Abstract
This article explores the creative consumption of popular music and explains how audiences involve their place-based emotions within their representations of popular music in an everyday setting, drawing on a qualitative study on people’s interpretations of Phoenix Legend (a popular music duo in mainland China) and its music. We collected the texts created by Phoenix Legend’s audiences from Douban Music (http://music.douban.com/), a Chinese online music forum. Our analysis focuses on how fans, non-fans and anti-fans interpret and re-write the meanings of Phoenix Legend and its songs emotionally and how these interpretations shape and are shaped by these audiences’ senses of self and place. The key finding of this article argues that through the consumer-to-consumer network provided by social media (Douban Music), the rural–urban division, ethnic cultures and the role of Chinese nationalism in the global marketplace are generated by audiences’ creative writings and their interactions with other consumers. Moreover, we suggest that anti-fans’ and non-fans’ emotional engagement within music consumption and their interactions should be paid more attentions to.
Introduction
Phoenix Legend (Fenghuang Chuanqi in Chinese) is a Chinese popular music duo established in 1998. It consists of a female vocalist Yangwei Linghua and a male rapper Zeng Yi. In 2005, Phoenix Legend won the second place of the Star Boulevard (Xingguang Dadao in Chinese) – a national popular music competition organised by China’s Central Television. Since then, this music duo has become one of the most popular music groups in mainland China. According to an article from China Daily, 1 Phoenix Legend is commercially successful which attracts enormous fans from both rural and urban areas and from all ages in China. Since 2005, Phoenix Legend sold more than 6 million albums in mainland China. Among these albums, Good Luck and Happiness (Jixiang Ruyi in Chinese) was the second-best-selling album in 2008, and The Hottest Ethnic Trend (Zui Xuan Minzufeng in Chinese) was the bestseller in 2009. 2
The popularity of Phoenix Legend becomes a frequently discussed topic among the academia and mass media in recent years. Some scholars have described Phoenix Legend and its music as a ‘Phoenix Legend culture’: a popular music style/genre that mixes Chinese ethnic melodies and tunes, rap, hip-pop and dance music and a popular way of entertainment, which connects music and ordinary people in mainland China.
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Some Chinese media even call Phoenix Legend ‘people’s artist’ because its songs are accepted by nearly every person in mainland China. As Zhang
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noted in Southern People Weekly, the Phoenix Legend culture has ‘intruded’ into everyone’s daily life in contemporary China: Phoenix Legend’s songs are not only circulated by the cell phones of security staffs
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and the audio equipment from the square,
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but also accepted by urban youths. I searched for online videos with the keyword ‘class breaks + Phoenix Legend’. 448 items were found. After watching these videos, I find that listening to Phoenix Legend sounds have become a way of relax for teachers and students. (Translated from Chinese into English by the authors)
That is, both scholars and journalists have made a strong connection between the representation of Phoenix Legend’s music and everyday experiences in contemporary China. One major lacuna of these analyses is that they seldom talk about the real audiences’ music consumption and their understandings of Phoenix Legend and its music, which is the main focal point of this research.
This article seeks to map Phoenix Legend’s music in contemporary China through an audience study. During the past two decades, Chinese popular music audiences are transformed from a rebellious generation to an individualised one who prefer to express their own ideas. 7 Nowadays, Chinese audiences have gained more opportunities to express themselves through social media. The primary purpose of this research is to explore the creative interpretation of popular music in an everyday setting. It argues for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between audiences’ representations of everyday, rural–urban, regional, national and global geographies and their emotional involvement with popular music. The key objective of this article is to provide a counterpoint to the studies on popular music and consumption, which is predominated by the Anglophone discourse, through an empirical research in China’s context. It contributes to wider literature through proposing an agenda of geographies of popular culture concerned with audiences through their social and emotional networks from a Chinese perspective.
We consider Douban Music (http://music.douban.com/), a Chinese online music forum, as a pathway into scrutinising how different types of audiences understand and re-write Phoenix Legend culture. This allows us to explore how the interaction between audiences and popular music takes place, how these ordinary audiences produce geographical knowledge through writing comments and reviews and how they connect their representations with musical text, their lived experiences and para-texts – semi-textural and independent fragments that surround and position the texts (such as covers, prefaces, reviews and typefaces). 8 In this research, para-texts refer to the texts related to Phoenix Legend and its music created by music reviewers, audiences and the mass media.
