The popularity of folk songs is based on a high degree of modernity and individuality, while all grand narrative things such as history and eternity are excluded. In modern industrial society, the high progress of science and technology has liberated manpower and freed people from material shortage, resulting in a large number of "leisure classes". The solid material foundation enables them to have enough energy and time to appreciate, recall and grieve.
The high explosion of information in today's era makes people feel information fatigue and aesthetic fatigue, and instead advocates a simple, natural and detached lifestyle, rather than a really heavy and depressing reality. They hope to exclude the alienation of technological rationality while enjoying the convenience of modern science and technology. Most people in today's era only pay attention to the individual's self-feeling, rejecting grand narratives with eternal characteristics and heavy and serious nature such as religion, politics and history, and attach importance to the individual's present, isolated and tiny self-feeling and delicate emotions.
They pay more attention to free private life experience and individual self-expression, and don't pay attention to group things. They are far away from public affairs, politics, society, religious ghosts and even nature. What they often care about is not the real nature, but the "natural" artificial bonsai composed of related elements and symbols selected from nature, and the "distant place" they care about is not the real life of people far away. The "Chengdu" written by Zhao Lei is not the Chengdu that local people are used to, but just the imaginary space he described.
The middle class and petty bourgeoisie, which are in the middle position of society, generally lack elegant cultural background and literary capital for pursuing noble aesthetics. They either sanctify marginal and popular art and inject elegant forms into low-level culture and art, making it "elegant" and "legal" and raising their status.
Popularize serious art, use the class habits of the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie to popularize elegant culture, screen, reorganize or reproduce the aesthetic symbols contained in it, so as to reduce elegant culture to the world of its own class. The relatively simple and easy-to-understand folk songs just meet the exquisite aesthetic needs of middle-class petty bourgeoisie.