It's been a long time since we've heard from Zhao Lei. The last time he made a move was on December 18, 2019 when his latest single "Little Man" was launched on music platforms. However, the song did not cause much reaction, such a scene compared with his 2017 with the "Chengdu" fire throughout the country lively scene, can be said to be "ice and fire". Is Zhao Lei really not hot anymore? Why did Zhao Lei slowly "disappear" after he became famous with "Chengdu"?
To solve this mystery, we have to start from the beginning of the story.
Zhao Lei was born in 1986 in Beijing to an ordinary family, with his father running a small business to support the family. Originally, he went to school and played normally like all children. But he watched a movie called "Beautiful New World," in which a wandering singer sang in an underground passageway with a guitar on his back, and the young Zhao Lei thought it was too cool to live like that.
When he got his own guitar in high school, his favorite thing to do was to run to the underpass and sing. Zhao Lei didn't care about the stares of passers-by, he just wanted to sing.
To sing, Zhao Lei even gave up going to college. He loved the freedom of singing the songs he wrote in the underpass. As a young man, he didn't think about how much money he was going to make, and when he had a little money he went to eat skewers.
After singing for a while, Zhao Lei had a better stage to sing on, and he went into a bar in Houhai. At first, Zhao Lei sang happily, singing 40 to 50 songs a night without feeling tired, but also earn 80 yuan. But slowly Zhao Lei began to hate this life, and the main reason is that the bar owner does not allow him to sing his own songs, the bar owner said to him: "Sing your own songs not many people listen to, you honestly sing Zheng Jun, Xu Wei, Wu Bai's!"
Zhao Lei wasn't the kind of guy who would just "eat the leftovers," he wanted to sing his own songs. One day, after singing in a bar, he told the audience, "You don't have a mind, you don't understand music."
It wasn't long before he left the bar and borrowed $700 from a friend to start wandering the world.
The life of a wanderer is hard. When he doesn't have a fare, he measures the land with his feet, and when he can't walk anymore, he stops cars. If no one was willing to drive him, he stayed on the spot. Along the way he sang in the rain and wrote poems in the snow. He used his pen to write the true feelings of his heart, composing everything into his songs.
But unfortunately he did not meet anyone who understood him. When he came to Lhasa, he met Big Ice, the owner of the Floating Bar, and he didn't have any money on him, so he said to Big Ice, "Can I stay with you for two months as a resident singer, do you think it's okay?" Immediately after that he said, "No one likes my songs, Lhasa is my last stop, after two months here I'll smash the piano and go back to Beijing to be a soldier."
Da Bing found the man quite interesting and asked him to sing a song. Zhao Lei sang his original song "Painting". Big Ice was very shocked after hearing it, and he said to Zhao Lei: "Don't go away, you stay here, now this bar has half of you, you're the boss of this bar now, so you must continue to sing, don't give up on music."
Zhao Lei indeed did not give up on music, and he continued to sing in Lhasa, but only songs he had written. He also had a hard time in Lhasa, often eating instant noodles, dipping potatoes in salt every day when he ran out of money, and sunbathing in the yard with his bare buttocks.
But the days of such wanderlust could not last forever, and he returned to Beijing, where he had a chance to take part in that year's "Happy Boys," and at that time, in front of the camera, he said to all the viewers, "Some people can sing, and some people have to sing, and I'm the one who has to sing. I'm Zhao Lei, and I'm going to start a new wave of original Chinese music." Unfortunately, he didn't become the winner and stopped at the top 12. But as for the music, he confessed in an interview with the show, "My music has become one with me, and every word I say is true, it's all my real experience."
While he didn't do very well on "Happy Boys," Zhao Lei still didn't give up singing. He asked friends to borrow 600,000 yuan to put out his first album, "Zhao Xiaolei," but the album didn't sell well, and he was more than 100,000 yuan in debt. Shortly afterward, his mother, who loved him dearly, fell ill and died, leaving him more than 400,000 in debt.
