China's first pop star

Lai Kam Fai first wrote China's first pop song, "When Will You Come Again"

Lai Kam Fai was born in Hunan province in the late 19th century into a wealthy and prestigious family. He had eight brothers, all of whom would later become prominent figures. The eldest brother, Lai Kam-hay, in particular, was an expert in linguistics, famous for formulating phonetic symbols and editing the Dictionary of the Mandarin Language.

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Lai Kam Fai (1891-1967) was a founding father of Chinese popular music.

Born in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, Lai Jinhui studied guqin and plucked instruments since childhood. He was y influenced by the folk music of his hometown and the popular theatrical music of Hunan Opera, Flower Drum Opera and Han Opera, etc. In 1927, he founded the "Chinese Song and Dance School" and later formed the "Chinese Song and Dance Troupe". In 1929, he organized the "Mingyue Song and Dance Troupe", which toured all over the country, and in 1931, the "Mingyue Song and Dance Troupe" was merged into the Lianhua Film Company, and after 1949, he worked as a composer at the Shanghai Fine Arts Film Studio, where he died in 1967.

In his youth, Lai was obsessed with the new music movement and advocated that new music and new literature should go hand in hand. Based on this realization, he composed a large number of children's operas, songs and dances and songs. These works were not only popular in mainland China, but also spread to Hong Kong and other parts of the South China Sea. Songs such as "The Sparrow and the Child", "The Grape Fairy", "The Fairy Sister", "Poor Chou-heung" and "The Moonlit Night" were extremely popular. Most of the works in this period were based on the theme of protecting children's creative talents and opposing feudal education, with easy-to-understand texts and concise, vivid and lucid musical language, which inherited and developed the tradition of school music and songs advocated by Shen Xinguong and Li Shutong. At the same time, he was an expert in utilizing folk music materials. In these children's songs, folk songs, ditties and tunes became the materials for creation. Lai Jinhui was undoubtedly a pioneer in the nationalization of songwriting.

Following the children's songs and dances, Lai moved on to popular music. Hairy Rain" and "I Love You, Sister" were his early pop works, marking the birth of Chinese pop songs.

The success of Lai's career in pop music had its own social background. At that time, Shanghai was already a commercialized capitalist city, and Western, especially American, pop music was flowing into China through the media of dance halls, movies, and radio broadcasts. There was already a demand for pop music in the cultural life of the public. It was in this context that Lai's popular music was born.

In 1928, Lai led the "Chinese Song and Dance Troupe" on a tour of Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaya and Singapore, where pop songs such as "Hairy Rain" became a mainstay of the program along with his children's songs and dances. 1929, when he was stranded in Singapore and unable to return home due to financial difficulties, he accepted an order from a bookstore for a short period of time to produce a book. In 1929, being stranded in Singapore due to financial difficulties and unable to return home, he accepted an order from a bookstore and wrote one hundred popular songs in a short period of time and sent them back to Shanghai, where the Shanghai Civilization Bookstore published sixteen song books. The songs "Peach Blossom River" and "Special Express" were written at this time and were a great success.

The "Mingyue Song and Dance Troupe" was an important group in the development of Chinese pop music. China's first generation of singers such as Zhou Xuan, Bai Hong and Yan Hua, and pop writers such as Lai Kam Kwong and Yao Min were all in the troupe. Nie Er also embarked on the path of music creation from here.

Between 1931 and 1936, Lai Kam-kwong also scored music for a dozen movies, including "The Immortal on Earth," in which most of the interludes were pop songs. At the same time, he was also involved in dance hall music, jazzing up folk melodies. At the time, record companies such as "Bai Dai" and "Victory" recorded and published a large number of his pop songs.

Li Jinhui's pop compositions laid the foundation for the basic style of Chinese pop music, which combined folk melodies with Western dance rhythms. At that time, the main ones were tango and foxtrot. The instrumentation also imitated the style of American jazz. The works such as "Hairy Rain", "Peach Blossom Red" and "Special Express" were not of a high standard, and some of them were quite vulgar, catering to the low taste of the common people, and were widely criticized at that time. Nie Er once wrote an article rebuking these works. It can be said that Chinese pop music did not take a healthy path at the beginning. In addition to the mediocre content, the crude production of music and the showy and whiny singing had a bad influence on the subsequent development. But his success in dealing with the relationship between exotic forms and national traditions in popular music is worth learning from future generations.