Why Would You Mess With Him? He Doesn’t Feel Any Pressure

Li Xiaoyu was born into a parallel world and discovered that it had every instrument imaginable, yet no one had ever played them solo. All music had to accompany vocals. Instrumental and electronic music were a blank slate.

From releasing his first single at sixteen to breaking global sales records with his pure electronic album Frequency at twenty-two, he spent years turning this auditory wasteland into a forest. Then he chose to lie flat: he went home and spent three years with his two silver-gray Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs. His mother, Shen Manyun, summed it up: “You’ve been cooped up in the doghouse so long, you’re starting to stink.”

To get him out of the house, Shen Manyun teamed up with the investors and forced him onto the variety show Keep Running. Three days before filming, his older sister, Li Xiaoyue, the country’s only double Grand Slam winner and Cannes Best Actress, handed him the list of regular guests. “There’s a girl named Bai Lu. Stay away from her.”

After filming ended, he sent her a demo. He typed and deleted the filename several times, then settled on two words: Just Because.

Later, he would softly tell her “I like you” while she slept, take her to Disneyland to buy a limited-edition Duffy, and scour the world for the merchandise and figurines she liked, until her studio had an entire wall filled with them. After reaching the top of his career, he turned to patriotic works, animating the country’s publicly disclosed weapons and equipment and the people who developed them, and composing the music for every production himself.

But what people loved talking about most was still his line on Keep Running: “What’s it got to do with me?”

The entertainment industry’s most pressure-proof man sent a girl countless demos. Every melody said the same thing.