Cui Jian
Cui Jian is a Chinese singer-songwriter and musician. Known for his countercultural impact, he has launched a ground-breaking musical trend of Chinese rock and pop, dubbed the "Godfather of Chinese Rock". With poetic, socially conscious lyrics, his experimental approach features multiple traditional instruments, eclectic musical elements and cultural references from different eras. Cui is widely deemed the most influential rock musician in China as well as one of the greatest and most prominent figures in Chinese music.
Born into an ethnic Korean family with parents who were both artists, Cui began his musical career as a classically trained trumpeter before switching to guitar. He rose to prominence with his single "Nothing to My Name", which mixed rock and roll and xintianyou and became an instant hit in 1986. A pioneer of the country's alternative music, he challenged the dominant culture, earning a cult following on China's university campuses while also facing backlash from social conservatives. This was followed by the unprecedented success of Rock 'n' Roll on the New Long March, generally acclaimed as China's first rock album, which heralded him as the "spokesperson for his generation". However, for more than a decade, his performing in Beijing was on-off interdicted, partly because of his [|activist role] in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
He consolidated his fame with less commercial and more sophisticated Solution and Balls Under the Red Flag, the latter of which is considered by critics to be his magnum opus. Later he shifted towards electronic and rap-oriented avant-rock on The Power of the Powerless and Show You Colour, and returned to a folk and blues rock style with Frozen Light and A Flying Dog. According to Billboard magazine, Cui is estimated to have sold 100
million albums, although
the vast majority have been pirated
copies. In 2009, he was voted the sixth most influential Chinese singer of the past 60 years in a China Internet Information Center history poll. At the 2010 Chinese Music Awards, he was ranked among the 30 greatest Chinese artists of the past 30 years.
Cui has also been involved in other projects including music directing and filmmaking. Since the 1993 underground movie Beijing Bastards, he has worked on several films as an investor, composer, screenwriter, guest star, and producer; he also directed the musical Blue Sky Bones. Despite his many denials, Cui's actions and work have led him to be often portrayed as a dissident. His international acclaim is always tied to his public persona with political overtones, which frequently downplays his musical achievements.
Early life
Cui Jian is a third-generation ethnic Korean whose grandfather migrated to China during the Japanese occupation and established the family. Cui's parents moved to Beijing from the industrial northeast in the 1950s. His father, Cui Xiongji, who died in 2006, was a professional trumpet player, and his mother, Zhang Shunhua, who birth in Busan, South Korea, was a member of the China National Ethnic Song and Dance Ensemble. He lived with his parents and younger brother Cui Dong in an old two-bedroom apartment within an apartment building near Yonghe Temple. Cui Xiongji conducted strict nationalist education, but Cui Jian rebelled against such education from childhood. Cui Jian said that he was a little red guard. He spent his childhood at an air force boarding kindergarten due to his parents' demanding work schedules. Their limited proficiency in Chinese contributed to his stutter. Cui Xiongji described the young Cui Jian as possessing "an intense intellectual curiosity about incomprehensible subjects, often engaging in solitary observation and contemplation". Cui Dong said that when Cui Jian was young, his essays were particularly strong, his other academic performance was also quite good, and he was a good student.Cui Jian became jobless after graduating from middle school and lived in a 14-square-meter room with his family. Cui Xiongji told Cui Jian that "either up to the mountains and down to the countryside or play musical instruments". Cui Jian followed his father to start playing the trumpet at the age of fourteen. He joined the Beijing Symphony Orchestra in 1981, at the age of twenty, became a professional trumpet player of the Beijing Aihe Orchestra. Yang Leqiang, a former member of Seven-Player Band, recalled that during symphony orchestra rehearsals at the time, while others wore crisp suits, Cui showed up in slim-fit pants. Cui first heard rock and roll in the early 1980s when professional musician friends smuggled cassette tapes in from Hong Kong and Bangkok. He spent this period listening to Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Talking Heads. He learned to play guitar and began writing music, which he played in cafés and dormitories. He bought his first guitar for 20 yuan and learned to play it from a Mongolian worker, surpassing him within a couple of weeks. During that era, playing guitar was deemed "hooligan" and "bourgeois" behavior. In 1983, when Cui Jian went to Handan for a performance with his troupe, he played guitar one evening. He recalled "the audience was instantly stunned, and one girl immediately burst into tears". That same year, he wrote his first song "I Love My Guitar". Zhou Yaping, former timpanist of the orchestra, recalled that Cui could accurately imitate the singing styles of English-language vocalists, or artists like Liu Wen-cheng, which was quite rare at the time.
