消愁 [明日之子]

Mao Buyi wrote and performed this song on a talent competition, and it arrived like an interruption — something that did not belong to the format that surrounded it. The production is deliberate in its simplicity: acoustic guitar, restrained accompaniment, a voice that sounds as though it is thinking while it sings. The subject is drinking alone and the particular texture of modern loneliness — the kind that is not dramatic, that does not announce itself, but accumulates quietly in rented apartments and unreturned messages and the specific sadness of a city at night. His voice is boyish but not thin; there is a conversational quality to his phrasing, as though he is speaking rather than performing, which makes the emotional content land sideways rather than head-on. "Dissolving sorrow" is the song's explicit project, and its implicit argument is that the project fails — that you drink to forget but the feeling remains, slightly softened, still present. This is the kind of song that found enormous resonance among young Chinese urban listeners because it named something they recognized without romanticizing it or offering false comfort. Reach for it when you are by yourself and have had just enough to drink to feel philosophical about it, and the city noise outside is a kind of company.