Music

The things Cui Jian criticized in the 1980s, he still criticizes today.

And he's sharper now. His new songs are even more biting than the old ones—the targets have changed costume, but the essence hasn't. Does he know his words change nothing? Yes. He isn't an idealist either—he's said so himself; he's a realist.

But he never stopped. Forty years into his career, the target of his critique is still there, and so is he. That stance, in itself, is the message.

It's the same as "knowing it cannot be done, and doing it anyway"—what you're doing may not win, but you do it. Because it's the only posture that is right.

Omnipotent Youth Society's "Kill the Man from Shijiazhuang" is a song about an ordinary person. He goes to work, comes home, lives his life—and then one day he breaks down.

It has no grand narrative, no heroism. But what you hear there is two things existing at once: despair and the refusal to die. A person crushed by life, yet not fully giving up. Both present in one person at once—that is the true state.

The deepest things don't live in grand narratives. They live in the most ordinary places.

Classical music's greatest influence on me isn't that it sounds good—it's the structure. In a symphony you can't improvise: there's key, harmony, form—a forest of rules. Yet within those rules you can express everything from profound grief to ecstatic joy.

Rules aren't there to constrain you. They give you a framework; only inside the framework can you be free. Doing strategy, writing code, investing—if you don't understand the rules, you have no right to break them. What classical music taught me is this: understand the rules, then surpass them.