Career
Early career
In 1984, Cui released his first album Contemporary European and American Popular Jazz Disco. Inspired by Simon & Garfunkel and John Denver, at the same year Cui formed his first band, Seven-Player Band with six other classically trained musicians, for which Cui played guitar and was also the lead singer. The seminal band was heavily influenced by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Talking Heads. The band played Western pop music in small restaurants and bars in Beijing and was the first of its kind in China. They performed their own works—mostly soft rock and love songs—in local hotels and bars. With his band, Cui released his first cassette Returning Wanderer that same year. The album featured commercial, pop-oriented love songs but also showcased songs with progressive and folk-rock influences, which were fresh and innovative in China at the time.In 1985, the band released another album titled "With Seven-Player Band", which featured a combination of Western pop-rock as well as new original songs. That June, under pressure from the authorities, the Seven-Player Band was forced to disband. Soon afterwards, Cui wrote his first rock song "It's Not That I Don't Understand", regarded as the earliest ancestor of Chinese rap rock. The song shares elements with Western hip hop through its use of drum set and foreign percussion instruments like bongos, congas, and timbales, while incorporating a dizi solo, marking one of the earliest moments when hip hop merged with Chinese traditional sounds. Over the next two years, Cui wrote thirteen songs. In late 1985, the cafeteria of the Beijing Film Academy hosted a music performance where Cui performed his original song "Rock 'n' Roll on the New Long March". Midway through the set, several CBS journalists arrived to film "China's rock 'n' roll". Yang Leqiang, member of Seven-Player Band, rushed the stage, hoisted Cui onto his shoulders, and students, including future rock musician He Yong, chanted, "His name is Cui Jian!" He later participated in the "Peacock Cup" vocal competition, with judges including Wang Kun and Li Shuangjiang, but was eliminated in the preliminary round due to his singing style being deemed unacceptable at the time.
1986–1988: The popularity of "Nothing to My Name" and collaboration with ADO
Filling the World with Love and "Nothing to My Name"
In early 1986, coinciding with the International Year of Peace, Chinese musician Guo Feng organized the recording of the charity song "Filling the World with Love" and planned to hold a concert of the same name convening 100 popular singers in Chinese Mainland to change the stereotypes of popular music. Prompted by this recording, cultural authorities made their first exception for popular music by permitting the organization of the concert. At the recommendation of popular singer Wang Di, Cui Jian participated in the concert and applied for a solo segment. With the permission of Wang Kun, Cui was able to sing his song "Nothing to My Name" at the concert. The concert took place at Beijing Workers' Gymnasium on 9 May. That evening, the venue was packed to capacity, with "everyone wondering what was going to happen".Two minutes before taking the stage, Cui felt his suit was "utterly stifling," so he switched to the dagua belonging to the father of Wang Di. Because of Cui's disheveled hair, cold look, and his apparel, which were different from the previous "gorgeously dressed" singers with "graceful singing", the audience became chaotic. However, the moment his "hoarse voice" rang out, the audience fell silent immediately. Then came applause and whistles, followed by continuous cheers. Keyboard player Liang Heping recalled that his hair "stood straight on end". After the concert, the young people sang his verses and played air guitar on the streets. Official personnel present displayed attitudes diametrically opposed to those of the young audience. Some "old comrades" from Yan'an left in the concert because they were afraid to take responsibility. Music writer Andrew Jones describes this event with the words:
"Nothing to My Name" is considered by some to be the first indie song in China. The sampling inspiration for the song draws from Northwestern China's "Xintianyou" folk music. Cui Jian incorporated traditional instruments like the suona, guzheng, dizi, and xiao, while blending elements and rhythms from punk, jazz, Afro-pop, and rap. Professor of East Asian Studies Nimrod Baranovitch wrote that the song features a hybrid of folklore with strong, fast and modern disco and rock beats. Stefan Simons wrote for Der Spiegel that Cui's loud, aggressive tones blasted against "oily party" arias and "schmaltzy" pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan, making the song the anthem of the alternative music and youth scene. The song is about a failed love affair, but widely read as a metaphor for the growing estrangement of Chinese youth from the political climate of China. Compared with the first-person plural pronoun "we" in revolutionary songs, the word "I" appears in 28 times out of the song's 42 lines and becomes a liberating call for self-expression. BBC correspondent Henry Knight described the song as "individualism, experimentation and non-conformity". Hong Kong news website HK01 stated that this love song accurately and profoundly depicts the confusion experienced by China's younger generation amid the collapse of social values at the time, as well as their reflections on identity amidst dual material and spiritual hardships.
His performance has been seen as the moment heralding the birth of Chinese rock 'n' roll, which has been compared to The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show., known as the Father of Taiwanese Folk Songs, thought "the younger generation in mainland China can now write their own songs" after hearing "Nothing to My Name". The song peaked at number one on the, and remains one of the most influential songs in the history of China.