Nân, Mỹ Anh, Cece Trương and Mono, F2 music: After autumn comes autumn again

Cece Trương, Nân, Mono, Mỹ Anh — Cece Truong, Nan, Mono, My Anh

Musician Hong Kien once said in an interview that he was not destined to become famous.

He supported many artists and many programs, but the person the audience remembers most is not him - the person standing behind.

That avoidance of fame seems to have been passed on to his daughter.

Don't pursue what is easy.

Nân (stage name of Nguyễn Hồng Trang), 23 years old, an independent artist, just released her first solo album last year after a period of being the lead vocalist of the band Windrunner in Hanoi.

XT-TX, as this album is called, is an album not written for a wide audience, with a personality that refuses to be tamed or restrained within any genre boundaries.

Sometimes the music here sounds like it comes from a climactic love opera, interspersed with countless spontaneous and spontaneous conversations or monologues, and word usage that is sometimes outside the vocabulary of people who do not belong to Generation Z.

Even while working in the Windrunner group, Nan showed himself to be someone who did not pursue what was easy.

In a world where people often lament the decline of electric guitars and rock music, she and her friends pursue the hardest rock genre, metal and hardcore rock.

Nan's clear voice floats like a leaf on the fierce guitar background, and the explosive growls in the album TAN released in 2022.

The father and son clearly pursue different types of music like the moon and the stars - if musician Hong Kien pursues mainstream music with middle-aged tastes, then Nan squeezes into the narrow alleys of music to juggle experiments.

Here, the musical connection between two generations in the family is not a tangible one in the sound itself: listening to Nan's music is not like listening to the music of a "family tradition", but has the mischief and exploration of an amateur, ready to overthrow the rules and conventions.

However, when thinking back to the context of musician Hong Kien in the 90s, when the Doi Moi period changed the face of popular music, the achievements of Hong Kien and the Anh Em band ultimately came from exploration and not necessarily from school education.

What they did at that time, such as the album Toc Ngan 2 or Made in Vietnam, was also music that was unfamiliar to most Vietnamese audiences at that time.

No version is absolutely better than the other, it's just that times have changed. Autumns go but there are still other autumns to come.

Look at the autumn go

The F2 generation of the Anh Em band not only has Nan, who is inheriting the family musical tradition, but also My Anh, born in 2022 - daughter of musician Anh Quan and singer My Linh - who aims for a more balanced approach to the mass audience and honing a distinct musical personality.

Two years ago, My Anh released a music video in which she sat at LP Club, a familiar place for vinyl record lovers in Hanoi, singing "Looking at the Autumns Go", a classic love song by Trinh Cong Son.

My Anh dressed comfortably but also very fashionable, wearing a pair of white sneakers, she sang Trinh's music with all the lightheartedness of a twenty year old just starting out in life.

The generation gap makes the verses heavy with memories, heavy with sadness about the passing of time, the musician's "sadness of regret" or "sadness in blue eyes" also fade away. The modern treatment with a touch of R'n'B makes the song more chill, although less lyrical.

That is in complete contrast to My Linh when she sang "Watching the Autumns Go" in a program called "Intersection of Time", while Khanh Ly sat below as an audience.

She chose a smooth way of handling it, bringing an atmosphere thick with the deep, passionate feelings of an experienced person who knows what nostalgia is, making even Khanh Ly listen with her eyes half-closed.

And going back in time, although her name was never associated with Trinh's music, My Linh, like many singers of her age, also released an album singing Trinh songs, called Trinh Cong Son's Love Songs.

My Linh was at the same age as My Anh is now, but instead of choosing love songs, she chose songs that perhaps one would need a lifetime to understand the truths in, such as Cat bui, Toi oi dung tuyet vong, Xin tra no nguoi, Mot gioi di ve...

However, listening to My Linh in her twenties sing philosophical lyrics about the hardships of life like "How many years have passed and still gone / Where have you wandered around to make life tired", "How many years have you been a human / Suddenly one afternoon your hair is as white as lime" we do not see any age difference or lack of experience.

Her voice is old beyond her years.

My Linh and musician Hong Kien were young people in the 90s.

Their sentiments have a continuity and closer connection with the senior artists and the tradition of Vietnamese light music, tending towards romance, lyricism, deep thoughts and beautiful emotions, and "meaning beyond words" interpretations.

Meanwhile, their children, the Generation Z artists whose youth took place in the third decade of the 21st century, seem to have been no longer overshadowed by sobbing emotions, metaphorical expressions, and linguistic devices that borrow clouds to point to the moon.

