The anxiety of love: an analysis of recent Chinese popular music

Love between two sexes is a time-honored but commonplace theme in songs that it does not seem to demand scholarly attention. Yet, the manner in which sexual love is expressed in Chinese songs today carries with it the deep stigma of the sea change that has been taking place in recent Chinese culture. The present paper discovers that, as a result of drastic changes in Chinese people’s attitude toward sexual relations, there has been a greater anxiety in songs intended for men to sing, as well as those for women, and manifestations of the anxiety of the loss of love are gender-specific. In “male songs,” paradoxically, the anxiety has been more voiced and apparently with more pain, which is one of the key indicators of the profound change in sexual attitudes in Chinese society.