Geographies of music and audience studies
Music has ‘the power to evoke a sense of space’ and has ‘a social and political significance which . . . might influence, change or enrich the interpretation of particular scenes’ 9 and can help ‘inform geographical interpretations of cultural landscapes’. 10 Audiences are ‘active agents, or poachers, that appropriate media texts to make sense of everyday life’. 11 According to Matt Hills, audience culture is a ‘performative consumption’ which refers to the embodiment of ‘the processes of stardom and textuality, self-reflexively presenting the body-as-commodity’. 12
Scholars have identified the important roles of audiences in producing and reproducing place identities of music. Music has the social force to assert or subvert local, national and global identities. 13 In their fan study, De Kloet and Van Zoonen 14 use the ‘local dimension’ to explain the way in which audiences express and construct locality. From their point of view, although popular music can be read as a homogeneous cultural icon, it is able to produce distinct fan cultures in different cultural contexts. Additionally, local popular music and stars are appropriated by local fans to produce a sense of locality and local identity. Empirically, Chow and De Kloet 15 demonstrate this local dimension through a comparative study on pop fans in the Netherlands and Hong Kong. Their results show that Dutch fans see their idol as ordinary human being, while Hong Kong fans characterise their idol as an extraordinary worker on the basis of the different dominant discourses in these two places. In De Kloet’s 16 research on popular music and youth cultures in urban China, he indicates that Chinese rock/pop fans use music to retain, produce and negotiate place-based identities. For example, Chinese audiences use Beijing rocks to negotiate their senses of mainland China and Beijing, use Gangtai pop (pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan) to produce their cosmopolitan imagination and use the Chineseness in Chinese rock to produce their national identity in the globalising world.
Apart from generating geographical knowledge through reading the musical texts, audiences can make a connection between music and their understandings of place through their emotional encounters with musicians/music performers. 17 For instance, Wood and her fellows 18 apply the term musicking – ‘taking part in any capacity in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or by practising, by providing material for performance, or by dancing’ 19 – to explain the interrelationship between place, people and musical performances. From their points of view, the musical performance helps to shape and form the audiences’ place-based identities, and in turn, performance times and spaces are shaped and created by artists, audiences and their interactive practices emotionally.
That is, audiences play important roles in (re)producing geographical knowledges, 20 meanings of places, 21 identities 22 and social relations 23 through their practices of reading/listening to, visiting the mediated places and people, discussing their understandings with other people and creating new popular cultures (such as developing new storylines of films/books). Thus, music consumers are active audiences who experience music in distinctive and localised ways 24 and who interpret media messages in different ways.
However, these existing works always equal audiences to fans 25 and often overlook the roles of non-fans and anti-fans in geographical interpretation of popular cultures – which is one of the main foci of this study. As Gray 26 indicates in his research on audience and textualities, social scholars need to pay more attention to non-fans’ and anti-fans’ engagements within media and their relationships with media texts because their dislike/hate or no feelings towards certain media text provide scholars new ways to understand how audience consume media and popular cultures creatively. Drawing on interviews with non-fans and anti-fans of The Simpsons, Gray indicates that the media text is read differently in different ways when it meets different audiences and different viewing environments. For the non-fans who do watch The Simpsons but with little involvement, they often have no agreements on whatsoever the text means, but might use such media text to construct their own flows of identity. While for anti-fans who dislike The Simpsons, the para-text and its para-textuality play important roles in building up their anti-fandoms. Based on Gray’s suggestion of paying more attentions to non-fan’s and/or anti-fan’s involvement within popular culture and their relationship with media texts and para-texts, this research attempts to map the way in which fans, non-fans and anti-fans interpret Phoenix Legend and its music.
In addition, there is a lack of audience studies that take the effects of social media on audiencing into account. Cyberspace provides audience-feedback mechanisms that help its users to share their ideas and subsequently re-bound various publics. 27 Specifically, social media provides ‘the way people share ideas, contents, thoughts, and relationships’ and the space within which ‘anyone can create, comment on, and add to social media content’ online. 28 In this way, social media consumers are active agencies that highly engage in interactions with the media products they and other consumers choose. Therefore, the social activities and interactions in social media create a consumer-to-consumer networks which refer to an exchange of know-how or a co-production of experiences. 29 The following analysis not only explores how audiences represent Phoenix Legend’s music textually via Douban Music but also seeks to explain and understand how these active audiences create these texts in their own manners, how they produce the imaginative geography of popular music anew through the texts they create and how para-texts (in particular other audiences’ writings) are influencing people’s geographical interpretation of music.
