Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Austin Day 1

Total sensory overload. Austin's legendary 6th Street is all it's cracked up to be--and I the real SXSW festivities haven't even begun. The biggest problem that I face is that there are too many bands and not enough time. I've seen some fabulous guitar players. You can see that Stevie Ray Vaughn really imprinted on his hometown.

Jon Campbell, drummer of Beijing-based blues outfit Black Cat Bone and another experimental band, was on the same flight as me and we hit the town together last night. We both observed that the clubs,though numerous, weren't all that much different from some of the places we play in Beijing: equipment that's roughly on par, the same sort of no-soundcheck, slapdash set-up, rush-you-on-and-off kind of thing that musicians in Beijing experience.

Had the best meal I've ever eaten off a paper plate last night: chopped beef barbeque at a place called The Iron Works, just a five minute walk from the hotel. Too many people have recommended a place called Salt Lick for me not to try it. This morning, I had what were without a doubt the best Huevos Rancheros I've ever eaten, at a place called Jo's on 2nd Street.

Heading over to the conference now, which (wisely) starts in the afternoon: the assumption is of course that everyone's out 'til the wee hours taking in music and libation.

SXSW-bound

In about 19 hours I'll be boarding a plane bound for Austin, TX, where I'll be speaking later in the week on a panel at South By Southwest about the Chinese music industry. Thanks to those who commented earlier and asked some good, tough questions.

South By Southwest has turned into more than just a music festival: Right now, the tech geeks have run of the place, and then the film nerds. Wish I could have made it at least for the tech conference. Read up on what's happening there at Read/WriteWeb, which has a man on the ground blogging away about some sessions he's attending.

I'll also take the opportunity after the conference to visit my two best friends, Drew & Dave, who live in Madison and Chicago, respectively. We played in a progressive rock band called Freefall together in college, and the weekend promises to be full of great food, music, and lively conversation.

Shameless Promo: Upcoming Chunqiu Shows

We've got a couple of shows coming up toward the end of the month in Beijing, and I'd love to see some of you in attendance.

Some of you might not consider yourselves "Metal" people, but as many can attest, Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn) is different: I'd like to think we add quite a bit of melodicism without sacrifice of ass-kickery. There's reasonable complexity to our compositions without being wanky and self-indulgent. And there's definitely a touch of Chineseness to the music. Some hear hints of Celtic, Bluegrass, Mongolian and TUrkic Central Asian music in the mix too... So come check us out!

We're playing Thursday night, March 29, at Star Live (that's 星光现场). It's widely regarded as Beijing's nicest live club, and is located above Tango, across the Second Ring Road from Yonghegong, the Lama Temple. Don't know what other bands are playing, or exactly what time we go on, but you're safe if you show up 9:30 or so. Tickets are probably 30-40 kuai. Sorry, don't know that either, but will update as I have info.

We're also playing Friday night, March 30, at the New Get Lucky (新豪运) at Nurenjie. Again, details to follow; tickets there are usually 30 kuai, I think. Hope you can make one of the shows!

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.

What have you always wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about the Chinese music industry?

I'm headed in about a week to Austin, TX, where I've been invited to be on a panel at the South by Southwest Music Festival, on China's music industry. Of course it'd have been better if my band had been invited there to play, but even I can tell we're not "alt" enough for that honor. I've not spent time in Austin before, and hear it's a cool town; that's Beijing E-I-C Jerry Chan tells me of some good restaurants I plan to try, and your suggestions are welcome.

More important are your suggestions on things that I ought to talk about--things that I might overlook from my up-close perspective, but which people who bother to come to the panel should hear about. Doubtless, piracy and file sharing will come up--I have my take on that. And censorship: I have a POV on that as well. The moderator has said she'll throw me questions on the digital music scene--Internet downloads and mobile music, which I know something about, but that's pretty dull stuff, and a few good stats will put most of those Qs to bed.

What do you want to know about the music industry here?

By the way, Jeremy at Danwei alerts us to (yet another) article on the Beijing music scene, this one in The Fader. Right-click and "Save Target As" here to download the whole issue as a .pdf. The magazine's fetching editor-in-chief, Alex Wagner, came out here herself to report it. A bit of fact-checking might have helped; it has me as former bassist of TD, not lead guitarist, and it refers to Cui Jian as "Jian" at some point. But otherwise, not a bad read. There's a high style bar among rock scribes, and Ms. Wagner's mag clears it consistently. Nice prose, even if some of the old tropes about Beijing--draconian censors, metastasizing Starbucks, badly-named real estate developments--are a bit tired.

