“Do I wish I could get paid for everything? Of course,” he said in a telephone interview. (Little-known fact: In 1997, he earned a place in Guinness World Records for playing the longest note ever recorded on a saxophone: 45 minutes and 47 seconds, in E flat.) Since the 1980s, he has sold more than 75 million albums worldwide. Not that Kenny G is overwrought about the unpaid royalties. Mao Xiaojie, a junior at the Communication University of China in Beijing, said, “They’d play it over and over again at wedding banquets.” “All I know is when they play this song, it’s quitting time,” he said.įor a generation of Chinese youth, “Going Home” has featured prominently on the soundtrack of their lives.
But despite its lack of lyrics, he understood the melody’s cultural significance. Zhu could not pinpoint when “Going Home” had become China’s adieu anthem, nor could he identify the famous musician behind it. The manager, Zhu Mingde, followed, eager to turn off the lights and lock the doors. As usual, “Going Home” began looping over the loudspeakers, sending the weight lifters and treadmill runners fleeing for the locker rooms. on Monday, the Powerhouse Gym in central Beijing was a half-hour from closing. “Isn’t it just played everywhere?” she asked.Īt 9:30 p.m. “Going Home,” by the saxophonist Kenny G, has become a staple of Chinese society.
One recent Saturday afternoon, as the smooth notes of “Going Home” cooed repeatedly over the ordered chaos of Beijing’s famous Panjiayuan Antiques Market, hawkers packed up their Mao-era propaganda ashtrays, 1930s telephones and “antique” jade amulets while the last bargain hunters headed for the gates.
Every day, “Going Home” is piped into shopping malls, schools, train stations and fitness centers as a signal to the public that it is time, indeed, to go home. BEIJING - There are many things about modern China that defy easy explanation: parents posing their children next to live tigers, the sight of grown women wearing furry cat-ear headbands while shopping, the performance-art-like spectacle of strangers napping together in Ikea display beds.īut no mystery is more confounding than that of China’s most enduring case of cultural diffusion: its love affair with “ Going Home,” the 1989 smash-hit instrumental by the American saxophone superstar Kenny G.įor years the tune, in all its seductive woodwind glory, has been a staple of Chinese society.
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