01
There are many masters of writing lyrics in the Chinese music industry, but Lee is a particularly strange alternative – he has little education.
His highest degree is from the private Mingxin Industrial College in Hsinchu, which he failed to graduate from. And his major is not even remotely related to music, electrical machinery.
I don’t know much about Taiwan’s specialized education, according to our mainland curriculum, students studying electrical engineering, already do not need to learn the language (Taiwan called “Mandarin”, right?) The first time I saw the film, I was able to see it. In other words, Lee’s formal education in literature and writing only lasted until he graduated from high school, if he paid attention to the lectures.
And yet, Lee is such a great lyricist, he can hit us with such plain language, he can leave us speechless with such simple words.
I’m curious to know who taught Lee’s language.
What a master it must be to use the limited years of classroom time to train him to become such a “mountainous” figure.
02
Unfortunately, from his public biography and his own interviews, Li Zongsheng has not experienced specialized literary studies, at least neither as a graduate student in a Chinese department of a university, nor as a personal disciple of a literary master.
In addition to his language teachers in primary and secondary schools, I’m afraid that the greatest influence on him is life.
Is life our teacher? I don’t think so.
At least I have never met any teacher in my life like life, regardless of the good and bad one throws you over.
He Yong, one of the three magical rocks, is often unreliable, but he has a particularly good lyric: “The world we live in is like a garbage dump”.
Yes, what we encounter in life are things that people have used. The laziest and dumbest people will pick up some ready-made junk at the top; the diligent people will go through some newer things at the bottom; the smart ones will pick what they want and combine it to become their own.
Obviously, Li Zongsheng is the smartest type of people.
03
I originally thought that even if we couldn’t be smart people, we could at least be hardworking people. However, in reality, we are the laziest and dumbest type of people.
In the thousands of years since the creation of Chinese characters, we are probably facing the most embarrassing times.
Our newspapers use the most uninteresting, boring, rigid and dogmatic characters because no mistakes are made.
We use the most vulgar, shallow, straightforward, and crude text on the Internet because it doesn’t take any brainpower.
Do these two kinds of words need to be? It is needed, all words are expressions of emotion and transmission of information. But what about the part in between? Where are those subtle, beautiful words?
I no longer want to cite too many words of ancient sages, as if they are too far away from us, but I still want to talk about Li Zongsheng.
His educational experience is similar to most of us, and he has read far less than his friends who are as slick as comedians in memorizing names, but he would use what he picked out from the trash heap that is life, and combine it into words that would amaze us all and take our breath away.
His lyrics, few gorgeous rhetoric, and no heartbreaking rage, but just let you admire speechless.
04
If you are willing to compare, you will know how ugly the words we use now are.
The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you are doing.
The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you’re getting into.
Li Zongsheng said, “It’s late at night, what other people are there for you to wake up and count your wounds like this”, and we would only say, “Blue thin mushrooms”.
Li Zongsheng said “we are all people who are racing against time, trying hard for a better tomorrow”, but we would only say “losers want to make a comeback”.
In fact, I don’t need to go on, the garbage words we use nowadays can almost all find their counterparts in Li’s lyrics.
We are all people who go through things in the garbage dump, why are the ones we turn out so ugly and the ones he turns out so beautiful?
05
In fact, it’s not our stupidity, it’s really due to our laziness.
In many cases, we are not losing the ability to think independently, nor are we losing the ability to create beautiful language, we are just lazy, we pick up a piece of garbage in the garbage dump of life and circulate it.
You know what? The top things in the garbage dump are always the dirtiest and most broken and disliked things.
We picked it up, but also like a treasure, everywhere in the wind to lift up to show people, neither afraid of stinking themselves, nor afraid of stinking others, but also inevitably to pass on to our descendants.
The written word is also a culture that has been fused, created and eliminated over the years, and cannot be reversed.
But I was afraid that a hundred years from now, when our descendants study the writing of our era, they would give that very disparaging snort and say, “Look at them, what kind of writing did they use?”
But fortunately, we will all be dead by then, neither ashamed nor blushing, and to use one of the safest words now in vogue – emotionally stable.
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