Quotation songs

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107298576.004

3 - Quotation songs

Portable media and the Maoist pop song

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Andrew F. Jones

Edited by

Alexander C. Cook

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Andrew F. Jones: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Alexander C. Cook: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley

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Summary

Singing Chairman Mao’s quotation songs, we think of Chairman Mao; singing Chairman Mao’s quotation songs, we remember Chairman Mao’s instructions; singing Chairman Mao’s quotation songs, it’s as if Chairman Mao himself is by our side.

People’s Daily, September 30, 1967

At the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in April 1969, Chairman Mao’s wife Jiang Qing issued a surprising broadside against a form of music that had once seemed to embody the political passions of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: the quotation song. These songs, which had been promoted nationwide since September 1966, set the Chairman’s maxims to music, and were deliberately conceived as a musical analogue and mnemonic device for Quotations from Chairman Mao, more popularly known as the Little Red Book. Upon watching a televised song-and-dance program extolling the Chairman, Jiang Qing is reported to have said:

Don’t you believe that they are singing about Mao Zedong thought – that’s not really what it is at all. It’s yellow music. We’ve already dealt a blow to the emperors and feudal lords, and now they’re doing this sort of thing? In future, we need to get rid of folk tunes, we need to be rid of this swing music. They say they’re eliminating the old and ringing in the new. What’s new here? Some of their movements are based entirely on swing dancing.

She continued, “They’re wearing red stars and waving red flags, but they’re swing dancing. They may as well be naked.”

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Mao's Little Red Book
A Global History
, pp. 43 - 60

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107298576.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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