To this point, Fu understood the rock song “I Have Nothing” (Yi
wu suo you , 1986; Ex 2) from Cui Jian, the most influential rock
musician in the 1980s, as signifying a breakthrough in the way of
expressing emotion from “conceptual words” to direct “outcry”.
Although Cui himself has stated that “I Have Nothing” is merely a
male-female love song, this piece was widely taken by Chinese scholars
as emblematic of humanist expression in the pop song of the 1980s,
pointing to its messages of human nature, existence, and
self-consciousness.6 It was also taken by several
Western scholars as a marginal cultural expression which contained an
anti-state message. For instance, Baranovitch interprets the title
phrase “I Have Nothing” as the articulation of spiritual and material
impoverishment of Cui’s disillusioned generation (2003: 32-33), and
Jones hears it as an allegory of the deprivation of the generation’s
emotional and political rights (1992: 137).