Researching Phoenix Legend’s audiences on Douban Music
We have paid attention to Douban users’ creative consumption of Phoenix Legend’s eight albums: 30 Above the Moon (Yueliang Zhi Shang in Chinese, released in 2005), Good Luck and Happiness (2007), The Hottest Ethnic Trend (2009), I Come From the Grassland (Wo Cong Caoyuan Lai in Chinese, released in 2010), Singing Loudly (Dasheng Chang in Chinese, released in 2011), The Best Era (Zuihao de Shidai in Chinese, released in 2014), The Symphony Concert of Phoenix Legend’s Music (Fenghuang Chuanqi Yinyue Zuopin Jiaoxiang Yanzouhui in Chinese, released in 2014) and The Hottest Little Apple (Zuixuan Xiao Pingguo in Chinese, released in 2015).
Douban.com is one of the most popular Chinese social network service (SNS) websites. According to Douban.com’s business report, more than 80 per cent of Douban users are from urban areas within mainland China. These registered users are young people aged between 18 and 35 years who have higher education or equivalent degree. Douban Music is a music forum on Douban.com which provides ordinary audiences an online community to discuss music and musicians. For each released music album, Douban Music creates a homepage to introduce the basic information of the album (including the artists, music genre, the date of release and the producer) and allows registered users to rate, tag, review (with unlimited Chinese characters) and make short comments (within 140 Chinese characters) on the album, songs and artists. Moreover, Douban users can reply and repost others’ reviews and comments.
We have collected 26 reviews and 1,509 short comments from Douban Music. These texts were then categorised and coded in order to outline the main themes. All of the collected data and codes were left in Chinese to retain their original meanings throughout the analysis processes. Only the quotes we select for this article were translated into English by the authors.
As Madge 31 suggests, online research ethics include informed consent, confidentiality, privacy, debriefing (feedback procedure) and netiquette (such as avoid aggressive behaviours and online harassment). For her, in open-access online forums, the informed consent is not always be essential, but the respondents’ identities should be carefully protected. That is, subject anonymity is an important ethic issue of confidentiality for the studies using online resources. 32 To this regard, disguising the personal information of the researched requires avoiding naming of individuals and groups, using pseudonyms and avoiding verbatim quotes if search mechanisms could link these quotes to personal identifying features. 33 In this research, we collect data from the public online forum of Douban Music; thus, there is no need to proceed with a formal informed consent. We informed Douban users that we want to collect data from Douban Music through posting a message in the forum. In order to protect the privacy of the researched Douban users, all names shown in this article are pseudonyms 34 and all of the titles of the reviews are not shown in the empirical sections.
Throughout this article, we not only intend to understand audiences’ geographical constructions and re-constructions of Phoenix Legend’s musical texts but also attempt to explore how different types of audiences use different ways to complete their geographical interpretation. Taking these audiences’ views together, the following analysis focuses on the distinct ways in which these different audiences consume Phoenix Legend and its music.
Creating everyday soundscapes: popular songs belong to everywhere
The interaction between human and music is ‘an organisation of experience, as referents for action, feeling and knowledge formulation’ 35 within certain social contexts. On Douban Music, audiences generate their own geographical knowledge of Phoenix Legend and its music based on their daily experiences, feelings and memories emotionally. They consider Phoenix Legend’s songs as popular songs which belong to everyone and everywhere, as they can listen to and/or hear these songs in various spaces, including home, campus, places for leisure activities and transports (summarised in Table 1).
Categories of soundscapes.
Refers to Karaoke entertainment establishments in mainland China.
People tend to ‘consciously and actively use music as a resource in everyday life’ in different ‘interpersonal and social contexts’ and ‘set their own limits and boundaries upon what they hear, orienting themselves to new sounds according to their personal “musical geographies”’. 36 Therefore, the social effects of music come from ‘the ways in which individuals orient to it, how they interpret it and how they place it within their personal musical maps, within the semiotic web of music and extra-musical associations’. 37 Through audiences’ interactions with music, the meanings of everyday life are shaped socially. As shown in the words created by Douban users, the Phoenix Legend’s music not simply exists in the daily spaces, but it also has been inscribed into these audiences’ everyday practices, such as eating, cooking, doing sports and driving. Through their connections between music and these daily practices, these audiences thereafter transform their mundane spaces into soundscapes.
