??? Conductor and his Rainbow choir grab eyeballs again ????SHANGHAI-BASED conductor and composer, Jin Chengzhi, and his amateur choir, Rainbow Chamber Singers, are an online sensation again for the second time in seven months. ????The choir’s latest song, “Feel My Body Emptied,” has become one of the hottest topics on China’s social media since Wednesday. The video of the song has been viewed by more than 100,000 people in the 24 hours since being released on Weibo, China’s largest microblogging platform, and it has become one of the most widely shared and acclaimed posts on WeChat, the most popular social network in China. ????The last time Jin and his choir received such acclaim was in January when the choir’s 40 members put on sunglasses and sang a song titled, “Where On Earth Did You Leave the Key to My Apartment, Zhang Shichao?”, at the end of one of their regular performances. ????Written by Jin, the song is about Zhang Shichao, his former classmate at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who had forgotten to leave their room key behind before going on a date. ????With simple lyrics expressing Jin’s frustration and anger over not being able to get in touch with Zhang despite repeated phone calls, the song is divided into sections that include a combination of chorus elements from Sancta Maria, a soprano aria based on the opera, “Rustic Chivalry,” and one of Taiwan pop singer Jay Chou’s hits, “Cowboy on the Run.” ????The song not only impressed the audiences in Shanghai but also became an online sensation after the choir uploaded the show on Sina Weibo. In a week, the video was viewed more than 25,000 times and nearly 300 people applied to join the choir. Jin himself received many invitations to perform concerts in different parts of the country. ????People liked Jin’s first song because it presented a lighter side of otherwise serious chorus singing. Jin’s second hit, however, struck most people’s heart with its hilarious portrait of a life buried in endless overtime work. ????Many of its lyrics, like “I haven’t removed my makeup for 18 days, and I have been wearing the same contact lenses for two and a half years. My body is a mess, and I am getting fatter and fatter;” “Get up and fight in Beiwuhuan (North Fifth Ring Road in Beijing), my home is in Huilongguan (the dwelling place for young office workers in Beijing), my sofa is my harbor, my stomach is empty and I begin to daydream. How could I relax?” are portraits of life for tens of thousands of young white-collar workers in modern cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Others, “Focused on KPI every day, why not now put away your crafts-men’s spirit?”, “I want to go to Yunnan,” and “No more overtime!” speak to the yearnings in their hearts. ????Members of the Shanghai-based choir are mostly in their 20s. Wearing sunglasses is one of their signature styles onstage. This time, they all wear pairs of mouse ears. ????“These songs are our humorous way to make fun of life,” Jin explained. Despite their online popularity, he prefers to be called a serious musician than an online celebrity. ????“The songs are prepared as a dessert after our concert. It was for fun. We didn’t expect all the attention,” said Jin, 29, when speaking of their sudden success in January. ????“What matters to us is that the song introduces people to chorus singing and makes them fall in love with it.” ????Jin has written more than 100 songs for the chorus and he attributes his melodies to Wenzhou, his hometown, in Eastern China’s Zhejiang Province. One of his works, “Zeya Anthology,” is inspired by the Zeya Mountain there, while another song, “Bamboo Forest,” is performed in the Wenzhou dialect. ????Jin’s parents, who had run a small family business in the past, now live in the mountainous area following his father’s cancer diagnosis. “I can find a balance between my life in Shanghai, a metropolis, and my life in Wenzhou, a quiet place. My songs are like the pictures that I see of the moon, mountains and rivers,” he says. “They are simple and personal.” (SD News) | 