英语现代中国流行歌曲歌词评论

Dingyu Wang(515370910026)

Vy100

Professor Thorpe

12.13.2015

Enjoy the Confusing Music: the Vague Chinese in Pop Songs Last Friday I went to a café and heard a melodic song. It wasa pretty song,but it confused me more than it delighted me- I had no idea what the singer was singing! As China develops, there also develops a wide variety of modern Chinese pop music based on the western pop music, so Chinese people now can enjoy different foreign genres in Chinese. However, Chinese pop songs in the 21st century do a bad job on conveying their context to the audience because the audiences have difficulties understanding what the singers are singing when there are no lyrics providedfor people to read.

Lyrics do play an important role in constructing the context of a pop song. Although the mode and the melody of a song could shape itsaffection, it’s the lyric of the song that provides the exact context and distinguishes itself. For example, “The Old Boy” and “ARIGATOU” are two songs that have the identical melody and even the identical accompaniment, but the former one expressesthe difference between the previous dreamand the reality, while the latter one talks about the kinship (Chopsticks Brother; MIZUNO YOSHIKI). Different lyricsconstruct different contexts, even with the same melody and accompaniment. Therefore, audience should get the lyrics accurately to understand the exact context. However, audiencesin China have great difficulty in understanding the lyrics of Chinese pop songsdue to the following three factors, andas a result, those songs are weak in conveying their context to their audience.

First, the way that most pop songs express their meaning is different from the way Chinese people speak daily. Kai Xu andJiao Ye name this phenomenon “the language defamiliarizationof

the lyrics of pop songs” (72). They find that Chinese songwriters often adopt the tricks “dislocated meanings” and “deviant collocations”in order to have specialaesthetic effect (72). “Dislocated meanings” meansthe meaning of a word is extended or “teleported” to another meaning that has some relation to its original meaning and “deviant collocations” means the collocations that violate the language convention, for example, the connection of the abstract concept and the concrete noun. These two tricks, which are popular in Chinese songs, defamiliarize the sentences and as a result make audience hard to understand what the singer is singing.

In addition, the relatively stricter requirement in rhythm in Chinese songs sometimes forces songwriters to change the structure of a normal sentence- change the order of the words in a sentence to make the last word rhyme, delete some elements of a normal sentence, repeat a word, or just mix two sentences together. In the song “The Sky of Entertainment”, EasonChan sings “the color of the sky is going to darken in your eyes which I stared at is colorful”, which is a fused sentence grammatically (Radio Mars). In effect, this is a defamiliarized sentence mixed from the sentence #1 “the color of the sky is going to darken;” the sentence #2 “but in your eyes the darkening sky is still colorful;” and the sentence #3 “I stared at your eyes.” Such sentencesthat are defamiliarized in the consideration of rhythm arecommon among Chinese pop songs. This phenomenonalso weakens the Chinese pop songs’ ability to convey their context.

Here,the deduction is based on the statement“unfamiliar sentences are hard to understand in a short time even if they do make sense in the context”, and thatis supported by Daming Zhang, a neurologist in Heilongjiang. He points out that the process of people’s understanding a sentence while listening to others is not “from bottom to top”, but “from top to bottom”, which means people are always predictingwhat may be said next based on the context, and then “pretreat” the

possible next-comingsentences and as a result,if the next-coming sentence approximately coincidewith one of the predicted sentences, people are able to understand it quickly before the speaker continues speaking (19).For example, “I’m using a guitar stirring in a pot of tomato

purée which contains a bicycle tire” is hard to predict, because it’s completely new to the listener, while “I’m using a spoon stirring in a pot of tomato purée which contains some sugar” is easier

to read, because the listener has predicted that “the speaker may be going to stir something”when he hears“I’m using a spoon…” Analogously, the defamiliarized sentences require a longer time for audience to understand the lyrics simply because audiences cannot predict those strange sentences! Notice that the sentences in a song just go one after another successively, providing little time for audience to process the defamiliarized sentence, thus leaving them lost in the song.

The second factor is the interaction between the lexical tones of Chinese and the tunes of songs. In comparison with English, the meaning of a Chinese character dependson not only its pronunciation but also its tone. Giambattista Vico said “The Chinese native slang has only three hundred vowels, which vary in pitch and duration, but they come with their twelve thousands glyph, so they are singing to speak”, which sounds like a kind of praise (Vico). However, there also come problems- if Chinese people sing to speak, then what will happen when they sing?

