The Mortals Behind China’s ‘God Songs’ | Hacker News Reader

The Mortals Behind China’s ‘God Songs’

sixthtone.com

70 pointscow921 comments

OT but I find the translation from 神曲 to God Songs very inaccurate. The word 神 has many meanings in Chinese other than referring to gods. Some related expression such as 这玩意真神 or 这人真神 would be more properly translated into: this thing/person is enthralling/magical/enchanting/hypnotizing.

神曲 would be the kind of songs that are so hypnotizing that you can't direct your attention elsewhere. And those songs might not necessarily be nice songs. They are referred to as 魔性洗脑神曲 sometimes, which is something like enchanted brainwashing hypnotizing songs in English. One of the first songs being associated with this term is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7U0EirV2Hw

I thought maybe the author got that translation from google translate, but then I put it into google translate and got back "divine comedy"

Yup, that's the Chinese title of Dante's work: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%A5%9E%E6%9B%B2

The Greek 'daemon' seems like a pretty accurate translation for '神'.

Strictly, daemon is Latin; a better transliteration of the Greek into English is "daimon".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B4%CE%B1%CE%AF%CE%BC%CF%8...

A Latin transliteration of the Ancient Greek, as “δαίμων” engendered “daimon.”

The Japanese definition for 神曲 (kamikyoku) is just "incredible song" which I think is probably the intended modern Chinese definition in these contexts (I speak both).

I'm not sure if it's an example of wasei-kango [1] (Japanese-invented words being incorporated into Chinese, i.e. "phone", "bicycle", etc.), but 神曲 has been used to describe online videos of Japanese songs for at least 10 years with little descriptive meaning beyond "this is a great song" (for example, this medley of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon soundtrack from 2007 [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasei-kango

[2] https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm1396236

Using 神 like that is the same as “god-tier” in English

I don't know Chinese, but my reading was a mistranslation of Idol as in the various Idol TV shows.

This is pretty close to the English term "earworm".

Kind of OT, but the media outlet that published this article kind of gave me a weird vibe. Then I looked it up, and apparently it's a CCP-approved, strictly censored news organization[1], like most other news sources based in China.

Really don't want to get into details, but some articles[2] don't even acknowledge all viewpoints, which makes it clear that there's some censorship going on behind the scenes.

Despite that, I have to agree the OP is definitely interesting and relevant to HN.

[1]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-t...

[2]: http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004929/user-concerns-over-fac...

This reminds me of the story of MP3.com. The creator ran a search engine, which never got especially popular, but it was popular enough to demonstrate the sudden growth of that term, and so he registered the domain name without even knowing what it meant.

The amount of good Chinese music out there is amazing.

If you're open taste-tasting modern Chinese pop music, I would like to recommend:

- A-Lin: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCURRzgKx4DkVozbOjFflMpg

- Mayday: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQyweuVOAh3NHGKDDadRSbg

- JJ Lin: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd91HSXKhsIv8PIjNrDByHQ

- Joker Xue: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeHAsNPoMw7xfNf0pH-CmJA

They are all on spotify if you look them up too. From Spotify/YouTube you can use related artists/playlists to get into more variety.

Immediately remind me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEfQ_9DIItI, where the scores in the movie are constantly borrowed/changed from known good version.

Also: the music in Iron Man 1 eventually became part of Game of Throne theme song: https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/e81vr8/18_sec...

I like the idea of Jung's "Collective Unconscious" and think about it as ephemeral culture seems to briefly stabilize. Looking up popular keywords from search engines is one approach for understanding mass movements about what people are paying attention to. While I don't feel that art should be automated, or even rigorously formalized, that does not appear to be what is happening here. Instead, these writers rooms still have to go through the interpretive process, applying the same mundane thought processes to make anything really work.

When I watched the latest star wars show with some friends, we started noticing all the meme-able moments, now I wonder if those were introduced intentionally too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyetic

We should call the meme version of these type of works "memetic" works.

"God Songs"?

This is the worst translation ever.

Even "Magic Songs" is better.

It'll be interesting to see the long term effect of this circular dependency between producers and consumers in arts.

Why do we like what we like? What creates a trend? Can you create a trend by observing what's trending?

Yes, this has been done in the pop music world for at least 100 years. Irving Berlin analyzed top of the chart songs so that he can learn how to construct his own.

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