China's Underground Music Is Weirder Than You Think

china is the largest country by population and the second largest economy in the world but if i asked you to name your favorite chinese band your answer most likely would be why is it that the country is simply too poor or too authoritarian to cultivate a music scene has our geopolitical rivalry made cultural exchange undesirable or is it something else most chinese bands don't work on facebook youtube even band camp we need a vpn needed like this that for starters china does have an underground music scene and it is bonkers during my brief foray investigating online i quickly realized china had some of the coolest post-punk psychedelic and indie music anywhere but it's also true that these bands operate under conditions that would be quite foreign to us as westerners whether it's touring by train and bus using an entirely separate array of social media websites submitting your music to censors before publishing or playing shows with the constant presence of plain clothed officers [Music] the musicians in this scene are some of the bravest funniest and most creative you'll find anywhere i spoke with lolly from beijing's famous record label maybe mars and was fortunate to have all of my nagging questions answered do you think shoegaze is particularly popular i think it was but now less and less fans doing shoe days so without further ado let's dive into the strange and wild world of china's underground music [Applause] trying to sum up china's sound with a simple label is difficult is metal that popular no it's not it's going down now in china there's another genre called the city pop do you know i'm not familiar it's very weird genre city pop it's like a chilling love beach summer something [Music] [Music] a lot of the music popular today has roots outside china's borders like city pop which comes from japan or the band retros whose front man studied in germany there's the psychedelic punk of bands like backspace or a dream camp and of course shoegaze no matter how out of date it might be getting learning about these bands is no easy task to say china operates on a separate internet is not an exaggeration instead of facebook it's wechat instead of twitter it's weibo youtube is yoku spotify is 10 cent for someone in china to access the forbidden version is not impossible they just need a vpn and a little bit of know-how but it's created an environment where very few chinese people chat with those outside their country and very few of us chat with them to explain how it got this way requires a bit of a history lesson as with other communist countries in the 20th century music in china was required to serve the political interest of the government as mao declared in 1942 music was to awaken and arouse the popular masses urging them on to unity and struggle music for the sake of entertainment was bourgeois and during the cultural revolution academies were closed instruments were destroyed and musicians were sent to the countryside to work as peasants meanwhile in communist europe things had eased up rather quickly by the 1960s soviet teens could get their fix of the beatles through bootleg records but in china this never happened in fact it wasn't until 1980 after the death of mao that millions of chinese people heard the beatles for the first time during the central tv station's evening news a story about john lennon's recent passing played a few segments of beatles songs including strawberry fields forever from then on china's gradual opening to the outside world allowed music to trickle in slowly first from records brought in by international students and later from daco scrap tapes and cds that were sold to china as reusable plastic although chinese customs would clip the tapes to make them unlistenable not quite ready to allow the free distribution of all western music crafty music fans would figure out how to restore them so even as the country began to open up economically the mechanisms of censorship remained in place the government deciding which albums movies and now websites to allow through its borders but back to the story cut out tapes were expensive hard to find and more importantly hard to understand language barrier aside imagine spending your whole childhood listening to the same eight revolutionary operas then stumbling across sister ray by the velvet underground [Music] as much as we like to brag that we loved it from the first listen oftentimes that isn't the case but nevertheless groups of young people gathered for bedroom listening parties soaking in each new album they could get their hands on and slowly making sense of the 40 odd year history of rock and pop that they had missed one such kid was qui jin often dubbed china's first rock star [Music] now frankly the music is a bit more like 80s power ballads than dirty rock and roll but it was huge for the psyche of chinese youth at the time his song nothing to my name was emblematic of the poverty and emptiness people felt at the conclusion of the cultural revolution [Applause] [Music] music became anthems for the student democracy movement he even performed at tiananmen square in may of 1989. mere weeks before well you know what happened but for our purposes it was a watershed moment the era of homegrown chinese rock music had officially begun [Music] now fast forwarding a bit by 1997 all types of music had entered china and fans of the weirder and wilder stuff were beginning to find each other albeit in tiny numbers in the city of nanjing 23 year old yan hai sun fell into a group of music fans that would hang out shop for cut out tapes and listen to bands like joy division in the clash their own punk scene was tiny maybe five bands in total heavily scorned by their families and neighbors but that year yon formed a group that would change the course of chinese indie music forever [Music] [Applause] [Music] called pk 14 they were inspired by the diy ethos of fugazi english post punk and the protest folk of bob dylan and woody guthrie after moving to beijing in 2001 they became a major force in the emerging indie scene through their lyrics music videos and insane live shows they pushed the boundaries on what a newly opened china was ready and by self-releasing music and touring by train and bus at least in the early days they paved the way for countless more underground bands to follow suit high sun also became an engineer and producer much like steve albini seeking out bands he personally loved and helping them with their debut releases in the mid 2000s he played a role in another pivotal moment producing the first album of carsick cars [Applause] formed by university students in beijing carsick cars struck that delicate balance between pop punk and noise freakouts their anthemic track jean nan hai named after the cigarette brand of the same name was simple enough to be sung by just about everyone