Such soundscapes are forged to be fluid by audiences’ time-space experiences and imaginations emotionally. In a review on the song Flying Freely, Jiang, who is a Phoenix Legend fan, writes her personal story of this song: she first heard this song when she was a high school student. After she left her hometown in northeast China to study in a university in the southwest, she was moved again by the lyrics because these words express migrants’ nostalgia towards their hometowns. In the summer holiday of 2009, Jiang sung Flying Freely with her high school classmates. For her, Fly Freely is not only her favourite song but also a ‘companion’ who moves with her from high school to university and from the northeast to the southwest. In this way, Flying Freely draws out her life trajectory and maps her everyday geography of schooling, leisure and travels. In the remaining parts of her review, she creates an alternative storyline of Fly Freely: This story takes place in a train towards the borderland of China. On this train, . . . a man bought a standing ticket, while a woman had a seat. The man stood just next to the woman quietly . . . He put on his headphone and listened to a finger-popping song with his burning desire:
YO~YO~COME~ON~OH~YEAH!
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Who is singing? It reduces my loneliness The clouds are white, the sky is blue, but I’m still drifting I’m living alone in this world But seeing the dazzling fireworks at a distance [Lyrics of Flying Freely] The woman heard the man’s song. She thought this man is also a migrant worker. She thought about her migrant experiences and found that she is very lonely, although she had never yearned for the dazzling fireworks at a distance. She looked at the man [and] asked the man to sit next to her. . . . (Quoted from Jiang’s review on Flying Freely)
In this story, the lyrics of Flying Freely are woven into a romantic encounter of a man and a woman on a train. For Jiang, this story is not simply her interpretation of the lyrics but also her creative combination of the song and her imagination of love, migrant workers and the scenes in the old green train.
Music’s engagement within space reveals the important role of music in producing and reproducing particular places
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and people’s sense of place. In our analysis, some detractors and non-fans define the characteristics of Phoenix Legend’s music as a ‘low’ or ‘vulgar’ culture because it belongs to everywhere except the concert hall – where classic music or fine art takes place. These audiences make a distinction between concert hall and everyday soundscapes. For example, in a review of The Symphony Concert of Phoenix Legend Music, Hui indicates that the combination of Phoenix Legend’s songs and symphony performance does not blend the popular/vulgar and the classic/elegant. This combination simply moves Phoenix Legend’s songs into a concert hall rather than creatively re-composing them into the ‘classic style’ or the ‘real art’: ‘Music’, for most Chinese people, refers to ‘songs’, however, ‘symphony’ refers to ‘art’ . . . Although this record is about a symphony concert, it is still very vulgar! The vulgar melody is fine, if it is a pop CD. I can’t see the blend of vulgar music and classical style! Maybe the composers never consider the music in this concert as classical music . . . This record doesn’t represent the real art! It is still a vulgar music concert. (Quoted from Hui’s review on The Symphony Concert of Phoenix Legend Music)
This distinction between popular music and classic music suggests that, at least for Hui, Phoenix Legend’s songs are transgressive and ‘out-of-place’ in the concert hall because such songs are conventionally played in more everyday places, such as public squares and hair salons. Here, the meaning of ‘out of place’ and transgression does not refer to a pollution, dirt or extra-legal institution, 40 but is about placing a culture in the space where this culture is unexpected to exist. In this way, the culture hierarchy between the concert hall and everyday soundscapes is made and maintained.
