Recently, composer Sakamoto Ryuichi's documentary "Sakamoto Ryuichi: Finale" landed on domestic theaters. At the same time as the movie was showing, Ryuichi Sakamoto himself opened Sina Weibo and greeted Chinese music fans in Chinese in the video. For a time, Ryuichi Sakamoto and his music became popular words, and even appeared on Weibo hot searches.
In fact, this is not the first time Sakamoto Ryuichi has caused heated discussions in China. Music fans kindly call him "Professor" because he is knowledgeable and personable. Every time he comes to China to perform, there is a whirlwind, and he is like one of the most popular and well-known composers in contemporary times.
"Sakamoto Ryuichi: Finale" received high reputation.
However, behind such a popular and labelled Sakamoto Ryuichi, there is another Sakamoto Ryuichi that has been obscured. That is the sociality in his music, his attention to public issues, left-wing theory, and his critique and vigilance against the capitalist lifestyle.
Today, our push focuses on this charming and mysterious music world created by Ryuichi Sakamoto, and pays more attention to supporting his creative ideas behind it, and this is closely related to Ryuichi Sakamoto's intervention and attention to public events.
Written | Zhou Lang Gu Qu
01
For his music,
every definition is like the tip of an iceberg
music sounds, A pair of smooth hands stroked the keys, the player tensed his cheeks, and the upper and lower gums clenched tightly. He quickly entered the rhythm of selflessness. The rusty piano in front of him, like the resurrection of the undead, made a sad sound in the desolate area.
In 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear leak, Sakamoto Ryuichi and his friends went to the scene and found a piano that had been submerged by the tsunami. The piano was severely out of sound. Sakamoto said, "I just want to listen. Listen to its sound.”
He used this piano to play a restless, short, and even harsh music. This piece was named "disintegration" and included in the April 2017 album "async" ". Regarding this work, Sakamoto explained: “The piano uses the'power of civilization' to make nature meet human standards. The sea water hits the piano, which is inaccurate for humans. In essence, they just restore the original in nature. Status.”
This is not the first time Sakamoto has surprised people. In China, he is best known for the soundtrack of the movie "The Last Emperor". At the same time, his most classic song "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" ("Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence") is widely circulated, and its influence even surpasses Oshima Nagisa's movie "Merry Christmas on the Battlefield" itself.
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Main Theme Sakamoto Ryuichi-Ryuichi Sakamoto-Music For Film
Sakamoto Ryuichi is keen to accept the test. During the production of "The Last Emperor" with Bertolucci, Bertolucci asked him to write a short piece of music to render the scene of Puyi's coronation, and the completion time was only two weeks. He hoped that Sakamoto could finish writing and recording the scene the day before filming.
But there was nothing at the scene, and finally I found a piano, and the sound went badly. Sakamoto Ryuichi protested, and Bertolucci provocatively said: "Enio (referring to the musician Moricone) works like this!"
As a result, Sakamoto wrote 44 songs crazy in two weeks. The most classic is the music "Where is Armo" with Chinese instruments such as violinist, erhu, guzheng and pipa. With this piece, Sakamoto swept the Academy Awards, Grammy Awards and Golden Globe Awards.
Bertolucci in China
Bertolucci likes to use the radical method very much. When he filmed "The Covered Sky" and once again collaborated with Sakamoto, he temporarilyFeeling that the prelude is not satisfactory, Sakamoto is asked to change one. Sakamoto Tante said: "It's too hasty. There are more than 40 people waiting ahead. I can't change it!" Bertolucci said, "If it's Mollyconne!" Sakamoto thought to himself: "Morricone can do it, then I too. It must be possible!" So he immediately called the band back to rehearse urgently.
Sakamoto Ryuichi is such a musician. Whether playing the piano or playing electronics, he showed amazing imagination, with antelope hanging horns, no trace to be found. So how do you describe Sakamoto Ryuichi's music? Perhaps one sentence cannot be summarized.
In "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", it was the person who cried and ate dinner in the cold night and was encouraged to live; in "Rain", Wenxiu dropped the umbrella and said, "I will I don’t need it anymore." In "Where Is Armo", it was Pu Yi who looked back at the Hall of Supreme Harmony, chasing the yellow silk cloth in front of thousands of courtiers. In the end, "You can't catch up with all the people, all the doors. You can't open it."
Where Is Armo? Sakamoto Ryuichi-The Last Emperor (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Sakamoto Ryuichi’s music cannot be defined. Although there have been many legends about him, and there are no shortage of articles on the Internet that summarize his style concisely, but every kind of generalization is easy, and every definition is like the tip of an iceberg. The more you want to understand, the more you discover I am full of doubts.
