消愁

The sonic signature of this song is deceptive simplicity — a few guitar chords, a rhythm that walks rather than drives, production that seems to have had things removed rather than added. Mao Buyi's voice carries the particular quality of someone who has sung in small rooms for many years: there is no projection in the theatrical sense, only presence, only the sense of a person sitting across from you at a table with a drink in hand. The song takes the ancient human ritual of drinking to dull pain and examines it without judgment and without endorsement — it simply inhabits the feeling, the specific warmth and specific sadness of the act. What makes it remarkable is that the restraint of the arrangement forces the listener to supply their own content: you hear this song and you think of whatever it is you've been trying not to think about. Mao Buyi won a national singing competition with this track and the result was both deserved and somewhat paradoxical — a song about private grief becoming a mass phenomenon. Culturally it tapped into a specific post-college-generation exhaustion in China: the feeling of having worked toward something that, upon arrival, felt less solid than promised. This is a song for the hours between midnight and three in the morning, for the companionable silence that follows a conversation that said everything and nothing, for the particular flavor of sadness that doesn't require explanation.