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Excerpt: Yellow Music

SING-SONG GIRLS AND "MASS ORNAMENTS"

The Bright Moon troupe itself was soon eclipsed by a second new media technology: talking pictures. With the introduction of sound technology, music and the motion pictures were linked in a productive symbiotic relationship. Obligatory screen songs helped to promote the pictures, while the films themselves helped to sell records of the songs. The trend was augmented by a wave of new musicals produced by Hollywood's dream factories and shown on Chinese screens, as testified to by a contemporary journalistic account.

It was [Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald's 1929 hit] The Love Parade that made Chinese film producers realize the magnetic power of theme songs. For every film they now insert a theme song, although the picture itself may be a silent one.... Secondary school and college students throng to theatres where "musical extravaganzas" are billed. They like Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, and George Raft. They like tuneful songs and snappy dance steps. Chinese who cannot speak English can nevertheless enjoy a musical comedy, even though the plot may be more vague, if possible, than it is to those who understand the language.

With these new members and in its new incarnation as the Lianhua Song and Dance Team (Lianhua gewuban), the troupe starred in a musical production called Twin Stars of the Silver Screen (Yinhan shuangxing), performing a title song written by Li Jinhui called "Twin Star Theme" (Shuangxing qu), as well as one of his children's performance pieces, "Work Hard" (Nuli). The film remained well within the domain of nationalist and May 4th humanist ideals and was promoted as such in Lianhua's house journal, Film Magazine (Yingxi zazhi): “Starring the Lianhua Team's musical star Li Lili and ten other dancers in military outfits and jackboots complemented with shiny swords, the film inspires us to work hard and make progress, spurring on our will to struggle into the future. This is truly a musical that suits the needs of our times. Even more interestingly, the film (largely ignored by music historians like Wang Yuhe, whose work depends on drawing a rigid line between serious, May 4th-derived music and degraded commercial music) featured nondiegetic music composed by none other than the president of the Shanghai Conservatory, Xiao Youmei. Even within the film itself, this line is repeatedly blurred. The Lianhua Team's dance routine is followed by a rather provocative "Egyptian dance" performed by the female lead, Violet Wong, on a set that mixes faux-Egyptian and art deco decorative motifs in an obvious nod to the fascination with Egypt that suffused the cinematic production and popular imagination of the United States and Europe in the wake of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923. This promiscuous dialogue with globally circulating trends in popular culture is further reflected by a scene in which the protagonists, both stars in the stable of the same socially responsible film studio, flirt their way across a miniature golf course landscaped to resemble a pastiche of famous Chinese scenic spots, including a pagoda, serpentine bridges, and what appears to be a tiny replica of Hangzhou's West Lake.

The success of this production was followed by a botched attempt to film color shorts of Li's performance pieces. A brief collaboration with another film studio, Tianyi (Unique Photoplay), produced a second boxoffice flop, the color musical Poems on a Plantain Leaf (Bajiao ye shang shi). Despite these setbacks, Li would continue to compose music for this new medium throughout the rest of his career. Indeed, Li wrote three screen songs for one of China's first musical talkies, Romance at the Dancehall (Wuchang chunse, 1931). In a sense, this film represented the creation of a new media loop—the sort of urban milieu in which Li's yellow music had first gained popularity became the object of filmic representation in movies about the lives of sing-song girls who performed it. The screen songs from the movie, in turn, were published in collections of sheet music and film magazines, made into gramophone records, broadcast, and ultimately emulated by sing-song girls in the dance halls.

This media loop, in turn, was fundamental to the emergence of a star system in Shanghai's commercial media culture. The growth of the broadcasting industry, the availability of gramophone records, and the popularity of sound films all ensured that Li's music could move out of schools and theaters and into public and private social spaces: cinemas, stores, street corners, and homes. These new spaces, of course, allowed for the creation of larger and more heterogeneous audiences. To keep these new consumers informed, a host of movie magazines, celebrity pictorials, and daily gossip tabloids known as "mosquito papers" began to be published as guides to this new consumer culture. And just as in Hollywood, part of the business of these publications was to manufacture, organize, and channel consumer desires through the creation of stars. This resulted, of course, in institutionalizing just the sort of voyeurism that Chou identifies as the underside of a May 4th representational regime which required (for the sake of modernity and emancipation) that women display themselves on stage.

Just how these publications tend to channel desire toward fetishized (usually female) star images is a question I cannot answer here in anything more than a piecemeal way. One particularly illuminating example of such fetishized images was a monthly magazine called Pop Star Pictorial (Gexing huabuo), first published in March 1935. Each of the three issues that I have been able to locate follows a similar format. The face of an established star (Zhou Xuan, Bai Hong, and Xu Lai, respectively, all graduates of Li's Bright Moon Song and Dance Troupe) adorns the front cover. Sandwiched between pages of gossip, brief star profiles, information on radio programming, and dance hall advertisements, are photographs of members of Shanghai's various song-and-dance troupes in poses typical of the day: lounging in bathing suits at the municipal pool or modeling stylish outfits in the park. As the editor makes clear in the premier issue, these photos are meant to serve a specific purpose. All too often, he laments, listeners to wireless broadcasts "can't tell the different stars apart."

The magazine, then, exists to fill in this gap, to offer these (heretofore invisible) women up to the gaze of the consumer. This process of individualized consumption is furthered by articles in which each singer's voice is characterized in terms of tastes (sweet, sour, salty, etc.) or rated in terms of her looks. Readers also are invited to identify uncaptioned photographs of faces to test their knowledge of the stars. This sort of fetishization was pervasive at the time. Even in Art Sound (Yisheng), a serious monthly devoted to film and music and edited by leftist musicians Ren Guang and his wife An E, a spread shows readers cropped pictures of various body parts (feet, legs, hands, and eyes), and they are asked to identify the star to whom they belong. A final and highly significant aspect of this process took the form of popularity contests in which readers of periodicals like Pop Star Pictorial and Nightly News Magazine (Da wanbuo fukan) were asked to send in ballots ranking their favorite sing-song girls. The popularity of these sing-song girls can be gauged by reader response to the first of these contests (sponsored by the Nightly News), which resulted in a flood of more than 70,000 ballots!

These individual performers shared the stage and screen in the 1930s with a phenomenon that the Weimar era film critic Siegfried Kracauer dubbed "mass ornament": formations of dancing chorus girls and female athletes arranged in precise geometrical arrays. Best exemplified by the musicals for Warner Bros., this form made its way to China by means ot Hollywood films screened in Shanghai and other Chinese cities and was quickly taken up by local studios. The first months of 1934 alone brought several musicals featuring elaborate, Berkeleyesque production numbers, including A Fairy on Earth (Renjian xianzi, with music composed by Li Jinhui), and The Health and Beauty Movement (Jianmei yundong). Unsurprisingly, the personnel for these films was drawn largely from the Bright Moon and other song-and-dance troupes. The association between these individual and collective displays of female bodies became a principal ground on which critics of all ideological persuasions attacked Li's music. But at the same time that leftist musicians battled the new culture of consumption with which Li had increasingly become associated, they also appropriated many of its techniques. Mass ornaments gave way to mobilized masses, while sing-song stars like Zhou Xuan became mass-mediated emblems for the plight of an embattled nation.