Frog in a Well: My own little corner of the Chinese music scene

Dan, who's an expat playing music down in Shenzhen, was good enough to respond to an earlier post asking what people might want to know about the Chinese music scene. Reading through his list of questions (which appear below as asked) I'm made painfully aware that my scope of knowledge is dated and narrow. Taking a crack at his questions/topics:

1. guess I'd be ready say something about trends you see in the music scene

The long tail phenomenon, for sure: More heterogeneity in music, a splintering of genres, and increasing awareness of the disparate subgenres of music that exist in the West and developed Asia, and what those subgenres mean in the sociocultural contexts where they emerged. This has been going on for a long time, but has been kicked into high gear by the ready availability of CD catalog cut-outs, pirated CDs, and of course P2P file sharing networks, which are highly developed in China. Look at the magazines available these days both offline and on, and you realize that Chinese music fans these days outside of the mainstream are current on all the microgenres. Chinese bands are placing themselves in a global musical context. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of crap music at the head of the long-tail curve, and even out along it, most Chinese music I'm hearing is still in an imitative stage, but I think we're moving out of that. Awareness of the endless possibilities will open up musical innovation--I hope.

2. popular themes that people write about

Here, my ignorance is appalling. I really don't read lyrics most of the time, unless I happen to see them scrolling across the screen (which means I'm in a Karaoke, which means I'm in some business situation and liquored up and listening to pop pabalum, and then you know what that's all about--I love you, why'd you leave me, come home). Occasionally someone will tell me "Hey, so-and-so is a good lyricist," but in those cases the lyrics are so abstruse that I can't be bothered to make sense of them. In the Metal genre--my little corner--there's surprisingly little of the gore (Death Metal), the swords-and-sorcery (Power Metal), the balls-out blasphemy (Black Metal) that are typical themes for those subgenres in English: like Chinese poetry, you get a lot of imagistic stuff, some (admittedly maudlin) emotive stuff. I run across a lot of songs about the power of music to move people. Wish I could say more.

3. some of the specific "China" challenges that bands face here when they're starting out

It's tough in most other cities, I imagine, without a lot of decent venues and other "infrastructure" like good guitar shops and a pool of decent musicians, but in Beijing at least I'd say the "China" challenges are outweighed by the "China" advantages: A relatively low bar, cheap and plentiful rehearsal space, no pay-to-play deals at venues, a decent number of venues, and very little genuine competition. Plus there's keen interest from the foreign media and academic establishments, so you get easy press and patronage. Very few bands are really going to "make it," but almost anyone who doesn't completely suck can get to the point where they're playing paid gigs a couple of times a month.

4.if it is (or is not) possible to make a decent living playing music in China

Nope. Not what I'd call a decent living, not for the vast majority of musicians, not right now. If salvation comes, it'll come with mobile downloads, and that's going to have to wait until there's some significant uptake of 3G service. I do believe that full-song music downloads will become popular as they have in Japan (where 95% of all digital music downloads were mobile in 2006), and in Korea. But it'll be years before we see musicians in marginal genres--say, oh, like rock!--make any decent money in China. 

5. maybe something about how bands use the internet for marketing (if at all)

They do: Lots actually have MySpace sites, and there are BBSs and sites like DemoCN that are available for musicians to use. Most bands are so pessimistic about selling CDs that they just allow downloads via their sites, in the hopes that they'll become viral hits and people will come to their shows.

6. Other main music scenes (ie, everything aside for Beijing)

Chengdu was looking promising for a while: a slew of bands from that city came to Beijing back in 2001 or 2002 and I heard some that I quite liked. But it's been quiet of late. Shanghai doesn't have a lot of bands, or that big of a scene, but there are two bands from there that I think highly of: Crystal Butterfly and Frozen Fairyland. In Shenyang there's a really brutal Metal scene. Same with Tianjin: there are some really scary Metal bands out there, some of whom I've seen perform in Beijing. Names escape me. Kunming has produced some good bands and musicians, but they've mostly found success only in Beijing. The Kunming scene, from what I can tell, has a lot of ephemeral jam bands with rotating line-ups, just right for the backpackers who float in and out of that city.

7. If there are regional style niches (is there a city that may be equivalent to early 90's Seattle, for example?)

If so, I don't know about it. Beijing really still dominates.

8. Stuff about local hip-hop

I honestly don't know. I like hip-hop plenty, but I've not really checked out the local hip-hop scene insofar as one exists.

9. Any interesting fusion releases (ie, modern music sounds mixed with traditional Chinese instruments) that don't suck?

I've done a bit of that in the two original bands I've played in, and I'm always surprised not to see more of it going on. Where I've seen it done successfully is with bands like Confucius Sez, to some extent with Second Hand Rose, quite well with Buyi, and again, with that Shanghai band Frozen Fairyland.