Making the rural–urban distinction: ‘agricultural metal’ and ‘rural pop/rock/rap’
Although researchers always deem Chinese popular music to be an urban youth culture,
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Phoenix Legend’s audiences tend to interpret its popular songs as ‘rustic’ and ‘agricultural’ popular music. A number of Douban users connect Phoenix Legend’s songs to the rural or less urban areas. These audiences like to use ‘agricultural metal (nongye jinshu in Chinese)’
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or ‘rural pop/rock/rap (tuliu/tuyao/xiangcun rap in Chinese)’ to tag the genre of Phoenix Legend’s songs. These tags are para-texts of Phoenix Legend’s musical texts – on the official website of Peacock Records (Phoenix Legend’s record label), the genre of Phoenix Legend’s music is ‘pop’. These para-texts are produced, circulated, consumed and reproduced by active audiences. Different types of audiences tend to understand these para-texts in distinctive ways. For anti-fans, they use the words of ‘agricultural’ and ‘rural’ ironically to express their understandings of the Phoenix Legend culture as a low/cheap culture, knockoff and bad art. For example, in a review, Yi writes that The term of ‘Agricultural Metal’ represents urban residents’ discrimination towards rural people . . . peasants are hardworking. They deserve to be respected. Chinese urban residents’ ancestors were from rural areas. I think, Chinese urbanites . . . should not say that they have prior status than the rural people. (Quoted from Yi’s review on Singing Loudly)
Since the posts on Douban Music are open for comments, the Douban users who posted their ideas can interact with the viewers through their responses. In this case, m, an anti-fan, makes a comment in a response to Yi’s review, which re-confirms ‘agricultural metal’ as a low culture: Your view is odd! . . . if you compare Phoenix Legend with Maria Carey and Elton John, you should know what is good music and what is bad music!!! We cannot say that peasants’ tastes are good because they work hard and deserve to be respected! My ancestors might be peasants, but I am now more civilised than them and have better tastes! . . . Agricultural metal is a low culture. . . . The low-income rural-urban migrants never have good tastes of music . . . Phoenix Legend’s songs are low and cheap fast food cultures. (Quoted from m’s response to Yi’s review on Singing Loudly)
Another audience, Xiao, posts a comment to support m’s view: Agree!!! There is no Chinese song as good as John’s Candle in the Wind. (Quoted from Xiao’s response to m)
These quotes indicate that m devalues Phoenix Legend’s music through objecting Yi’s views that rural people deserve to be respected because they work hard, and Xiao expresses his or her understanding of Phoenix Legend’s music as low culture through her support to m’s idea. Based on this interaction, the anti-fandom/non-fandom of m and Xiao is made by their responses to the para-texts created by Yi, rather than the interpretation of the musical text produced by Phoenix Legend.
Furthermore, these anti-fans tend to understand the term of ‘agricultural metal’ as an opposition to urban aesthetics. As Chuan writes in his short comments on the Moonlight Over the Lotus Pond, he indicates that this song is not a ‘real and pure agricultural metal’ because it is ‘full of fake petit bourgeois aesthetics’ which represents ‘urban middle-class tastes’. Obviously, through these anti-fans’ textuality of ‘agricultural metal’, the priority of the urban over the rural – the urban is more advanced socially, culturally and economically than the rural – is constructed.
For non-fans, they label Phoenix Legend songs as ‘agricultural metal’ or ‘rural pop/rock/rap’ only because they find these words are funny: I still consider agricultural metal as a joke. This term is so funny! But music should not be understood to be fine or bad. But some songs are really funny. (Quoted from g’s short comment on I Come From the Grassland)
These quotes suggest that these anti-fans’ and non-fans’ texualities are always influenced by the para-texts created by other audiences and the mass media.
While for supporters, some of them refer ‘agricultural metal’ to be a popular music style in China and will be a music trend in the future. As Zuo points out in his or her review on The Hottest Ethnic Trend, agricultural metal becomes a Phoenix Legend style. This style can be a trend of Chinese popular music. Moreover, as Xiao indicated in her review on Singing Loudly, Phoenix Legend is the creator of the agricultural metal style. In this sense, the meaning of agricultural metal is rather a rustic or low music genre, but a popular trend of Chinese popular music. Nevertheless, for some other fans, the term ‘agricultural metal’ or ‘rural pop/rock/rap’, as an urban discrimination towards people from rural areas, forms the inequity or injustice between the urban well-off residents and the rural poor people: Why using ‘agricultural metal’ to label Phoenix Legend? Because this word is funny? . . . Because Phoenix Legend’s songs are always played from the dirty and ugly knockoff phones by low-income rural-urban migrants rather than from urban people’s iPhones? (Quoted from Yi’s review of Singing Loudly)
Moreover, some fans write their comments and reviews based on a critique of the connection between ‘agricultural metal’ and bad art which is made by other audiences or the media. For instance, I’ve read other reviews of this song. I’m bloody angry!!! To those who have denigrated Phoenix Legend, Do you know how amazing Phoenix Legend is? Do you know how amazing their heavy agricultural metal is!!!!!!!!!!?????????? . . . In order to redress this wrong stereotype of Phoenix Legend, please let me re-introduce these two artists. (Quoted from Xing’s review on Above the Moon)
Similarly, Leeble posts a review in response to other listeners’ comments on Phoenix Legend’s music: Don’t care about other people’s connection between Phoenix Legend and copycat music, let’s sing its songs loudly! . . . Many listeners relate Above the Moon, Horse Pole (Taomagan in Chinese) and Love Trade (Aiqing Maimai in Chinese) to be three brainwashing songs. How can they say so? Its songs are powerful. (Quoted from Leeble’s review on Singing Loudly)
These two examples illustrate how fans criticise the para-texts created by other audiences. In this way, a consumer-to-consumer network is constructed.
