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