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Luhan is Reloading
A few days ago a female anchorman from European and American Music FM gave me a ride, and I had "A Little Bit of Everything" (Penthouse Remix) playing in my car. She asked:
"Mr. Deng, you like this kind of Chill too?"
"Recently I was asked to do my homework for a piece"
"Now foreign musicians are asking for music reviews in Chinese too?"
"It's Luhan's album. It's Luhan's album"
"What?"
Then I cut to the song Squareloud Remix
"O.... .M....."
Then it was on to the Lead solo in the chorus
"woca......"
It's a good thing I've always been guided by the principles of "you can't listen to what you want to listen to" and "you don't judge something until you've listened to it carefully," because otherwise I'd be faced with this kind of embarrassment all the time. And with a little bit of bad intentions (like picking out the non-Chinese parts and playing them to my high net worth friends, "I heard Skrillex featured a new artist"), "Reloaded I&II" is a real slap in the face.
Of course, if you had known about Luhan's new album's production team beforehand, you might have been a little more prepared to avoid making hasty judgments. Luhan's production team for this album includes big-name American producer Djemba Djemba, Canadian musician Matthew Tishler, British singer-songwriter Jamie Scott, as well as up-and-coming domestic electronic musician Squareloud, and musician Zhu Jingshi (Jing) (both of whom are also major lyricists within this album). The team is young but professional, with diverse cultural backgrounds and artistic philosophies. As well, the production costs are not cheap.
But ultimately, the judgment of music comes down to the work. My overall impression of "Reloaded" (which includes the two EPs "Reloaded I&II" and the four singles "To Love," "Super Champion," "Medal," and "Promise") is that it's a pioneering, stylish, and sophisticated album. Though the album's musical form has been kept in mind for public acceptance, many of its subversive aesthetics and expressions have already been revealed -
"A Little Bit of Fun," for example, is a very hip-hop song. The blunt, hard-hitting "I got that good / I got that good good" is the chorus of the song, which uses a sample collage (i.e., copying and pasting a particular piece of singing or playing), which is typical of the "techno mindset". This compositional method of repeating rap samples and superimposing various vocal weaves has a strong anti-melodic and anti-harmonic character: it emphasizes the rhythm, de-emphasizes the textual meaning of the lyrics, and pursues indeterminate connotations, with a sense of anti-conformist rebelliousness. The street-violence that often accompanies American hip-hop is neutralized by Luhan's relatively polished appearance and dancing, as well as the fairly step-by-step title track (they're still standing still and arguing about something) and the Pre-Chorus segment (I'll tell you about), which draws a rather energetic but non-aggressive picture.
The other two Remix versions of "A Little Bit of Fun" (Penthouse Penthouse & Squareloud) and a purely instrumental version (Instrumental Version) are thoroughly electronic - a mix of The two remixes (Penthouse Penthouse & Squareloud) and a purely instrumental version (Instrumental Version) are thoroughly electronic - a mix of trap and dubstep without the EDM grooves of house and trance, which could easily be misinterpreted as "square dancing.
It's necessary to explain the "electronica mindset" here, which is another non-mainstream but fast-developing way of thinking outside of the previously mentioned "keyboard mindset" and "guitar mindset", i.e., no longer using melody and harmony as the main driving force of the music, but rather, through the replication, variation, and superpositioning of a large number of Patterns, letting the music change through inner layers and variations in a regular cycle. The music is then looped through the inner levels of change and conflict to realize the propulsion and explosion of emotions. In this way, music is liberated from tonality (even melody-free music, such as hip-hop and noise music, etc.), and melody and harmony are gradually marginalized, while the importance of timbre and rhythm is gradually brought to the fore.
Electronic music is undoubtedly the most eye-catching label of Luhan's album, but it's by no means the whole of his album, and we can't even summarize or define it with the existing electronic music styles. In fact, for a lot of rapidly evolving fields, most generalizations are just markers, because we have no idea where the boundaries are. What we can do is keep generalizing, analyzing, summarizing, and then giving artists new ideas and perspectives - such as "Under the Sea (Deep)", another track on the album that I really like. It has many of the characteristics of "A Little Bit of Everything" such as collage-like development and simplified lyrical text, but the feature that surprised me even more was this: the amount of information.
