet (at that time, I was calculating money every minute, not like now all-you-can-eat in a month) to go online to understand the R&B genre, R&B is Rhythm & Blues. Chinese is Rhythm and Blues.

The song "10:30 at the Airport" couldn't satisfy my ears, so I saved my daily allowance. After three weeks, I finally saved enough money to go to the record store to buy Tao Zhe's first album "Tao Zhe" . After listening to it, I felt that Tao Zhe was a musical genius. Apart from "10:30 at the Airport", I also liked "Love, It's Simple", "Beach", "Waiting for the Spring Breeze" and "Quicksand" in the album.

After listening to the entire album, I fell deeply in love with R&B. After Tao Zhe's success, a group of R&B singers emerged in the Chinese music scene, including Jay Chou, Wang Leehom, the talented Fang Datong, and Zhang Zhicheng from Malaysia, who became the king of heaven, making R&B mainstream music. I listen to all the songs of these singers. In the early days, I liked Tao Zhe the most, and in the later period I liked Fang Datong.

The lyrics of R&B are very sensual and direct, especially Tao Zhe's songs are very catchy, such as "10:30 at the Airport", very direct and simple words tell a story, which makes me feel very immersed.

After I came out to work in the society and had some financial ability, I started to buy CDs, and I bought several Fang Datong albums.

But when I became more and more able to buy records, my interest shifted from listening to songs to reading, and bought a lot of novels, books, magazines, etc. I gradually stopped buying records, and listening to music tended to go out, go to work, or listen to the radio while driving with my sister. In recent years, because I don’t need to carry my sister, because of the epidemic, I can’t go out, and the place to work is less than five minutes away from home. , I don't even listen to the radio. And at home because there are too many things to do, such as watching TV series, movies, watching short videos. And when I was reading or writing, I was watching movies or variety shows on the Internet, and almost no songs were played.

I don't know what caused it, but I gradually changed little by little and stopped listening to songs. I thought about it, the problem is that I am getting older, and now the songs are no longer suitable for me, and I can't hear them well. R&B songs. I don't know what new singers, what new songs, and who the current superstars are!

Even so, I still listen to music occasionally. There are a few singers that I keep listening to, and none of them belong to the R&B genre. For example, I have been listening to the songs of the two champions of Taiwan's Super Avenue of Stars, "Prince of Psychedelics" Lin Youjia and "Prince of Qingquan" Hu Xia, and I have listened to their songs for more than 10 years. Both the quality of the songs and the level of singing. , remain at a high level.

As soon as the two of them have a new song, I will come and listen to it. I like Lin Youjia's new song "End" recently, and I fell in love as soon as I heard it.

Occasionally, I also listen to the songs of Taiwanese singers Xie Zhenting and Li Youting. Both of them are talented. They can write their own lyrics and music and make albums. The styles of music are also very diverse, and they are the ones who can sing!

I'm thinking, if there is no singer or genre that amazes me next, will the index of my listening to songs become less and less?