If a person only does one thing in his life, he can achieve the ultimate. Ryu Sakamoto handed it over to the music himself. He firmly believed that what he made must be the best, so he devoted himself wholeheartedly to this. When he is playing, the slightest interruption will make him uneasy.
On August 11, 1996, he was invited to participate in a private performance in China. Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Cui Jian and Jiang Wen were also present, but he walked off the stage angrily in the middle of the performance because there were audiences in the first row. Stopping to take pictures affected his performance. Sakamoto said to the audience: "I want to dedicate the best performance to the Chinese audience, but the interference from the stage almost prevented me from playing."
Speaking of which, Sakamoto was not in China yet. He is well-known, but time has passed. Now he is the common idol of young people in East Asia. In the literary circles of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Ryuichi Sakamoto has become a fascinating symbol, where young boys and girls converge, and under the call of music, they are singing and dancing. In the voice, strangers toasted and drank, chatting about idol Sakamoto's 80s.
02
Born in a leisure class, embracing left-wing theory
Ryu Sakamoto started to learn piano at the age of one or three. At the age of fourteen, he felt that he was the reincarnation of Debussy. Later, he once said: "The most influential musicians in his life are Bach and Debussy."
His musical talent was proven early. In one test, the teacher asked students to "write a fugue in five hours" and "write a sonata in seven hours". He was the first person to hand in papers.
After graduating from university, he continued to study for graduate school, but missed a lot of class. The supervisor advised him to graduate as soon as possible and not to waste university resources. He handed in an orchestral piece, which was appreciated by Japanese pioneer musician Dai Min Lang.
Sakamoto Ryuichi was also a left-wing enthusiastic youth when he was young. He read Mao Zedong's works and listened to the lectures by the leftist Marxist Shiratani. When he was in high school, he often went to a cafe called "Vienna", which was a gathering place for Japanese student movement members. A storefront was the music cafe "Fugetsudō". According to Sakamoto, "There were a lot of avant-garde people gathered there. Left-wing poets and painters, but the atmosphere in the store is really unflattering, so we will only go to Vienna, which is relatively rough.”
In the 1970s, left-wing thoughts were very popular in Japan, artists and knowledge keen to intervene in reality Most of the elements belonged to the left-wing camp. For example, the well-known left-wing Marxist scholar Hariya Kotoro once regarded Sakamoto Ryuichi as a guest. Left-wing thinking directly influenced Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music. When he was drinking with friends in high school, he bluntly said: “We liberate and be manipulated by capitalism together.Controlled music, let us imitate the spirit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and use music to serve labor! "("Music Makes People Free") Therefore, the young Sakamoto Ryuichi is neither satisfied with the gentle court classical music, but also clearly criticizes Takemitsu's democratic music. However, he revealed in his autobiography "Music Makes People Free": Once he went to Toru Takemitsu's concert to hand out flyers, and wanted to fight him. But after Toru Takemitsu showed up, he talked with him patiently for 30 minutes, but he felt quite moved. The object of the struggle in the past suddenly became what he admired. Senior.
Sakamoto Ryuichi
His aggressiveness and randomness made the teachers love and hate him. Other students took music as a task, and he took music as a game, years later When someone asked him why he chose music, he said: "I am now engaged in music work, but why I entered this industry, I don't know myself. I didn’t deliberately want to be a musician..."
Sakamoto Ryuichi "On the one hand, I want to do everything perfectly, but on the other side I hate being obsessed with perfection and trying hard to destroy." He loves feathers He never publishes works that are unsatisfactory. But he is not like those musicians who are hungry for fame and fortune. Once they gain fame and fortune, he is cautious. On the contrary, he is the one who subverts the most thoroughly. So he is a beginner in Western music and listens to Bach. He and Debussy later determined that Western music had reached a bottleneck, and that the future belonged to electronic and national music. So in 1978, he formed a YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra) combination with Takahashi Yukhiro, Hosono Haruomi, and others. Set off an avant-garde storm.
Dongfeng Yellow Magic Orchestra-UC YMO: Ultimate Collection of Yellow Magic Orchestra
Takahashi is a nobleman in Sakamoto’s life. Sakamoto is immersed in works and worldliness If you need someone to push you, such as forming a band, Takahashi is the promoter.
Sakamoto's famous nickname "Professor" is also Takahashi Ki. When they first met, Takahashi was wearing a suit Expensive suits, Sakamoto casually wearing slippers and jeans, originally looked down on each other, but later heard that the other party is engaged in music, Takahashi introduced his high school friend Haruomi Hosono, he was forming a rock band. When he heard that Sakamoto was a graduate of the composition department of Tokyo University of the Arts, he half-joked: "You have such a high degree, will you be a professor in the future?" Later, with the popularity of YMO, the nickname "Professor" became popular.