I'd be happy to elaborate on any of this for anyone who's interested. Thanks, Dan--this is good prep for my talk in Austin.

Comments

[Azchael (Max-Leonhard von Schaper)]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for the interview, those are quite some interesting points! I agree with you on the lyrics topic. For most (esp. metal bands) lyrics are always second to music in China acc. to my impression. Those gore/death/black metal bands "sing" in a way it's definitely indistinguisable what they actually say, so the song writing, i.e. lyrics writing comes as a last point on their "to do" list.

Sorry, actually I wanted to post a few working links with more info on the bands you mentioned, but I always came across a spam message. If anyone wants some more info on them, please check out: http://wiki.rockinchina.com

There you can enter the following band names in the search box:
Cold Fairyland (aka Frozen Fairyland)
Cloth (aka Buyi)
Crystal Butterfly

for some bands from Chengdu:
Soundtoy
Proximity Butterfly
Ashura
Dim Nova

for some bands from Tianjin:
Vomit

It's good to see you blogging again!

Rock on!!!
Max-Leonhard von Schaper (aka Azchael)
Rock in China
www.rockinchina.com

[Tony Reno]

Nice to see you are blogging! Please give a listen to my podcast. We play the latest and greatest rock from around Asia, among other things :-)

[Micah]

Shanghai has some hip-hop crews with released albums. A lot of their web exposure happens on Shanghaining:

http://www.shanghaining.com/

Most of the rock scene in Shanghai concentrates around promoters/club Yuyintang:

http://www.yuyintang.com/

In my impression, the band with the best lyrics in Shanghai (besides Cold Fairyland) is Top-Floor Circus 顶楼马戏团, because they have a good sense of humor and mix Shanghainese into songs. Also the band 三黄鸡 has strong local flavor.

But of course it's true that Beijing still dominates... first-mover advantage.

[Lisa]

Beijing's advantage over Shanghai is infrastructural: government support, media coverage and record labels. We have the bands, we have the audiences, we have the venues and we have the shows, but Shanghai's up against a wall in terms of bigger or more permenent options. Bands here have mostly given up on cutting "real" records, after the Crystal Butterfly/New Bees debacle. Some of the guys have launched what they hope will grow into a Shanghai version of the Midi festival, but the Shanghai municipal government is very hostile to all independent cultural events. And not just in music: the Fringe Theater Festival last year encountered similar problems.

We've got about a hundred active bands here, with Crystal Butterfly (now largely inactive), Cold Fairyland and the Honeys the main veterans. Top Floor Circus is Shanghai's version of Second Hand Roses: I consider them more performance artists than musicians, and consider their live great and their music meh. But that's just my opinion.

Low-profile veterans Bird on a Wire have evolved into the popular I-GO. There are lots of "new" (I have a liberal interpretation of that word...) groups that are really promising, more than I can keep track of, Micah probably can say better than I. Sonnet is really promising, as is Happy String. Sanhuangji is interesting because they have a more folky, peastanty sound which they tightened admirably after making their demo CD. Lanse Huayuan is probably too poppy for your tastes, Lao Kai, but they're the stylistic successors to Crystal Butterfly (doesn't hurt that they share a bass player). Lanting, the other contendor to that title, are currently disbanded, but knowing their frontman Wang Yihou, I doubt we've seen the last of them. Zhang Haisheng of Yuyintang lists 疯狂蘑菇团，残酷音律, and 大傻帽 as other promising new kids to watch, but I admit I haven't seen any of them yet.

Seriously, there are now more bands and concerts than even a geek like me can keep track of. It's great, but it's not enough.

[Azchael (Max-Leonhard von Schaper)]

Hi Micah and Lisa,

What about the Shanghai metal scene? I remember there had been a few basic bands:
Deadly Sins
Blood Funk
Sky Funeral
Ling Chi
are they still active?

Rock on!!!
Azchael

[Babi]

Has anybody here seen this crazy Chinese rock stuff yet? It's in reflection of the Geffen Records/GnR "Chinese Democracy" promo, and avenges the anti-China/China-hater opportunists smear campaign, which includes avenging for the utterly cold-hearted Sharon Stone "karma" remark, the Jack Cafferty goon-thing, and this latest derision with westerner's "care and concern" about China and it's democracy. Check it out, it's just invigoratingly SHOCKING: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGLChQED9I8

here an alternate version with more complete subtitles of those Chinese metalcore-thrash lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyt8aHxAm0g