Jay Chou's turn

In the wave after wave of entertainment, if you can't continue to create hot spots, it will soon be forgotten by people. Jay Chou is different. The new song came out, and it came late after several years, but every time it can stir up huge waves.

On July 6, Jay Chou's new album's title MV "The Greatest Work" was released. For a time, the song was all over the Internet, and the interpretation of the article also began to dominate the screen.

Jay Chou, who was born in 1979, is now 43 years old. As a pop singer, he is a well-deserved success. He is mainly active in the first fifteen years of the 21st century. The sweetness and bitterness of juvenile love and the rebelliousness of adolescence to the world are the themes of most of his songs. At that time, the MP3s and MP4s in the streets and alleys of the mainland were full of his indistinct voice, which was all the rage. After Teresa Teng, Luo Dayou, Jacky Cheung and others, he walked to the center of the stage with the rhythm of a marginal teenager. In the second half of the post-80s and post-90s' minds, he really became what TV calls "the king of heaven".

However, people always grow up. Most of Jay Chou's fans back then were over 30 years old and parents. As smart as Jay Chou, of course, he knows that his time has passed. However, he was still a little unwilling.

In 2018, after a few years of silence, Jay Chou released a new song "Waiting for you to finish class", the theme is still the love of boys and girls. It was hotly debated for a while. Most of the people who follow are his fans back then. Listening to songs and talking is for nostalgia.

The past always seems to be golden, but the laws of art are against immutability.

On July 6 this year, Jay Chou's new song "The Greatest Work" MV was released. In this song, the theme has begun to change. No longer love and rebellion, but committed to the peak of art.

In the plot design, Jay Chou opened the time tunnel through the sound of the piano and came to Paris in the early 20th century. He met many famous art masters, including Rene Margherita, Salvador Dali, Sanyu, Mo Chennai, Xu Zhimo and others, involving art, design, literature and many other aspects, have already broken through the field of music.

Obviously, Jay Chou is no longer satisfied with the standard of pop music. He began to observe the masters in the world art history, hoping that his works will reach a new peak.

In the MV, he did not learn from the masters, but inspired them to create masterpieces of art. This subtle shift people may laugh and not think about. The underlying law behind it is the reversal of the trend of Western learning over the past century.

Since modern times, China has lagged behind the West in all aspects, and there has been a steady flow of Western learning to the east. Either Westerners come to China to preach, or Easterners go to the West to study. In terms of fine arts, Xu Beihong, Lin Fengmian and others traveled thousands of miles to Europe, studying Western art, and using the light, shadow, color and composition of oil paintings to transform Chinese ink painting. In other disciplines such as architecture, literature, history, physics, and chemistry, there are countless people who go to the West to seek law.

Easterners to inspire Westerners to create history are rare in modern times.

In Jay Chou's MV, the situation is completely reversed, and it is changed to Chinese to inspire Westerners and create works that are famous for later generations. People readily accept it and are not surprised. This is due to the rise of China after the reform and opening up. At least China seems to be very strong. In the humanities, such as arts and social sciences, where there is no clear standard, people seem to think that it is possible to surpass the West.

But in many science subjects that are backed by data and based on rigid judging standards, we have not yet compared to the West. The most obvious per capita GDP is far from the West.

Maybe, don't take it seriously like this. Zhou's songs, after all, are just entertainment culture, and they are the magic tricks he used to inspire the great masters of the modern Western world. In the eyes of today's people, they are no more than trivial skills, and anyone can use them with a little training. If you use his unique experience, behavior or character to inspire the masters, or on the contrary, according to the current plot settings, it will be even more exciting.

Moreover, most of the Western art in the early 20th century that Zhou admired belonged to surrealist painters. Their works were reflections on the industrial society that paid too much attention to efficiency in the 19th century. They used absurd techniques and novel techniques to attract people's attention. . In other words, people like Magritte and Dalí are themselves a kind of pop culture. It cannot be compared with ancient Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, which were the most glorious periods of Western culture. Some people even say that the Western culture in the early 20th century was a sick culture. This is a bit exaggerated.

It may be because China has experienced decades of rapid development, and it is too similar to the early 20th century in the West, so Zhou chose people like Dali and Magritte. And Zhou, like them, has a spirit of rebellion.

However, with the trend towards classics, it is a good turn after all. Including La Lang Lang to play the piano, it is all to improve the style of popular music.

At the end of the song "The Greatest Work", there are these lines:

The madness of the generation, the king of music, all things are surrendered to me. The path of the movement is still rushing, and I am still creating. The melody of my fingertips is longing for the madness of the generation. The king of music, I think I don’t need a picture frame, it can’t be framed, the keys The tempo, my notes, are all futuristic art.

In the last few lines of lyrics, we can see the shadow of Jay Chou in his early years, the rebellious and proud boy seems to be back.

The transformation of pop music singers has always been a problem. Some people retire, some become bosses, some people change careers to become actors, and some people choose to stick to the music field and become powerful singers. Few of them continue to be brilliant. Compared with other people, Zhou's transformation has not only maintained his own style, but also added a little artistic depth, which can be regarded as a success. When Jay Chou commented on his new song, he said, this is my greatest work. Hopefully this is just a passing word for propaganda.