The popularity of ballads is closely related to consumerism and the middle class. Today's popular ballads conform to the habits and aesthetic tastes of the urban middle class, with relatively simple melodies, refined styles, and themes of love, nostalgia, poetry, and faraway places that meet the individual freedom and self-expression that the middle class advocates.
The popularity of ballads is based on the era of high modernity and individuality, while history and eternity and all other grand narratives are rejected. In modern industrial society, the high degree of technological progress has liberated manpower from material deprivation and created a large "leisure class", which has enough energy and time for aesthetics, remembrance and sentimentality.
Today's highly explosive information has caused information fatigue and aesthetic fatigue, and people have turned to a simple, natural, and transcendent way of life instead of the really heavy and depressing depths of reality. They want to enjoy the convenience of modern technology while excluding the alienation of people by technical rationality. Most people of today's era are only concerned with the feelings of their individual selves, rejecting the grand narratives of religion, politics, and history, which are timeless and serious in nature, and emphasizing the current, isolated, and tiny feelings of the individual and his or her delicate emotions.
They are more interested in free private life experience and individual self-expression, not concerned with group things, away from public **** affairs, politics, society, religion, ghosts and gods, and even nature, and their concern is often not the real nature, but the "nature" composed of selected elements and symbols from nature, and the artificial bonsai. They are often concerned not with real nature, but with "natural" artificial bonsai made up of selected elements and symbols from nature, and the "faraway place" they are concerned about is not the real life of the people who are in the faraway place. Zhao Lei's "Chengdu" is not the Chengdu that locals take for granted, but only the imaginary space he depicts.
The middle-class small capitalists in the middle of society generally lack a refined cultural background and the capital to pursue noble aesthetic arts and culture. They either sacralize the marginal and commonplace arts, inject elegant forms into the low-grade arts and culture, make them "refined" and "legalized", and elevate their status.
To popularize serious art, the middle-class petit bourgeoisie is utilized to popularize the practice of elegant culture, sifting, reorganizing or reproducing the aesthetic symbols contained therein, thus pulling elegant culture down to the world of its own class. The relatively simple and easy-to-understand ballads fit the sophisticated aesthetic needs of the middle class.