Why Chinese Pop Culture Is So Underrated?
China is not perceived as “cool”. Its movies, music, and fashions are relatively unpopular and the screen celebrities and pop stars are insular without a global appeal. There is no seductive quality.
Generally China’s pop culture lacks artistic, emotional or sex appeal. Even though income has risen in China, people there still turn to the United States, Europe, South Korea, even Japan - for leisure and entertainment.
Chinese musics seems to focus more on the lyrics with simple melody. Chinese pop songs built on the legacies of Chinese poems from the Tang Dynasty and Ci from Song Dynasty. Many famous lyricists wrote songs that are pretty in line with the metering requirement of poetry as well as the tones of various Chinese dialects. Chinese pop music isn’t built to challenge or break new ground. Chinese pop music largely borrowed from Japan prior to the 90s, rerecording many Japanese hits. More recently Chinese music has taken some R&B elements from the Korean wave of hip hop style. Chinese countries have a low tolerance for "weirdness" in music. They like the music soft, the tempos moderate, the vocals simple.
The Chinese music uses 5-note scale instead of the 7-note staff. They are of equal "step" to each other so you never get the "half-note" effect, so the Chinese music never got the harmony right and never got the chord right. If you want to create a symphony out of it, well, better wait for the next civilization. It’s not that there weren’t any good pieces out of it, but there is always this weird mix of harmony and discord because of the 5-note scale. Nowadays almost nobody really listen to Chinese music anymore. Basically, this branch of the culture went down the wrong path early on and never recovered from it.
The art of China suffered early on from the lack of technology, actually. The traditional medium for Chinese painting is basically water color. Most of them are just ink and water. Well, I have yet to see anybody achieve the level of realism during the Renaissance period with water color. They never developed the right medium to express it. Still, the Chinese achieved certain level of visual art and I believe there’s a robust market for the traditional Chinese art.
Traditional Chinese literature is actually very good, especially in poetry and prose. That’s why Chinese poetry are still very popular among Chinese, and people use poetic expressions all the time. But does it translate well into English? No, not really.
