Music and Society, Episode 1

One may assume I would talk about protest or politics music, but let’s start with some more universal humane emotions.

Spring, seasons.

We welcome spring back to the town. Red blossoms on the trees, sun pushes away those heavy coats, people jumping on the grass, high, or shy…

Interestingly I first heard this song from Kaiserreich BGM. They did a terrific job on selecting appropriate songs for different countries and scenarios. Apart from the good tastes of those mod creators, the key is that we got so many brilliant ballads, marches, early pop… In China, you may have been hearing the voices of those unforgettable singers hundred years ago.

There’s the seductive vibes of those who lost in Shanghai’s material luxury; there’s the desperate cries of lowly errand boys; there’s heroic charge against the imperial oppression; there’s bitter-sweet celebration of the aftermath…No matter which alternate universe we were in, those expressions of universal emotions in the early days of widely-spread and recorded songs would perfectly fit in.

大地回春, Spring returns to Earth. It was a few weeks ago when we appreciated some performances of fellow students in the name of “Taste of Taiwan”. “A song to celebrate the spring,” as the host of that classical music team said. Perhaps the most popular example in this context is 恭喜恭喜, whose more jubilant version is still ubiquitous in all places during the Spring Festival time, and is widely-taught online to be the typical song of a mixture of sorrow and joy, written to commemorate the Pyrrhic victory in the war of resistance against imperial Japan. Spring returns to Earth, also a song in the post-war era (probably released in Hong Kong), somehow expressed the similar sadness but mostly hope and resilience for a unpredictable future.

It’s about neither cliches like love and sex, nor vigorous and spectacular crying for justice. There are songs that were luckily born in those eras, and brilliantly yet calmly expressed some common characteristics of a nation, stored these “shared memories in history” with vibrations that will be carried on eternally…

“Birds are singing endlessly, everything on the earth are happy to embrace a fresh start, hey!”