Mandopop
Mandopop or mandapop refers to Mandarin popular music. The genre originated from the jazz-influenced popular music of 1930s Shanghai known as Shidaiqu; later influences included Japanese enka, Hong Kong's Cantopop, Taiwan's Hokkien pop, and particularly the campus folk song folk movement of the 1970s. "Mandopop" may be used as a general term to describe popular songs performed in Mandarin. Though mandopop predates cantopop, the English term "mandopop" was coined around 1980 after "cantopop" became a popular term for describing popular songs in Cantonese. "Mandopop" was used to describe Mandarin-language popular songs of that time, some of which were versions of cantopop songs sung by the same singers with different lyrics to suit the different rhyme and tonal patterns of Mandarin.
Mandopop is categorized as a subgenre of commercial Chinese language music within C-pop. Popular music sung in Mandarin was the first variety of popular music in Chinese to establish itself as a viable industry. It originated in Shanghai; later, Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing also emerged as important centers of the mandopop music industry. Among the regions and countries where mandopop is most popular are mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore.
History
Beginning of recording industry in China
The Chinese-language music industry began with the arrival of gramophone. The earliest gramophone recording in China was made in Shanghai in March 1903 by Fred Gaisberg, who was sent by the Victor Talking Machine Company in the U.S. to record local music in Asia. The recordings were then manufactured outside China and re-imported by the Gramophone Company's sales agent in China, the Moutrie Foreign Firm. The Moudeli Company dominated the market before the 1910s until the Pathé Records took over the leading role. Pathé was founded in 1908 by a Frenchman named Labansat who had previously started a novelty entertainment business using phonograph in Shanghai around the beginning of the 20th century. The company established a recording studio, and the first record-pressing plant in the Shanghai French Concession in 1914, and became the principal record company to serve as the backbone for the young industry in China. It originally recorded mainly Peking opera, but later expanded to Mandarin popular music. Later other foreign as well as Chinese-own recording companies were also established in China.Early in the 20th century, people in China generally spoke in their own regional dialect. Although most people in Shanghai then spoke Shanghainese, the recordings of the pop music from Shanghai from the 1920s onwards were done in Standard Mandarin, which is based on the Beijing dialect. Mandarin was then considered as the language of the modern, educated class in China, and there was a movement to popularize the use of Mandarin as a national language in the pursuit of national unity. Those involved in this movement included songwriters such as Li Jinhui working in Shanghai. The drive to impose linguistic uniformity in China started in the early 20th century when the Qing Ministry of Education proclaimed Mandarin as the official speech to be taught in modern schools, a policy the new leaders of the Chinese Republic formed in 1912 were also committed to. Sound films in Shanghai which started in the early 1930s were made in Mandarin because of a ban on the use of dialects in films by the then Nanjing government, consequently popular songs from films were also performed in Mandarin.
1920s: Birth of ''Shidaiqu'' in Shanghai
Mandarin popular songs that started in the 1920s were called shidaiqu, and Shanghai was the center of its production. The Mandarin popular songs of the Shanghai era are considered by scholars to be the first kind of modern popular music developed in China, and the prototype of later Chinese pop song. Li Jinhui is generally regarded as the "Father of Chinese Popular Music" who established the genre in the 1920s. Buck Clayton, the American jazz musician, also worked alongside Li. Li established the Bright Moon Song and Dance Troupe, and amongst their singing stars were Wang Renmei and Li Lili. There was a close relationship between music and film industries and many of its singers also became actresses.Around 1927, Li composed the hit song "Drizzle" recorded by his daughter Li Minghui, and this song is often regarded as the first Chinese pop song. The song, with its fusion of jazz and Chinese folk music, exemplifies the early shidaiqu – the tune is in the style of a traditional pentatonic folk melody, but the instrumentation is similar to that of an American jazz orchestra. The song however was sung in a high-pitched childlike style, a style described uncharitably as sounding like "strangling cat" by the writer Lu Xun. This early style would soon be replaced by more sophisticated performances from better-trained singers. In the following decades, various popular Western music genres such as Latin dance music also become incorporated into Chinese popular music, producing a type of music containing both Chinese and Western elements that characterized shidaiqu. Popular songs of the time may range from those that were composed in the traditional Chinese idiom but followed a Western principle of composition to those that were done largely in a Western style, and they may be accompanied by traditional Chinese or Western instrumentation. An example is "The Evening Primrose" by Li Xianglan, a Chinese composition set to a Latin dance beat.
