When Wang Qi started to sing "Shepherd of the Cocoto Sea" at the Spring Festival Gala, a strange scene appeared in front of the TV:
Many young people have said: "Who is this person? Even Andy Lau and Jackie Chan and other superstars have to sing with others platters, how can he sing solo in the Spring Festival Gala 3 minutes 49 seconds?
While the parents' generation excitedly started to sing along, they also popularized the song as a poignant love story about a shepherd and a beekeeper.
Some parents even took the opportunity to start amping up the song, saying that he's a very hot singer who composes and sings his own lyrics, and that "Standing and Waiting for You for Three Thousand Years" and "Ten Thousand Loves and a Thousand Graces" are all superb ......
Yes, Wang Qi has been hot for a long time now -... -Online.
But many young people, who fancy themselves as Internet surfers getting their hands dirty, only heard of him for the first time after the Spring Festival Gala.
Who is he? And how did he explode in the country with his songs?
Behind the beautiful and sad songs, what kind of heartbreaking journey?
In 1986, Wang Qi was born in a small mountain village in Xiuyan, Anshan City, Liaoning Province, where his parents were farmers and he had an older sister.
The village is very small, with less than 100 families. The village is also very poor, and everyone lives off the land. Wang Qi started helping his parents plant corn when he was seven or eight years old - specifically, helping to sow corn seeds.
This is the kind of place that's so simple, so simple that it doesn't seem to fit in with words like "music and dreams".
There's not even a place for music training in the village, not even in the town.
The only thing related to music in his life is probably his father, who used to be in charge of singing the Northeast Drum Book before production team meetings.
When Wang Qi graduated from junior high school, his family wanted him to learn to be a chef or a hairdresser - he had to learn a trade to support himself.
But Wang Qi wanted to go to art school.
This was a poor decision - he didn't really have a concept of music at the time.
Even more implausible is that his mom and dad actually said yes.
- We have to support our son's dream no matter what.
The art school was expensive, the family was poor, and finally the tuition was paid by his third aunt's husband, who is a rich electrician in the village.
However, the regular art school is still not affordable.
Finally, Wang Qi went to a "nothing" of the private training school, no academic certificate, no professional, the teacher voice, body, dance, everything to teach.
Many of his classmates scoffed at the school, but Wang Qi is grateful that he finally got out of the mountain village where he grew up, and finally began to work hard to realize his dream.
In 2004, after graduating from school, Wang Qi took a few hundred dollars in his pocket and confidently began to break into Beijing.
His senior introduced him to singing in a bar and told him that he could make a lot of money running the show!
As a result, the first time he sang, Wang Qi sang badly. He did not know how to sing, but he had never been with a band before, and looked at the expressionless faces of the band's big brothers, and he immediately panicked.
The hundreds of dollars he brought with him were spent in a few days, but he was introduced to a dance team - This is when the small, broken art school that teaches everything - everything - finally came to the forefront.
This is the first time I've ever seen a girl with a high school diploma, and I've never seen one before.
But it's not a long-term solution, after all.
A few months later, Wang Qi went back to singing, and this time he was able to keep up with the band - he'd gotten to know them well enough to realize that they weren't so scary after all.
He finally started to make money, making over two hundred dollars a day from three shows a day.
Wang Qi proudly called home: "This is more money than being a chef!"
In 2005, Wang Qi wrote his first song.
After writing it, he took a train to a recording studio in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, and after some haggling, he spent a huge sum of 1200 dollars to have it programmed, backed by a backing track, and recorded the CD, and went back to Beijing, feeling that he was going to be on fire.
After returning to the bar, he began to sing his own songs, hoping that the audience would find a superstar in the concert hall.
After only one day of singing, the owner stopped him and said politely, "You're fine singing your original songs.
Wang Qi was devastated - not only in his mind, but also in his wallet.
What he didn't know at the time was that the next decade or so would be full of blows to his music.
After more than two years in Beijing, Wang Qi finally decided to pat himself on the back, and then went around the country, covering every province.
It sounds overly romantic, but he wasn't just some wandering singer chasing his dream, as everyone thought.
He traveled all over the world just to sing for money - the price of going from Beijing to somewhere else was just a little bit higher.
In 2009, he arrived in Urumqi, Xinjiang. And then decided not to go.
This one to live, is 10 years.
It was at that time that he decided not to perform.
He couldn't imagine himself in his 30s or 40s as a resident singer in a bar - singing hard to a crowd of drunken people who were listening, or not listening at all.
He decided to get down to business, found a cultural media company, and started working as a laborer.
At that time, he planning, tuner, lighting engineer ...... anything to do.
A month's salary, 3500.
This money, can only be said to barely make ends meet.
He can only go to the weekend to do wedding officiating, a do do a few years.
Well, in those years when he had nothing, nothing at all, and all of his polished dreams were gone, he met his wife in Shanxi, a beautiful Xi'an girl who was a national second-class erhu player.
The two got married in Xinjiang, had a lively and lovely daughter, and lived a dull and happy life.
