Looking at “Brother Zeng” from a Different Angle

A guy in our dorm got quarantined a few days ago. He’s usually always humming “Leo” under his breath, and these past few days without him have felt a little strange and uncomfortable. It got me thinking again about Zeng Yike — first of all, she’s absolutely the focal point of Happy Girl; the moment she steps onstage, both the judges on TV and the rest of us watching at home perk right up, listening with a kind of mock-seriousness to her unconventional performances.

I’ve heard a couple of her songs, and honestly they’re not nearly as bad as rumor would have it. Sure, her lyrics aren’t especially profound, her melodies aren’t exactly pleasing to the ear, her “sheep’s voice” isn’t all that clear, and she kind of looks like Stallone… but her flaws and shortcomings, paired with her talent, come together to make a Zeng Yike unlike anyone else.

The people around me keep going on about how “Brother Zeng” is this or that, and for a long time I assumed most people were against her. But a couple of days ago I checked the Baidu forums, and it turns out the number of people who support her is absolutely no less than those who support people like Zhang Liangying. Looked at from a different angle, the real question is whether everyone is championing conventional aesthetic standards, or a freer, unrestrained kind of performance.

The crux of how people judge Zeng Yike — whether judges or the public — lies right here. But thinking it through a bit more deeply: can a genuine singing performance even really be judged at all? When people set out to define it, they inevitably go by tone, technical skill, arrangement, stage presence — every one of these is a way of deconstructing the art form of performance. But if art can be deconstructed like that, then surely there wouldn’t be so many “masters,” because we could just imitate them endlessly.

Or maybe we don’t need to look at it through such an artistic lens at all — maybe Zeng Yike is simply a joke produced by a commercial age. “Brother Zeng,” “Brother Chun,” and so on have all become little cults of their own — isn’t that kind of amusing? Ha. P.S. The guy from the dorm has been let out, and “Leo” is back in rotation.