Even though life has been tough, Zhao Lei is still hanging on by his teeth. He also started a 30-day "Ten Wheels Motorcycle Tour" with Haozi, Xiao Mang, Guanqi, Xudong, and several other musicians, traveling through 20 cities, and even had a couple of accidents that Zhao Lei almost "sacrificed," but Zhao Lei didn't regret it, and he just wanted to sing, sing what he thought. The tour was a great success," he said.
After the end of the tour, he participated in the "Chinese good songs", a song "painting" end. Liu Huan strongly praised, "This is the most beautiful lyrics I've seen so far." Zhou Huajian even asked him, "No girl, no food for all seasons, only that pen, is your real life really that worthless?" Zhao Lei answered sincerely, "From the time I chose to make music, I never thought I wanted to be rich, I just wanted to be happy every day and make the music I love."
With his performance in "China's Greatest Hits," Zhao Lei got a bit of fame. So a lot of record companies wanted to sign him. Faced with such good opportunities, he turned them all down, saying bluntly, "I don't like bad publicity, I'd rather not publicize than make my own stuff bad."
He continued to write and sing songs, and on January 21, 2017, Zhao Lei released his digital album "Can't Grow Up", and as for why he named it "Can't Grow Up", Zhao Lei said bluntly, "I'm just a child trapped inside an adult. I hope I can never forget my beginnings, and always live like I did before, keeping my honesty and simplicity as a child. Creating is the same for me, I hope I can express myself through my works as I wish." And at the time, Zhao Lei could never have imagined that a song he created called "Chengdu" would soon set the country on fire and catapult him into fame and fortune.
In February 2017 he was invited by Hunan TV's music competition program "Singer" to sing a song called "Chengdu" as a fill-in singer, and overnight the song "Chengdu" caught fire all over the country, and so did Zhao Lei.
After he became famous, Zhao Lei's life changed dramatically, his cell phone was bombarded all day long, and no matter who he knew or didn't know, they all came to look for him to take pictures and sign autographs. So some media asked him if he would consider a different lifestyle. Zhao Lei replied: "I'm a person with such a character, I don't care about money, I can buy a very good car, I can also use very good equipment, but I think that's meaningless. For example, if we drive to a small hotel, we can only afford a few hundred dollars to live in a place like that, then we can live there, and I think it feels like chivalry, especially good! What would be the point of serving us well and making us suffer at all?
But he's been held hostage by capital, and he's had to perform many commercial shows every month, and the bosses have asked him, "You can have as much money as you want, just sing 'Chengdu'." This is not the life that Zhao Lei wants to live, he doesn't want to just sing "Chengdu", he even said that he puked when he sang "Chengdu", he is a musician, he doesn't want to eat his old capital, he wants to keep creating new songs. However, his busy schedule of commercial performances left him no time to create any more, and he felt that his world was out of balance. He decided to change.
At the last show of a 2017 tour, he told a live audience, "Every time I bite the bullet and sing along, this time I really can't do it." He said, "This is a pattern that I don't think I'm going to repeat, and this is the last time." At the end of the show, after expressing his gratitude to the organizers, he added, "I especially want to say Fuck to them, if you keep doing it like this, I think you should, a lot of singers, just do away with it!" That day he sang a song "Legend of the City of Night", which is his mother's favorite song, one of the lyrics for: do not ask how many gains and losses, people in the high place will not win the chill ......
After this, Zhao Lei took the initiative to hide, he seldom accept media interviews, and seldom participate in performances, he needs to return to a simple life, he only He wanted to write songs and sing well, he was willing to abandon all the fame and fortune, he slowly "disappeared". When his new single "Little Man" was released on December 18, 2019, he wrote in the lyrics: I've found my place, and that takes a lot of time to exchange. Though I'm still hazy at times, may the years keep me naive.
Zhao Lei said, "If there has to be a label, I hope it's 'ordinary person', because in my own opinion, I'm just a singer, very ordinary."