Not to forget:
Yesterday Once More and China:
(1998) The Rebirth of Shanghai
Until the birth of the People's Republic, Shanghai was China's artistic center. Can it regain its former glory?
By John Leland and Anna Esaki-Smith
The Gap restaurant in Shanghai's French concession is a squeaky-clean place, all checked tablecloths and stylishly bland Chinese food.
But over dinner there, the journalist Yu Lei's mind runs to illicit thrills. Yu, 29, who writes for the state-run Shanghai Star, has a studious look,
set off by a stark buzz cut and bookish glasses. When he was a kid, he recalls, Western arts and media were still banned in China,
so one of his teachers recorded an American song off the shortwave radio. Huddling the students behind closed doors, and warning them not to tell anyone,
the teacher wrote the lyrics on the blackboard and taught the class to sing along. It was dangerously exciting, the lure of forbidden fruit.
But what struck Yu most was the
sweetness of the melody, the purity of the singer's voice.
The singer was
Karen Carpenter, who shortly became one of the first Western performers sanctioned in China.
Years later, as the Filipino band at the Gap shinga-linga-lings into the Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More,"
Yu can still hear the sweet strains of revolution.
Karen Carpenter, he declares, "was the beginning of the opening of China."
Source:
Newsweek: The New China »
(2016) Trends in Music Information:
"Teaching English pop songs, such as
Yesterday Once More....has always been regarded as vital in encouraging Chinese students to learn English."
(2009)Rupke and Blank:
'Country Roads: Understanding Popular Music in China,' What is your favorite American song ? "....all these students knew this tune..."
Source:
“Country Roads” To Globalization: Sociological Models for Understanding American Popular Music in China »