Sakamoto did not expect that this ticket-like band would be out of control. The second album sold 200,000 copies in Japan. The band was shortlisted in the top two electronic pop music rankings, YMO became the banner of Japanese pioneer bands, and Sakamoto became the dream target of girls. However, just when people thought that Sakamoto would keep doing it, he suddenly decided to quit. The reason was: I don’t like the feeling of being too famous.
After flying solo, Sakamoto made the soundtrack to the film masters while studying his own works. "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" is undoubtedly his most influential work. The first piece draws on the traditional Balinese music gamelan and uses an electronic synthesizer to produce a melody like clear spring water. As soon as it came out, it shocked the world.
During this period, his style shifted from electronics to ethnicity, successively He has released more than a dozen albums, and his creative power continues to flow like gushing magma.
Grammys, Oscars, the Brazilian National Medal, the French Medal of Arts and Literature, and other honors throw olive branches at him one after another, Oshima Nagisa, Beto Rucci and other celebrities entrusted him as a guest. He did not refuse Vanity Fair, but said soberly: "It is absolutely impossible to use music to save others. Because it is a lamentation composed by a group of people who think they are hopeless. "
It stands to reason that if Sakamoto goes on like this, he should be a musician to the extreme of glory, but he is wild and bears fame, but he uses his reputation as a bet to publicly announce that he is dating his wife. The incident caused a lot of uproar, SakamotoStill insisted, and finally married his sweetheart Akiko Yano.
Sakamoto's love history is very interesting, if written as a book, it will surely sell out. In his autobiography, he recalled the past in high school. At that time, he wrote a love letter to the girl he likes, quoting a certain writer's sentence "You are the executioner who controls the fate of the death row." He secretly put it in the shoe cabinet without a signature, full of confidence. I thought the girl must know that he wrote it. After "The Last Emperor" was released, it was rumored that Wu Junmei had been in love with a Japanese star. Sakamoto revealed in his autobiography that he particularly liked Wu Junmei, who played the embroidery in "The Last Emperor". After the outbreak of the September 11 incident, the gas masks in New York were out of stock. He bought ten gas masks online and gave his ex-wife one.
Stills of "The Last Emperor".
Sakamoto is such a gamer, the music critic Yao Dajun put it aptly: "(He) is not afraid of playing vulgar, not afraid of making girls fans, not afraid of fashion, not afraid of sensation, and not afraid of avant-garde, not afraid of machines, not afraid of Wires; clear brains; strong worldview; like all true creative masters, they do not rely on national scales and musical instruments to write music (Ryukyu is considered exotic), but can achieve a national taste; popular and rotten tunes are published in piles, but occasionally a magical pen But it can pierce the brain like a magic sound, and it lasts for three days. There are often only one or two songs in an album.”
No matter how the game is off-site, Sakamoto is a terribly focused person. In the documentary "CODA", he said: "Maybe I can live for another 20 years, maybe I can live for 10 years, or maybe only a year, and I still hold a heart. So in order not to regret, I want to create more More works that can be obtained.”
03
See a more complicated world,
Intervene in reality with music
Remove idol’s clothes, Sakamoto It's complicated again. His music has undergone a transition from classical music to national music and electronic music, and his political views have also shifted from the radical left to a more complex range. In the 1970s, there were many left-wing youths yearning for revolution in Japan. Sakamoto was one of them. He participated in the parade and read left-wing readings. The song "Thousand Knives" sampled Mao Zedong's "Shui Tune Song Tou·Return to Jinggangshan".
After the 1980s, Sakamoto Ryuichi saw a more complex world and adjusted his political concepts, but he still actively participated in public events. In 1992, he began to think about environmental issues, so after the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, he actively participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations and repeatedly expressed his distrust of the right-wing government of Japan. He said: "I am still concerned about the situation in Japan, whether it is environmental or political or social issues, because it is very similar to what happened in the United States. The right wing is rising. It has been five years in Japan and only a few months in the United States. That’s it.”
Young people love him who is fashionable and musical, and he hopes that people will think seriously and care about heavy topics. In the 1984 documentary "Tokyo Melody", he said: "I'm very pessimistic because young people don't fight anymore." In an interview with Lens, he said with emotion: "Young people now seem to be reluctant to pay attention. those heavy topic ...... really good sad ah "
" Music of liberty "author: [date] Ryuichi Sakamoto translator: He Qihong version: Chu dust culture | Chongqing University Press July
After the millennium, Sakamoto Ryuichi actively participated in the environmental protection movement, thinking about the relationship between man and nature. In an interview, he specifically mentioned the author Shui Mian's later work "Days to Eat the Soil". This book changed his view of nature and made him begin to explore the way of life that is not opposed to nature. Because of this, he supervised the collection of essays "Non-war" and set up the "more trees" project to promote forest construction.