He still writes songs, but sells most of them to other people - he needs to support his family, and he and his wife's income is just enough to support their food, clothing and mortgage payments.
He always sells cheaply, and sometimes he doesn't sell at all.
In 2017, he was asked by a northeastern singer to write a song, and he offered 2,000 - including (what was worth 1,200 back in 2005) the arrangement and backing vocals.
Yes, he's since taught himself arrangements and backing vocals.
He wrote with care. I think of what my father once said indignantly: "Look at you young people making music, you've lost what little folklore there is in the Northeast."
The song he wrote took on the color of a Northeastern ditty.
Yet the singer's only comment on the song was, "Brother, you're not a song."
After no further comment, he sang the song himself, passed it online, and then went back to work, paying off his mortgage and earning milk money.
The song, which was later sung by countless duo actors, was "Loverboy".
Six months later, that is, the New Year of 2018, he received countless calls and text messages from old classmates and old friends who had not been in touch for 800 years, telling him: I heard your song on the street!
He finally caught fire.
Countless agents in Beijing called and messaged him, and he finally got a commercial gig.
He knew he was finally famous.
It took him more than 13 years to graduate from art school in 2004 and finally catch fire.
And in those 13 years, no one ever said that his songs were good.
That was also the first time he really understood the power of the internet, and he started broadcasting live, and the swarm of comments under the live stream were all:
There's enough for this one song.
He knew it wasn't enough.
This red, it's too fragile.
In the age of the internet, where information changes rapidly, every fifteen minutes, there could be someone famous, but hot. Once the heat has passed, it will be annihilated in the sea of information, and just as quickly forgotten by all.
Soon, another singer approached him to write a song, and he wrote "Standing Waiting for You for 3000 Years".
Soon after, another singer approached him to write a song, and he wrote "Standing Waiting for You for 3000 Years". This time, he combined snowy mountains, grasslands, felt houses, poplars, and other imagery, and the whole song has a strong ethnic minority flavor in Xinjiang.
The other side still didn't see it, so he had to sing it himself.
The song, again, was a hit.
Next, The Love of a Thousand Graces, a song about parental love that he started writing when he was a son, revised countless times, and continued to revise after he became a father, was also a hit.
Almost at that time, the homesick Wang Qi decided to return to Liaoning with his wife and daughter, but Xinjiang, where he had been living for 10 years, had become his second hometown, with too many emotions that he couldn't let go.
He recalled that he had just come to Xinjiang to do the planning of those years, a company took a Cocoanuthai open-air camp planning, the designer brought back a lot of very beautiful photos.
When he looked at those photos again, he was inspired to write a song about love in Xinjiang to express his attachment to this beautiful place.
This is, The Shepherd of the Cocoanuts Sea.
At this point, he has become a pop music production machine, his music, either as background sound in the jitterbug countless times, or by the netroots cover, or become a square dance God song ......
The only awkward thing is that.
The only thing that's awkward is that he's been revered.
It feels like yxh is all over the microblogging world, and this data is just sad.
Luckily, "Shepherd of the Cocoanut Sea" is also red.
- and this time, not just any red, but a veritable explosion of red.
Some bloggers have tallied its airplay.
Over a terrifying 3.3 billion.
Interestingly, it's also popular on Jitterbug, live streaming, and square dancing, and many young people who hang out on B-station, Weibo, and Zhihu have never heard of it.
This is a time of rapid development and fragmentation. A family seems to be living in the same time and space, facing the same screen, but they are actually living in different worlds.
It's the faggotry of the ordinary life, the starry nights of the laborers, or the disorienting coolness of the new generation.
The big algorithmic push allows people to see only what they want to see, what interests them, and then further solidify their perceptions based on that information, and then, ignorant of the world beyond. Isolated from the real world.
This is what we call the "information cocoon".
Just like the workers do not know the same neighborhood square dance recorder, in the Coco Tohai, there is a shepherd fell in love with a beekeeper girl, and their parents in their love story sad.
Until Wang Qi took it to the Spring Festival stage.
The nation's attention.
Just such an ordinary and simple little man, who was born in the countryside, lived in the city, traveled to all the provinces of the country, knew many friends of different nationalities, engaged in the arts, worked as a laborer, was a son and a father.
He used his own efforts for more than a decade, telling his truest feelings, relying on the power of the Internet's communication, from the ordinary grassroots, step by step to the front of the Spring Festival Gala.
Then, in one night, with his simple voice, strung a lot of ordinary people, *** through emotions.
It is also this song that allows the family to sit quietly in front of the TV screen and listen to a simple and beautiful melody; so that the children suddenly realize that their parents, but also have a rich and colorful spiritual life.
At a certain moment, the information gap that is usually cut by countless small screens can be bridged; and the family members who always complain about not being able to understand each other can **** love.
Moreover, many people - rich or poor, young or old, regardless of ethnicity - in a certain Spring Festival, have a warm, **** the same memories.
- this, too, is the significance of the Spring Festival Gala.
~END~