According to Bourdieu, 43 our tastes are a marker of an individual’s social position in a certain society, formed though people’s economic, social and cultural capitals. These practices facilitate and display urban tastes. Because most of the Douban users are urban residents, their textualities of ‘agricultural metal’ and ‘rural pop/rock/rap’ more or less construct an urban discourse of ‘the rural’ and the socio-cultural gap between rural and urban China. For these urban audiences, Phoenix Legend culture is, on one hand, a funny or ridiculous rustic culture for rural people which mixes traditional tunes and melodies, simple rhythm and lyrics and electronic elements and which is totally different from the ‘urban petite bourgeois culture’, while, on the other hand, this rustic music is perceived to be a mirror of the urbanising China. As aforementioned, from the supporters’ points of view, Chinese people’s belief that the urban is better than the rural and their aspiration of urbanisation make them prefer urban culture represented by iPhone rather than rural culture represented by Phoenix Legend and knockoff phones.
Imagining the ethnic minority regions: minzu feng
Another popular tag of Phoenix Legend is ‘minzu feng’. The Chinese word minzu can be literally translated to be either ‘ethnicity’ or ‘nationality’ in different intertexts. As Ma
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indicates, ‘nationality’ is used to be the English translation in reference to the ‘Chinese nation’ (zhonghua minzu) and ‘ethnicity’ to be used when referring to the ethnic minority groups (shaoshu minzu) within China. For the term ‘minzu feng’, the word ‘minzu’ refers to the ethnic minority groups, and ‘feng’ means trend and style. China consists of 56 ethnic groups. Han Chinese is the major ethnicity in China, in particular in the urban centres of China’s east coastal region. In Chinese discourse, the 55 non-Han ethnic groups are called ethnic minority groups. The term ‘minzu feng’ often refers to the style of one or some of these non-Han groups. In recent years, the commercialised minzu feng become popular among urban Han Chinese
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because The majority Han ethnic group tends to view theses minorities as quaint and less touched by economic development. In desiring to visit these places, urban Chinese are seeking out a sense of authenticity that they believe is missing from their current lifestyles.
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In this sense, exotic and ethnic minority cultures are equated with authenticity and purity. For all types of audiences, Phoenix Legend’s songs have represented authentic or primitive cultures from ethnic minority regions. Some Chinese scholars have hit on the important roles of Phoenix Legend’s songs in the construction of geographical imagination and ethnicity. In his research on the symbolic meanings of Phoenix Legend songs, Wang
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indicates that Phoenix Legend’s songs combine ethnic minority cultures and popular music through three ways: the lyrical description of landscapes/landmarks, events and people in ethnic regions; the authentic linguistic expression from ethnic regions; and the rhythmic and tonal presentation of ethnic cultures. Phoenix Legend’s fans have received these representations and thereafter created their own imaginations of the place-based culture. Among the texts written by Phoenix Legend fans, the most frequently mentioned ethnic elements are Yangwei Linghua’s
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Mongolian identity and her sonorous voice: Undoubtedly, the grassland songs are more vivid than Han songs . . . Ethnic songs are not representing that fifty-six ethnic groups live together in China, but our urbanites’ desire of free spirit in the urbanising world. Linghua’s sonorous voice sounds like the whistle of a train towards the free grassland. (Quoted from Xiao’s review on The Best Era) Linghua comes from Ordos grassland . . . her voices represent the grassland. Hong Kong media call her the female version of Tengger [a famous male Mongolian-Chinese singer]. (Quoted from Weng’s review on Above the Moon)
Based on their understandings of the musical texts and para-texts, these ethnic elements are related to the grassland in Inner Mongolia and the free, simple and traditional nomadic lifestyle led by Mongolian people, which shape Han people’s aspiration of seeking the free and simple life and escaping the urbanising world.