1930s–1940s: The Seven Great Singing Stars era
In 1931, the first sound film was made in China in a cooperation between the Mingxing Film Company and Pathé. The film industry took advantage of the sound era and engaged singers for acting and soundtrack roles, and Li Jinhui's Bright Moonlight Song and Dance Troup became the first modern musical division to be integrated into the Chinese film industry when it joined Lianhua Film Company in 1931. Amongst the best-known of the singer-actress to emerge in the 1930s were Zhou Xuan, Gong Qiuxia, and Bai Hong. Although later singing stars need not also have an acting career, the close relationship between the recording and film industries continued for many decades. Later Yao Lee, Bai Guang, Li Xianglan, Wu Yingyin also became popular, and collectively these seven stars became known as the "Seven Great Singing Stars" of the period. Other notable singers of this period include Li Lihua and Chang Loo. In 1940 Yao Lee recorded "Rose, Rose, I Love You" which later became the first Chinese pop song to be covered by Western singers that was a hit.The "Seven Great Singing Stars" in the Republic of China period secured the place of the shidaiqu genre in East Asian society. Zhou Xuan is generally considered the most notable Chinese pop star of the era for her highly successful singing and film career. This generation saw the rise in popularity of female singers from mere "song girls" to "stars", and for the next few decades, female singers would dominate the Mandarin popular music industry.
In this period, Pathé Records dominated the recording industry. In the late 1930s to early 1940s, it held about 90% market share of the Mandarin pop songs.
The era was a tumultuous period, with the occupation of Shanghai by the Japanese armies during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 and to 1945, followed by continuation of the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists. In response to the turmoil, productions began to shift to Hong Kong, and after the Communist takeover in 1949, many stars moved to Hong Kong which then replaced Shanghai as the center of the entertainment industry in the 1950s.
1950s–1960s: The Hong Kong era
In 1949, the People's Republic of China was established by the Communist party, and in 1952 popular music was denounced by the PRC government as Yellow Music, a form of pornography. In the mainland, the communist regime began to suppress popular music and promote revolutionary marches. China Record Corporation became the only music recording industry body in China, and for many years Minyue and revolutionary music were about the only kinds of music to be recorded there.In 1952, Pathé Records moved its operation from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Stars from Shanghai continued to record songs in Hong Kong, and Shanghai-style music remained popular in Hong Kong until the mid-1960s. Although the music is a continuation of the shidaiqu style of Shanghai, many of its songwriters did not move to Hong Kong, and many of the musicians employed in the Hong Kong music industry were Filipinos, Mandarin pop music in Hong Kong began to move away from its Shanghai roots. Also partly as a consequence of having fewer good songwriters, some songs of this period were adaptation of English-language songs, as well as songs from other regions such as the Indonesian song "Bengawan Solo" and the Latin-American song "Historia de un Amor". As the style evolved, the sound of popular songs from the Hong Kong era therefore became distinct from Shanghai's. Among the recording artists of note to emerge in this period were Tsui Ping, Tsin Ting, Grace Chang, Fong Tsin Ying and, some of whom were also actresses. While some actresses continued to sing in their films, some of the best known songs were dubbed by other singers, for example "Unforgettable Love" in the film of the same name starring Lin Dai was sung by. The song was also recorded with piano and strings orchestration popular at that time.
Shanghai-style Mandarin pop songs however began to decline in popularity around the mid-1960s as Western pop music became popular among the young, and many Hong Kong performers copied Western songs and sang Hong Kong English pop songs. This in turn gave way to pop songs recorded in Cantonese as Cantopop became the dominant genre of music from Hong Kong in the 1970s.
After the Communist victory in China, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. There were local stars in Taiwan and Pathé Records did business there as well, but the island's recording industry was not initially strong. Taiwanese youth were drawn to popular styles from abroad; as Taiwan was ruled by Japan from 1895 to 1945, Taiwanese pop songs in the Hokkien language, the actual mother tongue of most of the island's residents, were particularly strongly influenced by the Japanese enka music. Popular Mandarin songs from Taiwan were similarly influenced, and many popular Mandarin songs of the 1960s were adaptations of Japanese songs, for example "Hard to Forget the Thought" and "Hate you to the Bone". Popular songs were necessarily sung in Mandarin as Taiwan's new rulers, which imposed martial law in Taiwan in 1949, mandated its use as well as restricting the use of Taiwanese Hokkien and forbidding the use of Japanese. The Mandarin pop music developed in Taiwan that would become modern Mandopop is a blend of traditional Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, as well as Western musical styles. was the earliest of the Taiwan-based stars who achieved success outside of Taiwan in the late 1950s with the song "Green Island Serenade", followed by other singers such as and Yao Su-jung in the 1960s. The 1960s however was a highly politically tense era, many songs such as "Not Going Home Today" by Yao Su-jung were banned in Taiwan.
In the 1960s, regional centres of Chinese pop music also started to emerge in overseas Chinese communities in Malaysia and Singapore, and singers from the region such as also achieved wider success.