英语现代中国流行歌曲歌词评论.docxVIP

Dingyu Wang(515370910026)Vy100Professor Thorpe12.13.2015Enjoy the Confusing Music: the Vague Chinese in Pop SongsLast Friday I went to a café and heard a melodic song. It was a 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 provided for 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 its affection, 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 expresses the difference between the previous dream and the reality, while the latter one talks about the kinship (Chopsticks Brother; MIZUNO YOSHIKI). Different lyrics construct different contexts, even with the same melody and accompaniment. Therefore, audience should get the lyrics accurately to understand the exact context. However, audiences in China have great difficulty in understanding the lyrics of Chinese pop songs due to the following three factors, and as 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 and Jiao Ye name this phenomenon “the language defamiliarization of the lyrics of pop songs” (72). They find that Chinese songwriters often adopt the tricks “dislocated meanings” and “deviant collocations” in order to have special aesthetic effect (72). “Di