Something To Their Name

Berwin Song | May 15, 2009 9:00 am | Add a comment | 1654 reads

Beijing has one of the best local music scenes in the world.

It may seem a big statement, but the flow of local bands booked for overseas tours and foreigners coming to Beijing to check out the noise is proof of deepening maturity and incredible diversity. Nor has it lost any of the spontaneous energy that’s been its trademark since blasting off 20 or so years ago.

The Golden Age
Like abstract art, rock & roll only began to seep into the country in the late ’70s, arriving on cassette tapes brought in by journalists, students, diplomats and suits. Copied and passed along, these scratchy mixes of Paul Simon, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were eagerly coveted and soon emulated by China’s sheltered youth.

The icon of early Chinese rockers was a young, classically trained trumpet player named Cui Jian, who earned his place in history with his legendary 1986 concert at the Capital Gymnasium, when he performed a song entitled “Nothing To My Name” (Yi Wu Suo You). The concert came to mark the birth of Chinese rock & roll, and the song would become an anthem for Cui’s generation.

“The first time I played rock & roll music, I felt I could say no to everybody,” he says. “It was the start of being able to show certain people: I’m different, I’m special. It was a good feeling, because everyone said yes – to traditions, to politicians, to teachers. I think we were the first generation to say no. For me, that is the meaning of rock & roll.”
It didn’t take long for other bands to form: harder-edged rockers like Black Panther, with Dou Wei on vocals and Ding Wu on guitar. Ding would go on to form China’s first metal band, Tang Dynasty, with China’s first guitar hero, Liu Yijun (aka Lao Wu). Beijing’s budding yaogun scene broke out of the student scene for the first time when it was given an unlikely mainstream stage at the 1990 Asian Games. Eager to show off China’s open-mindedness and “modern music,” authorities sanctioned a large-scale rock concert – the first of its kind for Chinese musicians –at the Workers’ Stadium, featuring Black Panther, Tang Dynasty, Cui Jian’s band Ado and the all-girl rock quartet Cobra. Suddenly, music industry eyes were on Beijing.

Scream

Though high-profile performances were few, yaogun continued to simmer under the surface. Cui Jian, for instance, held unannounced gigs at small venues. Meanwhile, the increasing flow and variety of Western music spawned new Beijing bands. By the mid-’90s, groups were playing forms of yaogun more raw and furious than anything seen before.

There was the grunge-reviving Cold Blooded Animal, led by a Kurt Cobain-channeling, guitar-smashing Xie Tianxiao (aka XTX), and the nü-metal Thin Man. In Wudaokou, China’s first punks congregated, in every flavor of the genre – from skaters to gutter to don’t-give-a-f**k.

These bands – dubbed the Wuliao (“boredom”) Contingent for their youthful anomie – was led by hard-charging, leopard-headed Brain Failure frontman Xiao Rong, the wayward son of a Party official. Tired of having no voice, these bands were ready to scream.

Their base was the now-defunct Scream Club in Wudaokou. Riot grrrls Hang on the Box made their debut here – to the sound of massive booing – by bum-rushing the stage and taunting the audience with their musical inexperience. The Scream Club venue was short-lived – though from its ashes emerged Scream Records, which released the seminal 1999 compilation of all the Wuliao Contingent bands.

At the end of the ’90s, the local scene began to benefit from better music infrastructure. In addition to Scream, other record labels were launched, including Modern Sky (which would release albums by alternative rock acts such as MUMA, Sound Fragment, Ruins, P.K.14, Re-TROS and Joyside). New venues fostered new scenes: River Bar, on Sanlitun South Street, supported folk bands like Wild Children (who ran the club) and Buyi, and inspiring acts like Glamorous Pharmacy and IZ, as well as solo artists Wan Xiaoli, Zhao Laoda and Zhou Yunpeng.

The capital’s longest-running outdoor rock festival dates from those times as well. The first Midi Festival was held in 1999 and continues on today. “That first festival was just for fun,” recalls Midi dean (and festival director) Zhang Fan. “I still remember it like it was yesterday – there was free entry, free beer, about 800 people – all in the school concert hall. It was like a crazy college house party!” The Midi Festival showcased countless young yaogun bands, and helped establish the live reputations of Brain Failure, Reflector and SUBS.

It was also 1999 that yaogun began grabbing attention in the West. Hang on the Box made the cover of Newsweek (in the first of the many “China has punks?!” pieces), while Xie Tianxiao be­came the first Chinese representative at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. Beijing’s folkies also made a splash, with Wild Children’s invitation to perform in London. These first forays into the Western world became a trend: SXSW has since seen several waves of Chinese bands: Brain Failure and Hang on the Box in 2003, and Re-TROS and Lonely China Day of Tag Team Records in 2007.

