1975-1993: #15, Yang Hsien, “Modern Chinese Folk Songs” (楊弦, 中國現代民歌集) (1975) (Yang Xian)

Yang Hsien, Modern Chinese Folk Songs, 1975

Yang Hsien, Modern Chinese Folk Songs, 1975

ranking: #15 on 1975-1993 list

The first time I heard Modern Chinese Folk Songs (中國現代民歌集) by Yang Hsien (楊弦), I mistakenly started with track four, “Longing for Home – Four Verses” (鄉愁四韻).  I had to turn the CD player off.  What I heard wasn’t the sweet innocence of the campus folk movement which I had grown up listening to on my parents’ cassette player.  What I heard was, by contrast, scary and unsettling — even ugly.  The song didn’t start with pretty guitar chords and a chipper snare, but a piano and then strings, warming up.  For what?  Who knew.  A minute in, the instruments were still quivering about, trembling into something that could be tragic, could be dire.  But certainly not happy-go-lucky, which is what I thought I was getting myself into.

When the vocals finally came on, they didn’t whisk me aside with folksy cheer.  They wailed with a kind of dizzy sedateness, the interplay of male and female voices half-broken after too many drinks, channeling confused energy into regret and grief.  “Give me a sip of that river water, oh that river water. / That alcohol-like river water. / That taste of drunkedness, is the taste of homesickness.”  No, that’s not what I signed up for.

Had I started the CD from the beginning, I would have found that the first three tracks were a bit more like the sing-songy folk I grew up with.  “Folk Singer” (民歌手) is Jack Kerouac tempered by the soothing sounds of John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary.  And “On Rivers and Lakes” (江湖上) has that same 1970s vibe — plus a chorus that even goes, “the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

But no.  I started with track four and that’s when the album starts to get weird.  And dark.  Witness track five, “Rondo” (迴旋曲) which has a certain troubadour spirit.  Not the Dylan kind, but the medieval kind, where jesters and the black plague are just around the corner.  A lute circles the vocals in beautiful, but slightly creepy, long phrases.  “Little Heavenly Questions” (小小天問) has a piano continue that creepy work, alternating between sweet arpeggios and ones with really odd intervals and harmonics.

Track eight is “Homesick” (鄉愁) another in a theme of nostalgia that permeates the album.  Here, the song closes with a direct reference to nostalgia’s political source.  While the song begins with universal grief (“When I was a child, homesickness was little postage stamps, / me on this side, mother on the other.”), but ends with, “Now homesickness is that shallow strait, / me on this side, the mainland on the other.”  Granted, this nostalgia is completely in line with the KMT’s stance on recovering the mainland, but the directness of the delivery, and the dim feelings it evokes, places it far from the usual pop — even the propagandistic kind.

And then comes the final track, “Folk Song” (民歌) which seems to take that last sentiment and then blow it up into a bass drum opera.  And this is when I realized what Yang Hsien was trying to do with the very weird, very ugly Modern Chinese Folk Songs.  He doesn’t make folk “modern” by making it palatable for contemporary ears.  He makes it “modernist” in the aesthetic sense.  He makes it a little disagreeable.  A little distant.  A little forced.  He makes us understand that drinking that river water of a thousand years, on that other side of the Strait, is not as sweet as we may have remembered.  And that bitterness is the real taste of homesickness.

I’m confusing two genres of “folk” here: American folk of the 60s and 70s, and traditional Chinese folk music.  Yang Hsien confuses the two as well.  Or rather, he seeks some common ground, musically.  You feel that too in the poetry of Yu Guang-zhong (余光中), whose verses combine the classical with the contemporary.  (The lyrics of Modern Chinese Folk Songs are all adapted from Yu’s poems.)  The unease I felt is culture and history working itself out, though not without friction.  Some find in that friction a new beauty.  Some find it grotesque.  (One of the jokes when the album first came out  was that it was neither “modern” nor “Chinese” — nor even “folk.”)

So what happened such that I was in such a shock when I plunged myself into the thick of Yang Hsien’s madness?  All I knew before turning on the album was that Yang Hsien was a pioneer — the “father” — of the folk music movement in Taiwan in the 1970s, and that he along with Kimbo and others put on the initial concerts in the mid-70s that mobilized a new wave.  Apparently I knew the wave more than that impassioned spark that set it off.  I knew the genre after it traded its distaste for juvenile sweetness, after it traded “modern folk song” (現代民歌) for “campus folk song” (校園民歌).  I’m still taken aback by how odd Yang Hsien’s debut album often is, but I’m equally struck by how artful it dared to be, and how a burgeoning musical revolution so quickly turned commercial — and even less modern or folk.