it's probably no coincidence that they were one of the first bands to attract attention outside china in 2007 they opened a pair of dates for sonic youth on tour in europe the following year they played all tomorrow's parties in london and later south by southwest [Music] meanwhile jan haissan continued to discover and produce dozens of more underground bands it seemed like every wild album i came across had his fingerprints on it [Music] for example from chain do high person plays dramatic and philosophical indeed [Music] their first album came out in 2015 recorded by high sun and released by lolly's record label maybe mars [Music] or fozzie from xi'an a band with a wide-ranging sound from the instrumental dead sea to the noise pop of the root of innocence [Music] both records again recorded by haisan but while the music scene was indeed growing and maturing i think it's important to point out how it was still quite niche at least relative to the size of the country the bars and like very small venues like cafes there are about four to five ones mid size venue like three to four and one big venue but the thing is it changes quite fast maybe every five years some venues got shut down and some new ones open for comparison in my home city of chicago which is one-eighth the size of beijing there's at least some 25 venues for indie bands making chicago's music scene by crude comparison 20 times larger and what is the reason there they get shut down i think the big reason is like a government thing they don't quite support and sometimes the venue is in small street and people obviously complain about the noise while small enough bands are mostly able to slip under china's surveillance radar bands and venues alike can be victims of their own success rock venues which are called live houses in china are often shut down unceremoniously by way of zoning changes or by the presence of plainclothed officers who will harass patrons if there's rumors of drug use all record labels have to go through an esoteric censorship process which involves submitting lyrics recordings and band member id cards to a partly government-owned publisher there's no clear list of what's allowed and what's not the former operations manager of maybe mars told rolling stone last year if an album is rejected they resubmit to a different publisher until somebody approves it and this is all not to mention the censorship of performances which can be politically motivated like when kui jin was banned from beijing after tiananmen square or it can be completely arbitrary like when carsick cars were pulled last minute from supporting sonic youth in 2007 it makes it all the more impressive that in spite of these uncertainties the underground scene has continued to grow does every city pretty much have at least one indie venue only the big cities for like a smaller city sometimes we play in the bar the equipment is not very good but can do yeah in 2015 american journalist john yingling visited many of these tour stops capturing the sights sounds and energy of a country beginning to explore its punk no ethos no window and that's the scene the whole thing is free to watch on youtube which i'll link to below throughout his many short interviews you meet adventurers pacha topal artists look like grey but you have to find a difference between great critics optimists in cynics their feelings on chinese politics and society are complicated criticisms can be harsh albeit worded carefully but there's no denying that each and every one of them are tapped in they may represent a tiny portion of the population but they are carrying the torch so to speak i would suggest them to to read this book our fans could be your life granted 2015 does feel like ages ago a time before kovid before trade wars before uyghur camps hong kong protests the expanding surveillance state it does make me wonder how things have changed between then and now on the one hand you see headlines about venues getting shut down bands being censored a promising indie scene now in decline on the other hand indie rock has become more popular than ever thanks in no small part to the hit reality show the big and that show changed the life of many bands you know before the income of the band playing one show maybe just a 2000 rmb and now after the show they are really there free to watch online with english subtitles this season-long reality competition is surreal it has all the trappings of an american idol-like show snappy judges dramatic backstories camera confessionals and of course an overbearing beverage sponsor but the kicker is the music is actually pretty good [Music] for example retros which is that industrial post punk band we heard at the start of the video well they actually won last year's competition [Music] it's almost like death grips winning at america's got talent fans got popular they have better life and people more people knowing the music but the best side is like most live houses were full of people and some bands want to book the venue but i cannot book because it's too popular in a sudden while i do understand the concern about a subversive indie scene getting watered down i think that overall it's a good problem to have holding a debate about sellouts and authenticity seems like a rite of passage for an emerging music scene not to mention some of the best records that i heard had just come out in the last couple years like persephone's seasons from the shanghai band rubber [Music] or just about anything from the band backspace one of my personal favorites on this list from their music which takes elements of kraut rock into smooth punk jams to their visuals it seems like everything this band does is fascinating [Music] coming from a small town in the south of china they relocated to the indie scene capital beijing where they signed with maybe mars their most recent release 2022's face of the night features the epic face mask tragedy a song radii china reports is about the distance between lovers caused by the need to wear face masks in this modern [Music] from this end it would appear that china's indie scene is still doing its thing being subversive weird and fun adapting in the face of lockdowns and restrictions and staying creative to those of us watching from abroad whatever we think about the politics and current events here's to hoping the indie scene stays this way for many more years to come [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Bandsplaining

Views: 572,214

Keywords: china censorship, the great firewall, chinese punk, chinese DIY, yang haisong, punk ethos, fugazi, xi jinping, chinese communist party, cultural revolution, history of china, music of cultural revolution, experimental music, krautrock, ambient, china indie music, dakou, scrapped tapes china, mao zedong, mao zedong music

Id: C7-7X9t3shE

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022