Recently I’ve tried to find some nice c-pop. So far rather unsuccessfully, everything I have found is incredibly boring/bland. It nearly always starts with a light piano intro and does not get any more exciting than that, there is little variation and if I skip through the song it often feels like I didn’t skip a thing.
That’s also why I started to search for a reason for this and found the linked quora question.
But perhaps someone here has found something recommendable within this wasteland, I’d be happy to hear about it.
Apart from the fact that I believe that most pop music is terrible and made from samples and lyrics written in 5 minutes on a napkin (although not always, there are laudable and quality exceptions), I don’t think it is so easy to value the music of a country with a history, culture, customs and values. completely different from the western one, as are also the tastes and preferences of the people. They even have a very different form of annotation than ours, adding that in Chinese in the lyrics of a song it must be taken into account that a word changes its meaning, depending on its intonation, which leads to word games (This is why Chinese music sounds to us many times like someone strangling a cat, but it is perhaps the only way to convey the meaning of a letter that depends on the intonation), incomprehensible to Western audiences, as often happens in untranslatable word games in other languages. You can never value music if you don’t know how to differentiate between quality and personal tastes.
That is certainly true, what makes it interesting, and the reason why I started looking into chinese pop music. It’s just that I found it notably less refined to say k-pop or j-pop and was wondering how that came to be. And at least the chinese people from the quora thread concede that c-pop is in terrible shape.
While those certainly can make a song more interesting I’d wager they play a minor role and can’t make up for a lack of an interesting melody. And said lack of interesting melodies or rather the extreme similarity of the songs I listened to is my main observation and leaves me somewhat disappointed.
Well, wordgames are not so often in pop music, but in tradiyional music. In general it can be said that linguistic, cultural and traditional particularities tend to have a lot of influence on the current music of each country and do not always correspond to a general taste in other countries. For this reason it is not so easy to assess it. Even in the contemporary music of your own country itself there are opinions of the most disparate of what is good or terrible. What we like or not, many times only depends on the moment and the mood of each one, Cannibal Corps does not hit a romantic dinner with the couple, nor does it hit smooth jazz at a party.