3·11 After the Great Japan Earthquake, more trees participated in the post-disaster reconstruction in Japan and helped local residents build 100 temporary houses.
The earthquake made Ryu Sakamoto feel deeply. He was thinking about "what music and art can do to disasters." In an interview with "ほうてらす" magazine, heSaid: “Speaking of what music and art can do to disasters, compared to sending food and donations, I think the highest level that can be done is to think deeply about the meaning of disasters and express them in my own works. Of course, for the victims What to do is another matter. Accepting the fact that human civilization and nature are opposed to each other, and transforming the serious thoughts caused by this into works, is something that has no end at any time.”
However, Sakamoto Long criticized capitalist industry, but he was also shaped by the capitalist industrial system. It is unavoidable that Ryuichi Sakamoto's success today is not only because of his own talent, but the tolerance of the capitalist industrial system to him cannot be ignored. When Sakamoto was portrayed as a musical icon, all his actions were closely tied to the molded symbol of "Sakamoto Ryuichi". What is this symbol that the public loves to see? Talent, handsome, elegant, and maverick, alone lacked his participation in left-wing politics.
The process by which Ryuichi Sakamoto was portrayed as the darling of the capitalist music world is also the process by which his left-wing color was diluted. We have rarely seen the left-wing color in the publicity drafts about him today. What we see is always celebrity anecdotes, outstanding talents, and interesting interactions between him and Bertolucci and Wu Junmei.
Stills from the documentary "Sakamoto Ryuichi: Finale".
Yes, these are very interesting, but the real Sakamoto Ryuichi, the really thorny and complicated Sakamoto Ryuichi has been simplified. His left-wing thinking has shaped his music, but when people mention his music, they don’t talk about the source. When talking about his support for world peace, they don’t say anything about his radical left-wing posture when he was young. This just shows The cunning of the capitalist narrative of this era. The left wing is stigmatized as an unrealistic utopian, but in this narrative, the complexity of the left wing is concealed, and the constructive side of the left wing is ignored. Behind this is the dilemma of the left wing in the post-revolutionary era, as well as the distribution and control of discourse accompanying the resurgence of conservative values.
Sakamoto’s image in the later period became moderate, and his attention to public events has also been greatly reduced compared to the past. Of course, there are reasons for his own age, but also because his identity is no longer the rebellious newcomer of the past. It is an undoubted music icon, a symbol worshipped by thousands of East Asian girls. His every move is no longer about himself, but also the interests of his team, related stakeholders, and the love of his fans. In fact, Sakamoto's support for environmental protection and criticism of Trump are all very politically correct in the current public opinion field and will not affect how others like him.
So the harsh Sakamoto disappeared, replaced by a gentle Sakamoto, a Sakamoto everyone liked. Music icons are logical, but the past revolutions have been buried in dust. This is the glory of a left-wing musician, but it is also his helplessness. When the destructiveness of his music is diluted, he may drift away from his original intention. Although, he is still himself. But the verdict that the years gave him was: There are many things you can't do.
In 2014, Ryuichi Sakamoto was diagnosed with throat cancer and had to stop all music activities. But as soon as his condition improved, he devoted himself to work again. In spite of the opposition of his relatives and friends, he took on two soundtrack assignments when he recovered from a serious illness: one is the new film "If I Live with Mother" by the famous Japanese director Yoji Yamada, and the other is Alessandro Gonzalez Ina "Wild Hunter" directed by Rido and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In order to live up to his trust, he laughed at himself as "prepared to die."
If there are two kinds of creators in this world. One is the accumulation of layers, step by step, he does not have an excellent talent, but he can reach his upper limit with hard work. On the other hand, he was as dazzling as a volcanic eruption when he first emerged, and with a stroke of his letter, he left his contemporaries behind him. So, Sakamoto Ryuichi is undoubtedly the latter. He came for the miracle itself. He does not belong to a certain national border and is not bound by a single concept. In the end, his creation will become the heritage of all mankind.
What is valuable is that Sakamoto did not cover his heart after he became famous. He pioneered, revolutionized, and constantly broke through himself. He came, he conquered, and worldly fame and wealth appeared in front of him, but he gently picked it up Putting it down again, he can play the role of an idol very freely, and still play the piano alone after returning home, gently stroking the dust on the back of the piano in the moonlight.
坂Ben said that the music he wants to make is music that people will still listen to 100 years later. In the end, he is still that clear music composer, a childlike circus walker. He plays wonderful music for the world, and that is his direction and the promised land of his life. So when the music sounded and the surroundings were quiet, the white-haired boy sailed against the current and returned to the past.
This article is exclusive original content. Author: Shuro Gu song; Editor: walk; proofread: Di Yongjun. Reprinting is not allowed without written authorization from the Beijing News, and you are welcome to forward it to Moments of Friends.
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