Pop Music and Video in Contemporary China

What is it about?

Dismissed in the official Chinese press as “trash, totally lacking in culture”, “Little Apple” by Wang Taili and Xiao Yang (a.k.a., the Chopstick Brothers) appears to have been China’s most-watched music video production in 2014. Wang and Xiao are unlikely pop heroes: earthily urban working class in their aspirations, they’re too old, too unpolished, and musically too retro to readily impersonate the “pretty boys” more commonly seen on China’s many entertainment channels, and their use of cross-dressing raises eyebrows in a nation that remains formally sensitive about the public revelation or celebration of same-sex relationships. Moreover, the song and music video were an unlikely melange of distinct ingredients, and of tragic love scenes and comedic dance. Drawing on K-pop models (like Psy’s “Gangnam Style”), “Little Apple” also dwelt on diverse Western inspirations (the Garden of Eden, Hans Christian Anderson, blonde wigs, Pirates of the Caribbean) and reached out to variegated contemporary and historical Chinese concerns (including performative cross-dressing, cosmetic surgery, brotherly love, the male gaze, and the penchant for gloriously filmed Korean TV dramas). The result was a signal contribution to the emergent Chinese pop genre of shenqu (literally, divine song), a classification for songs that spread virally online through their epic craziness and due to their qualities as an earworm, rather than by means of classic advertising and promotion.

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Photo by Brady Bellini on Unsplash

Photo by Brady Bellini on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The article offers a highly contemporaneous and original case study of the performance and experience of gender and sexuality in Chinese popular culture. The article is alert not only to the analysis of song lyrics and melodies but also to the embodiments of dance, costume, and gesture. Specifically as a new contribution to Chinese music studies, the article applies ideas from diverse disciplinary sources (such as Lauren Berlant’s “juxtapolitical”, Gérard Genette’s “para-text”, or Diana Sargent’s writing on the American bromance as masculinity in crisis) to shed new light on cultural work within China. Counterposing writing on disco from Gay Left magazine with the Venda ethnomusicology of John Blacking and the pointing gestures of disco with Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, the writing adopts a sense of play found within the song and the music video; the result is an affectionate piece of writing that communicates vividly to a potentially very wide set of readers from contrasting disciplinary backgrounds. The article concludes: “Ultimately, [‘Little Apple’] provides an extraordinary dance space for the ordinary person, one that celebrates two men’s claim to an enduring, intimate relationship. For six minutes or so, as viewers of ‘Little Apple’, we inhabit a world defined by profound and loving male collaboration.”

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