Riding the No Wave

By bringing niche artists and ultra-arcane genres to the attention of local bands, the rise of Internet culture helped open up the scene far more than daoban (“pirated”) CDs or imported expat mix-tapes had. Music critic Yan Jun, with his interest in esoteric sounds, helped turn the city’s avant-garde leanings into a full-on artistic noise movement. In 2005, he began Water­land Kwanyin, a weekly experimental music showcase at 2 Kolegas, which eventually led to his own imprint, Kwanyin Records, featuring a roster of obscure noise artists. As a music critic, Yan publicized the “No Beijing” movement in 2005, which included bands like Carsick Cars, Snapline, Houhai Sharks and Nezha (now the Gar), who took their cue from the 1970s New York underground No Wave noise-rock scene. These bands are now hailed as some Beijing’s brightest talents.

As Beijing bands proved their mettle on the international stage, the Western music establishment began to take a serious interest. Foreign artists came to China looking for collaborations, and the foreign media came looking for stories, particularly in the lead-up to the Olympics. Michael Pettis, an American economics professor at Peking University by day, opened D-22 in 2006 to provide a space for a new generation of bands. Pettis, who had managed a club and written for the Village Voice in early-1980s New York, saw parallels with contemporary Beijing. “One thing that was interesting about the New York scene back then was the way that everything was sort of mixed together,” he says. D-22 has since become a “hardcore music dive” (to use Pettis’s words) that regularly hosts now-familiar yaogun names: Carsick Cars, Joyside, Hedgehog, The Scoff and many more.

Other important venues opened around the same time: MAO Livehouse, Jiangjinjiu Bar and The Star Live. With these stages and other stalwart venues like Yugong Yishan, 13 Club and 2 Kolegas going strong, Beijing had the elements of a thriving scene. Meanwhile, in a musical universe far from the No Wave movement, local heavy metal acts continued to make their mark. The tight-knit metal scene produces international-caliber music spanning the range of the metal spectrum – from black to death, doom to goth, thrash to power, industrial and beyond.

Painkiller Magazine (

重型音乐) has been the genre’s leading voice since 2000, staging large concerts with foreign and local acts. Followers of the rock scene may find this surprising, as metal gets nothing like the coverage of indie rock, even though filmmaker and metalhead Sam Dunn came to Beijing to film a segment for his documentary Global Metal (released in 2008).

Breaking Even?

In 2008, the D-22-related record label Maybe Mars broke new ground by bringing in overseas producers to work on a series of albums. The aim was to give local musicians new production skills. The label’s initial releases included Snapline’s debut, produced by UK musician and producer Martin Atkins (of Pigface and PiL). P.K.14’s fourth album featured production help from Sweden and was mastered by Greg Calbi of Sterling Sounds in New York (whose credits include Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Sonic Youth, and the Strokes).
Maybe Mars has also branched into hardcore punk with Demerit, whose album was produced by Brian Hardgroove, bassist from Public Enemy. Hardgroove has sought out other bands to work with, including Brain Failure, for whom he produced a 2008 single featuring Public Enemy’s Chuck D on vocals, adding to the band’s celebrity-vocal collection.
Yet, for all the steps yaogun has taken, commercial viability is a long way off. “A lot of people don’t believe that rock & roll really has a chance to make money,” says Cui Jian. “And this is pretty tough – yes, piracy is terrible … but the performance business is also not set up for yaogun. There aren’t sound engineers, no lighting engineers … there’s no concept of beauty in rock & roll yet.”
Ultimately, despite the lack of commercial viability, the rebellious draw of making noise seems as strong as ever for some Chinese youth. Being stuck in the underground gives yaogun an authenticity and innocence that even the greenest of music followers can experience. Walk into any one of Beijing’s venues, and you’ll easily find a place in the front row – or you might be offered a drink by a nerdy looking dude whom you recognize as the singer of the headlining act. Want to catch a peek at a burgeoning metal scene? We got it. Wigged-out experimental machinery? Check. Jazz-lite and genre-busting free-form? Uh-huh. Punks straight out of the streets of 1976 London? Oi. Shoegaze, indie pop, post-rock, prog rock? Yup, yup, yup and yup. One of the best live music scenes in the world? Find out for yourself.

The following was excerpted from the 2009 Insider’s Guide to Beijing. To order a copy, call 5820 7101 or e-mail distribution@immersionguides.com. See www.immersionguides.com for details.