Some supporters prefer the ethnic style of Phoenix Legend songs because they come from the ethnic minority region: As a person grown up in the grassland from Inner Mongolia, I really think Above the Moon is a perfect Chinese song which combines R&B and folk music. Only people who have lived in or been to the grassland and listened to Mongolian songs can feel the real spirit of it. (Quoted from S’s response to Xing’s review on Above the Moon) I love Phoenix Legend. As a guy grown up in Inner Mongolia with grassland morning songs, I feel these songs belong to me. (Quoted from L’s review on Singing Loudly)
For these audiences who come from Inner Mongolia, the grassland and Mongolian lifestyle represented by Phoenix Legend’s songs resonate their place-based identity of and belongingness to the grassland. These audiences like Phoenix Legend’s songs because these songs represent the place they feel attached to.
However, Phoenix Legend’s anti-fans have expressed that they are annoyed by the ethnic style because it is a commercialised ethnic culture rather than the real and authentic culture from ethnic minority regions. For example, in Sui’s short comment on Good Luck and Happiness, the combination of ethnic style and rap commercialises Phoenix Legend’s songs and thereby destroys the authenticity of ethnic minority cultures: I was shocked when I heard the odd rap follows Mongolian folk melodies. I don’t like it and cannot be used to this style. It’s a destruction of Mongolian culture. Too commercialised. Many Chinese singers are singing to earn money, rather than expressing real cultures.
Negotiating the Chineseness/local and the global: ‘[a culture] of a minzu, [a culture] of the world’
Musical identities, for geographers, are shaped by both local and global forces and through a process of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. In this sense, the global and local are ‘relational rather than oppositional’. 49 Scholars have recognised popular music in China as the locality of Chineseness in the global music system 50 or new dynamics of re-localisation. 51 For Douban users, the Phoenix Legend’s music is both a globalised Chinese culture and a localised global culture.
As aforementioned, the Chinese term ‘minzu’ has an alternative meaning of ‘nationality’. Using the phrase ‘[a culture] of a minzu, [a culture] of the world’, some fans and non-fans have built up a strong connection between the Chineseness/local and the global. On one hand, these audiences consider Phoenix Legend’s music as a culture of minzu because it is a cultural product with Chinese characteristics created by Chinese artists for Chinese people: In this album, we can hear the roots of our minzu . . . In this album, there is a song called Between the River and Sky (Shui Yun Jian in Chinese). This song and ‘Meeting in Aobao (Aobao Xianghui in Chinese)’ are standard and traditional folk songs. (Quoted from Xiao’s review on The Best Era) Phoenix Legend creates authentic Chinese music. This music group never mimic the western popular music. It is minzu, it is popular. (Quoted from Lin’s review on The Hottest Ethic Trend)
These quotes represent the minzu features of Phoenix Legend’s songs to be a heritage of the traditional Chinese folk music. As discussed elsewhere, the idea of ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ is used to frame what is and what is not considered to be the characteristics of a nation and bridge the notions of nation and identity.
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For some supporters, they see the Phoenix Legend culture as ‘an important constitution of Chinese music and Chinese culture’ (quoted from Dazhi’s short comment on The Hottest Ethnic Trend) and a culture with Chinese characteristics which is ‘loved by every Chinese person’ (this phrase is widely used by Douban users). The minzu element helps Phoenix Legend fans sustain their national identity, as well. For fans, their patriotic sentiments are triggered by the minzu elements: Don’t you think this song is full of patriotic sentiments? They have expressed their love towards our country through their ethnic style! Those who have said that Phoenix Legend is rubbish are unpatriotic. (Quoted from Yiwen’s review on The Hottest Ethnic Trend)
On the other hand, many Phoenix Legend fans regard Phoenix Legend’s music as a global culture because of two main reasons. First, Phoenix Legend’s music combines Chinese cultural elements with modern rhythms, rap and English phrases. Some fans appreciate Phoenix Legend’s music to be a convergence of global and Chinese cultures in reference to para-texts. For instance, Weng quotes some words from a music magazine in the review: Chinese folk melodies are in harmony with western electronic music. It is awesome . . . An editor from a professional music magazine wrote these words after listening to the memo of this CD: these songs assemble the essence of Chinese folk songs and international fashion perfectly, creating a new style of Chinese ethnic songs. (Quoted from Weng’s review on Above the Moon)
And second, these songs are globalised because they not only appear in the overseas Chinese communities but also are accepted by foreigners. According to Gong’s short comment on The Hottest Ethnic Trend, the most successful Chinese cultural internationalisation is the appearance of The Hottest Ethnic Trend in the NBA. 53
Combining the Chineseness and the global, Phoenix Legend’s fans construct the Chinese nationalism anew. The new Chinese nationalism since the 1990s may be characterised as a reaction to changes in China’s international circumstance, as the official Chinese nationalism seeks to integrate the country into the international arena.
