Ich Bin Ein Beijinger: The Birth of Beijing Metal

Given rock music’s comically bleak beginnings in Beijing twenty-odd years ago, it’s a wonder there’s such a surfeit of hipness on the scene today. Hip, like decent beef, was in short supply back in the early days. Sure, Cui Jian had it, what with that whiff of dissidence always about him and that red blindfold ever at the ready. Ding Wu, who would go on to front Tang Dynasty, was cool – maybe not hip, but decidedly cool. That was pretty much it. No one else I remember from the old scene qualified. Ding Wu’s cool wasn’t consistent, either; he often rehearsed this stage move in which he’d drop down into a hurdler split, then bounce back up to resume singing or playing. That’s about as cool as back-to-back guitar solos. Even Lao Cui had his shameful moments (his early hits included an execrable cover of the Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney song “Say Say Say”).

I was lucky enough to be knocking around back when the Beijing rock scene was still in its infancy. It was 1988 – late enough in the decade for me to have been ashamed of the mullet I still sported, but too early to have grown it out. I had enrolled in what was then called the Beijing Language Institute, and there I began a musical partnership with another mullet-headed American named Sean Andrews, who hailed from Arkansas. Sean not only played guitar and bass, but had a singing voice high enough to make Led Zeppelin, Rush, AC/DC and Boston covers possible – a repertoire clearly absent of hipness.

Through a Russian friend, Sean learned of a music store called Huacai on the Liulichang antiques street. We found our way there one September afternoon, and at the insistence of the floor manager, plugged in and started playing. A crowd of tourists came in off the street to stare. The manager came out, oily and ring-bedizened, but rather than throw us out of his store, invited us to join him in the back office. There he served us cognac and expensive cigarettes before asking, in a grave voice, “How would you like to be playing on stage next week?” This I translated to Sean, who said to me, “Kaiser, you tell the man hell yeah.” So began my life in Chinese metal.

The manager introduced us to up-and-coming rocker Ding Wu, who was (as I’ve said) cool – clichéd arena-rock stage moves notwithstanding. And he was a great musician to boot. We struck up a friendship and I set to work trying to pry him free of Black Panther, the band to which he was then attached.

Black Panther was less of a band than a federation of a dozen or so musicians who played everything from Cui Jian covers to Bon Jovi tunes to George Michael songs. These last were sung by Dou Wei, who would morph through many musical identities, eventually becoming quite the hipster. Blessed with a versatile voice but no real genre allegiance, he shed his Wham! thing and nerdy glasses, grew his hair out and permed it, and by 1991 was banging his head as frontman of Black Panther. The following year he quit, lopped his hair off, took to wearing black turtlenecks, started droning like Peter Murphy and eventually married Faye Wong.

Ding Wu introduced me to the third member of what would become Tang Dynasty: bassist Zhang Ju. He eventually became China’s first “rock martyr,” having died just shy of 25 in a motorcycle accident in 1995. Come to think of it, Zhang Ju wasn’t hip either. He was like Che Guevara, in that the iconic photos by which he’s remembered make him look a whole lot cooler than he did in real life. I loved him dearly, and still do, but that doesn’t change the fact that in 1989 he had pronouncedly porcine features, as though ready to play Pigsy from Journey to the West, and not only wore his hair in a mullet but a permed one at that. To top it off, he often wore an acid-washed denim ensemble.

Today, hip bands abound in Beijing. The city’s numerous metal bands, however, are usually never numbered among them. The acts that regularly play around town – the experimental, noise, post-rock, post-punk and indie rock bands – get breathless coverage. And they are indeed mighty hip. They can do campy, arch, alienated, bored or world-weary. Even when they do earnest, they manage never to veer too close to earnest’s close relation: cheesy.

The closest Beijing metal ever comes to hip is when it does ethnic or scary, or both – the evil Tibeto-Mongolian stylings of Kungfu Voodoo, for instance. The hip bands, you see, never subscribed to that outmoded notion that technique or musicianship should actually have any place in music. Post-whatever hipness, after all, is predicated on the repudiation of that tired old belief.

Metal’s stubborn adherence to that notion would alone be enough to disqualify it from hipness, even absent the puerile Satanic iconography, or the sophomoric lyrics – even absent the guitar heroics or leather-clad machismo. Fortunately, most Chinese rock fans here, unlike the English media and the expat hipsters, haven’t caught on to just how unhip we metal types really are. Please don’t tell them.