They expressed their emotions directly, frankly and boldly, not afraid to use strong verbs at the beginning of sentences - something that must have been influenced by the spread of English in the era they grew up in - as can be seen in Nan's compositions:

"Today I pick up scissors and cut / Cut pictures / Cut scenes / Cut the unnecessary words that flow from my lips, the bitter words out of life" (Today I Cut).

Or a line in My Anh's composition: "Hold my hand, hug me, call my name, kiss me." [Honest] Even when choosing to sing an old song like "Watching the Autumns Go", My Anh would choose to sing it without the sad nuances of the song.

My Anh's pure version, you can listen to it while working, drinking coffee or chatting with friends without feeling distracted.

It's the popular music of the digital age, the age of mobile devices, the age of multitasking, the age where people often listen to music while doing other things, and popular music should be engaging enough but not necessarily dragging listeners into emotional abysses.

That is very different from traditional performances of Trinh Cong Son's music, which are often so emotional that they suck us into its world like a black hole.

No version is absolutely better than the other, it's just that times have changed. Autumns go but there are still other autumns to come.

Cece Truong

The gaps are filled

Trinh's music is a place where musical family "meetings" often take place. Not only My Linh and My Anh sing Trinh's music together, but another mother-daughter pair is veteran singer Cam Van and her daughter Cece Truong, born in 1998.

In a program before the release of the movie "Em va Trinh", the mother and son also sang a duet of Trinh Cong Son's song "Tuoi da buon".

Perhaps because it was a live duet, Cece Truong chose a not-so-unusual treatment to match her mother's thick, resonant voice that seemed to call back to her mother's past.

Cece Truong doesn't seem to be afraid of being overshadowed or being called "Cam Van and Khac Trieu's daughter".

She did not try to escape the influence of her parents. Many times she and her parents joined together, singing both the songs of their era and the songs of her era, from Listening to Spring Coming to Dad Tell Me or Stranger.

The image of a happy family traveling and singing together has become a much-anticipated part of their YouTube channel.

But that doesn't mean Cece Truong doesn't have her own independent musical world, outside the shadow of her parents and their friends (like singer Tuan Ngoc, for example).

Cece Truong used her mother's thick voice to create R'n'B pop songs like "Phan tam mot hich" or "Doi mat biet lie" (Lying Eyes), a direction somewhat similar to My Anh's.

Cece Truong's singles or My Anh's debut album Em in 2023, although they could not really explode, maybe because of their cleanliness and lack of the necessary "mess" as highlights, but they were also the first bricks that established the birth of a generation F2 in music.

Still have to remind Mono

Besides the literal F2 generation, meaning the children of middle-aged artists, modern pop music also witnesses successor generations with closer distances, such as Mono, Son Tung M-TP's younger brother.

With "visuals", charisma and performance ability not much inferior to his brother, Mono inherits Son Tung's large Sky community, Onionn, Son Tung's former close producer, and even Son Tung's musical style - a style that, when you're over 30, if you still pursue it, it seems a bit empty, but when you pursue it in your 20s, it's completely suitable.

And over the past year, while Son Tung has been struggling and stagnating with sporadic products, standing still in terms of ideas, not showing much progress and maturity in music, Mono has increasingly proven himself to be a new force in generation Z with two consecutive EPs in two years - proving a productivity that even Son Tung himself has never had.

Wherever you go, you can hear Mono's hits like "Em xinh", "Em là", "Waiting for you" being played.

Em xinh and Em là have the appearance of perfect pop songs - whether you find the melody good or bad, there's no denying that it's extremely catchy, making you want to sway to the beat, making you memorize the lyrics without even realizing it, and after listening, its simple, even somewhat childish, sentences linger in your mind forever, making you hum along to it.

Of course, it's still a long way from Mono achieving the unique position that Son Tung once had, when Generation Z is a generation that is too divided in musical taste, making it easier to become a mid-level star than before, but becoming a big star is much more challenging.

Overcoming someone is not the goal of F2s.

However, being the second generation in an artist family has never been easy. How many second generations can we count who have truly surpassed their parents? Even on a global scale, that number is not too many.

Although there are Miley Cyrus who is equally famous, maybe even more famous than her father Billy Ray Cyrus or Norah Jones who is more widely known to the public than her father, the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar, but look at the sons of John Lennon, Paul McCartney or the daughters of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash,... almost none of them can reach the stature of their parents.

But perhaps they came to music because it was natural when living in a family full of music, as Nân recounted in her interview the reason she came to music, even though she had studied another major:

"My dad makes music, my mom loves my dad and loves music, so since I was little I've listened to all genres." Perhaps never has surpassing someone been the goal of those who come to music for love.

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