Jing Zhang, a linguist in the University of Heilongjiang, conduct a qualitative survey on the interaction between the lexical tones of Chinese and the tunes of songs, in which she draws a conclusion that the inconsistency between the lexical tones and the musical tones will both make “lyrics hard to be understood” for listeners and “lyrics hard to be sung” for singers(44, 51). The inconsistency mainly lies in the phenomenon “Mismatch (Daozi)”, which means, for example, a character in the first tone (high and level tone) is sung in a rising tone(Zhang 2). Notice that, in Chinese, the rising tone is exactly the second tone of the four standard lexical tones(high-level

tone, rising tone, falling-rising tone, and falling tone). So the meaning of the “mismatched” character is easily misunderstood. Take an interesting example, there’s a nursery rhyme in Chinese called “Little Pine Grows Fast”, and the first sentence is “Little pine (rising tune), please grow fast.” Unfortunately, in Chinese, pine is pronounced as “song shu” in a falling and rising tone, while squirrel is also pronounced as “song shu” but in a rising tone, which means the “little pine” in the song is sounded as “little squirrel” exactly. In fact, my father told me he hasbeen considering it as “little squirrel”rather than “little pine”in that song for nearly 30 years- not until once he happened to read the lyrics of “Little Pine Grows Fast” in a n anthology of nursery rhymes did he realize it!

China has a long history of music, in which several music styles thrive. Jiafang Yu states that “the culture of C hinese music walked far ahead in the world in the past” (9).However, most of the musical pieces are without human voice except in operas. In operas, body languages help singers express the lyrics a lot and audiences didn’t feel that hard to understand the lyrics compared with the audiences nowadays. So, as time goes by, the 21st century comes and Chinese songs are facing a new problem- how to fit the Chinese language in the modern pop songs perfectly? This is not an easy problem.However, as Fei Liu mentioned, the songwriters in China rarely attach great importance to the consistency of Chinese and Chinese pop songs (89).

Then, here comes the third factor that makes the Chinese lyrics hard to understand.In the 21st century, as more and more foreign genres are introduced to China, songwriters just pay too much attention to imitate and study the new styles “musically”, but often fail to localize them “lexically”. In fact, somedefamiliarized sentences could be fixed into a normal order andmost “Mismatches” could be avoided if the songwriters take pains to match the lexical tones and the

musical tunes. Nevertheless, to do a perfect job on the consistency takes efforts, and nowadays few people want to do such things that consume so much energy to get lyrics consistent.

The lyric is an essential component of a song. Due to the threefactors above- the defamiliarization of the lyrics, the interaction between the lexical tones and the tunes of songs, and the insufficient degree of localization of the foreign styles lexically, Chinese lyrics are hard to be understood by just listening without reading, especially in the 21st century.The absence of lyrics makes a song vague in context. Therefore, the Chinese songs have weak abilities to convey their contexts when audiences are listeningto them.

Notice that although Chinese songs do bad jobs on conveying their context, this is not equal to that Chinese is not a proper language to be sung. Not everybody wants to hear the lyrics clearly. They just want a vague context. For example, so many teenagers in mainland of China love Cantonese songs, and I’m one of them. For me, I don’t have any idea what a singer is singing in Cantonese because Cantonese and Mandarin are quite different, but I still love those songs.

Works cited

Chopsticks Brother. “The Old Boy.”

Liu, Fei. “Grasp the Characteristics of Chinese, Sing Chinese songs clearly.” Journal ofTianjin Conservatory of Music 4(2003): 88-91. Web. 12 Dec. 2015.

MIZUNO YOSHIKI. “ARIGATOU” [Thank You].

Radio Mars. “The Sky of Entertainment.”rice & shine. Eason Chan, 2014. MP3 file.

Vico, Giambattista. Scienz Nuova. Trans. Guangqian Zhu. Beijing: people's Literature Publishing House, 1986. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.

Xu, Kai, and Jiao Ye. “The Language D efamiliarization of the Lyrics of Pop Songs.”Rhetoric Learning 2(2004): 72-73. Web. 8 Dec. 2015.

Yu, Jiafang. 中国古代音乐史[The history of ancient Chinese music]. Shanghai: Shanghai people’s Publishing House, 2003. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

Zhang, Daming. "Listen to Others with the Brain in the Process ofPredicting." Heilongjiang Science and Technology Information 13(2014): 19. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.

Z hang, Jing. “The Study of the D ouble Helix Model of Tone and Melody.” Heilongjiang, CHN: U of Heilongjiang P, 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.