The development of a lot of literature can be seen as the development of information content: the post-50s and post-60s like to watch plodding TV dramas (you can't miss the important plot even if you're distracted by cooking and washing the dishes), the 70s and 80s like American TV dramas (which are much more tense and exciting and have a more cerebral plot), and the 90s and 00s have finally come up with the pop-ups, which are so much more informational (and even if there aren't any pop-ups, the young people still like the show "Odd Man Out", which talks like a machine gun). (even without pop-ups, young people still love "Odd Man Out", the kind of program that talks like a machine gun). When I first saw pop-ups, I wondered if I could read so many things. Then I thought about it again. Internet content can be viewed back at any time, so if you can't get through the amount of information, you can watch it a few more times (if you need to), and if there is not enough information, it may be unattractive to users who are accustomed to overloading themselves with reading material. Do we have to get so much information? We may simply enjoy being bombarded with tons of information.
At least in music, the bombardment of information is very cool, and it's one of the key directions for future music trends. For example, the debut EP "My Name is Skrillex" by Skrillex, the world's leading producer of electronic music, is an album with a lot of information: the density of the collage of samples has been greatly increased (his editing of the material has even reached the level of the sound envelope), and the frequency of the weaves and rhythmic sections is much higher than in the usual electronic music. The intrinsic structure of the music is still there (ebb and flow, echo, progression), but the speed of interaction is too dizzying to capture, and the clutter of fragments is too much to think about rationally, so that sensory stimulation is emphasized more purely and completely. (the bilingual rhymes of "bottom" and "deep" are really interesting). The backtracking trap sounds are linked to a whole bunch of tone samples (default ringtones on both iPhones, dead batteries, cell phone signal interference), as well as arpeggios, lead fills, dazzling structures, and Luhan's sometimes soloing, sometimes self-superimposed voice, which is a proper information overload. With my ears (which I rely on for a living), I had to listen to the song dozens of times before I figured out the structure of the song, so it's not really easy for anyone else to make sense of the musical layers.
But it's really quite a pleasure to listen to, perhaps in the same way that young people are so happy with pop-ups.
This is the new aesthetic. It's not necessarily mainstream, but it's really fashionable, and by stripping away the past and taking such a pioneering stance within the new album, the word "rebooting" is really living up to its name.
The other songs on the album, while there are trade-offs (he's still an idol singer, after all, and has to take acceptance into account), have production details and quality that, while not as pioneering as they could have been, are relatively uniform in their aesthetic orientation, and the quality assurance is good. This is not something that can be solved by accepting a few good songs and hiring a few music producers, it requires systematic thinking and balancing, even compromise. Luhan is not yet a 'musician', but this is certainly an album that reflects his musical interests and ideas.
In fact, I should find some flaws and criticize them 'objectively'. There are flaws, such as the lack of melodic form, too many variations in the arrangements that create a sense of showmanship, and some of the songs' music videos that are at odds with the songs themselves (not just "Under the Sea"). But when you think about it, a lot of shortcomings, in the transformation of the aesthetic orientation (that is, the basic principles of artistic acceptance), it is no longer shortcomings: the melody is not good to listen to, but the melody was not the focus of his; arrangement show-off, but he is to let you dazzle all by his dizzy; as for the song is not catchy, they are not prepared to let you sing in the KTV ... ... ...So all these problems may not be a problem in his world. So it seems the only problem ...... is that the spread of his work in the outside world (i.e. the difficulty of circling the pure tone rice) is still relatively limited, I guess.
I've never denied that Luhan as an idol has a large number of fans whose emotions overwhelm their rationality. Even after consciously learning more about it, I feel more and more that this organization (Luhan's fans) contains a huge amount of energy underneath the seemingly self-restraint (100 million comments!). The more I realized that this organization (Luhan fans) has great energy under the seemingly self-contained (100 million comments!). So I'm even more pleased with Luhan's shaping of his fans' aesthetic orientation: a fan who can truly accept non-melodic, informative songs (although TA may have done so in an irrational state) is likely to be more tolerant and open-minded when rationally confronted with other forms of pop music, which are, after all, relatively avant-garde, abstract, and high-class in terms of aesthetics.