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In this period, China has embraced overseas cultures and taken active participants in international affairs. China’s increasingly important role in global events, such as China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and 2008 Beijing Olympics, boosts Chinese people’s national pride which stimulate the new nationalism mentioned above. In this study, the nationalism of Phoenix Legend songs is about the internationalisation of the music with Chinese elements. This nationalism becomes a part of the supporters’ fandom: Is it the new album? As a super fan, I’m deeply moved by the songs! . . . It’s a marriage of agricultural metal and disco! It’s a perfect mix style of folk songs and global music trend. (Quoted from Qing’s short comment on The Best Era)
Conclusion
Phoenix Legend’s fans, non-fans and anti-fans use Douban Music as an online space to generate their geographical knowledge through writing music comments and reviews. The key finding of this article argues that through the consumer-to-consumer network provided by social media (Douban Music), the rural–urban division, ethnic cultures and the role of Chinese nationalism in the global marketplace are generated by audiences’ creative writings and their interactions with other consumers. Influenced by the geographical representations of Phoenix Legend’s music perceived by them, their daily experiences and the para-texts made by mass media and other audiences, these Douban users forge geographical hierarchies of music at various scales, from the everyday to the global: classic/fine music belongs to the concert hall, while ‘low’ music can be played everywhere; urban music is prior to/better than the rural one; music from ethnic minority regions is more authentic than that from other regions; and globalised local music and localised global music are better than local or foreign music. This research, thus, could be read as a contribution to geographies of music and audience studies from a non-Western aspect.
In the social media setting, ordinary people’s geographical interpretation of popular music is not only based on the geographical elements represented by the music per se, but also deeply affected by their daily experiences, musical texts and para-texts. As Gray 55 indicates, para-texts are important in re-constructing texts which influences the audienceship and the audiencing process affectively. In this research, we find that the production, circulation, consumption and reproduction of para-texts are significant to the construction of fandom, anti-fandom and non-fandom. All these three types of audiences like to quote or response the texts created by others to express their preference, confusion and disgust. On the basis of emotionally readings of the para-texts, the audiences construct their audienceship and write the Phoenix Legend culture anew (e.g. the tag of ‘agricultural metal’). Everyday experiences are key to the formative of audiences’ geographical interpretations of music, as well. In this research, Douban users use Phoenix Legend songs to map their everyday practices and spaces because they have real experiences of listening to or hearing its songs in various places. Therefore, social media not only provides a space for people to share ideas and experiences through a consumer-to-consumer network 56 but also stimulates the production and consumption of new para-texts of Phoenix Legend’s music.
Furthermore, this research provides a new scope for Chinese popular music studies. The existing body of Chinese popular music studies have focused on Chinese popular music’s globalisation and multiplicity, its geography and temporality, and the connections between popular music and social changes. 57 Few works have discussed how audience configure the politics of self-reflexivity 58 and place-based identity 59 through different genres of music. However, how audiences establish their own geographies of popular music through their creative consumption are generally missing. Thus, this work could be read as one of the first studies that concern how audiences generate new geographical knowledge through their everyday consumption of popular songs.
More broadly, this article suggests that audience studies need to pay a great deal of attention to anti-fans’ and non-fans’ emotional involvement within popular culture consumption and their interactions. In this research, different types of audiences tend to read and interpret the musical texts in distinct ways. For example, the term ‘agricultural metal’ plays an important role in the construction of anti-fandom, as it is an ironical phrase which depreciates the Phoenix Legend culture as a low culture and bad art. For non-fans, this phrase is only a funny description of the Phoenix Legend culture (which is frequently used by others) without specific meanings. Through their different interpretations of ‘agricultural metal’, their different views on rural–urban differences and audienceships are forged.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.