Why are folk songs so popular in recent years?

The popularity of folk songs is closely related to consumerism and the middle-class petty bourgeoisie. Today's popular folk songs are in line with the habits and aesthetic tastes of the urban middle class and the petty bourgeoisie. The melodies are relatively simple and the style is refined. The themes of love, nostalgia, poetry and distant places they sing are in line with the inner needs of the petty bourgeoisie group who advocate individual freedom and self-expression.

The popularity of folk songs is based on an era of high modernity and individuality, while all grand narratives such as history and eternity are excluded. In modern industrial society, the rapid advancement of science and technology has liberated manpower, freed people from material scarcity, and created a large number of "leisure classes". Their abundant material foundation enables them to have enough energy and time to appreciate, cherish and express feelings.

The high explosion of information in today's era has caused people to have information fatigue and aesthetic fatigue, and they have turned to advocating a simple, natural and detached lifestyle instead of the truly heavy and depressing depth of reality. They hope to enjoy the convenience of modern technology while eliminating the alienation of technological rationality from people. Most people in today's era only focus on individual self-feelings, rejecting grand narratives with eternal characteristics and heavy and serious nature such as religion, politics, and history, and value individual instant, isolated, and small self-feelings and delicate emotions.

They value free private life experience and individual self-expression, do not pay attention to group affairs, and stay away from public affairs, politics, society, religion, ghosts, gods, and even nature. What they care about is often not real. Nature, but a "natural" artificial bonsai composed of relevant elements and symbols selected from nature, and the "distance" they focus on is not the real life of people living far away. Zhao Lei's "Chengdu" is not the Chengdu that local people are accustomed to, but just the imaginary space he depicts.

The middle class and small capitalists who are in the middle of society generally lack the elegant cultural background and the capital to pursue noble aesthetics and literature. They either sanctify marginal and popular art, inject elegant forms into low-level cultural art, "refine" and "legitimize" it, and elevate its status.

To popularize serious art, use the class habits of the middle class and petty bourgeoisie to popularize high culture, screen, reorganize or reproduce the aesthetic symbols contained in it, thereby lowering high culture to its own class in the world. The relatively simple and easy-to-understand folk songs just meet the exquisite aesthetic needs of the middle-class and petty bourgeoisie.