Old Tang Dynasty photos (Jan 99) and Reflections on a Watershed Year

This morning my sister Mimi, a professional photographer who co-runs Beijing's Yoga Yard, sent me these pics she took from my old band's launch concert for our second album, Epic (演义). They're 8 years old now, taken just five months before the Great Rift. (I've asked her to collect a bunch of stuff for a forthcoming documentary on global Metal that will feature some Beijing bands, including Suffocated, Chunqiu, and Tang Dynasty. I may be posting more of these--photos of the old rock scene as it was, back to the late 80s and early 90s, as I dig 'em out and get 'em scanned).

That night--an incredible high point in my life--was also marred by tragedy: Ding Yi, older brother of TD's lead singer/guitarist/co-founder Ding Wu (with the black Gibson), overdosed in the early hours and never woke up. Ding Yi, who had been resentful of me to begin with, was especially so that night, and not without reason: he was ill-treated by security people and initially prevented from going back stage, while my family was ushered in and treated like VIPs, right in front of him. Apologies from me didn't help at all.

When I talk about my departure from the band I often make half-joking reference to our "Yoko Ono problem"--Ding Wu's girlfriend, with whom I had an awful relationship--and more seriously to the immediate catalyst, the Belgrade embassy bombing, over which let's just say there was some disagreement within the band. But there was a lot of other deeper stuff too--things that had mostly to do with me being an American. It started early: I could up and leave in June of '89, I never faced real economic pressures, I could always treat music as largely a hobby. No matter how good my Chinese got, I was never living in the same world that the rest of the guys were.

Reflecting on the month following the May 9th '99 incident in Belgrade, I realize now what a major watershed it was in my life. My circle of friends changed practically overnight, from preponderantly Chinese to preponderantly expatriate. I went from living with a Beijing-born singer to dating an ABC (American-born Chinese) reporter. I plunged headlong into the world of the Internet: literally days after I formally quit, I had a job offer as editor at for an Internet start-up. I stopped playing music and didn't rejoin a band until early 2001. That's about when I managed to re-establish a sort of balance in life--vocation/avocation, Chinese/expat circles of friends, comfort with my (aspirationally) bicultural identity.

And that's about the time I realized that for me, living in Beijing was going to be about existing normally--having a life in which I didn't feel like a sojourner, someone observing from a dispassionate distance, where I felt like I was integral to the world around me. I ended up dating, then marrying, a Beijinger--a girl I knew from the rock scene, but who married me in spite of my affiliation with it. When I realize now how normal my life is now--a career, a family, very comfortable digs, a city that feels genuinely like home, some wonderful musical outlets, and now this blog--I gotta say I think at least it's going in the right direction.

It's my son John's first birthday today. I sat him in front of the computer just now and showed him some of those old pictures of Dad in his rock get-up, and he giggled and pointed. Probably the right response. My response was harder to understand: I felt a little like crying, but I felt incredibly satisfied, too.

Brother Jay's Big Gay Musical Nominated for Best Original Script

My brother quit his job as a high-flying lawyer in San Francisco to write musical theater, and he's doing well in his new career. His first original show, Insignificant Others--I'm not counting something he wrote with the quaintly 80s title Upwardly Mobile while at Stanford--just nabbed a nomination for best original script from the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle. Says Jay:

This honor comes as a total surprise, especially considering the musical was still in workshop in 2006 and has not had its commercial release yet.  In fact, we didn't even know we would be up for consideration or that any BATCC members came to see the show.  (They usually don't attend workshops or in-concerts.)

The other nominees in this category are Morris Bobrow for Shopping! The Musical  (now in its 10th month at the Shelton Theatre in Union Square) and Stew and Heidi Rodewald for Passing Strange at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.  Curiously, Vanities by David Kirshenbaum (world premiere at Theatreworks) was not nominated, and that show is moving to Off-Broadway soon.

In any event, we are very happy with this unexpected recognition by this body.  (Incidentally, Homeland was not up for consideration given its limited four day run at the end of the year.)

The little fucker's always been more talented than I. His stuff is very moving. If you're in the Bay Area and get a chance to see any of his shows, do go. Funny how we once played together in what was, bar none, the world's worst rock band, called Fallout.

China's Best Thrash Metal Band, Suffocated

Make no mistake: Suffocated (窒息)fucking rocks. They've recently released their debut CD, Dead Wind Rising, and I can say of it that for the first time there's a Chinese Metal recording genuinely on par with western Metal bands.

Here they are at the press conference they had yesterday at Melody in Beijing. I put in a little guest appearance to throw the horns with the boys and tell the media that these guys rule.

Kou Zhengyu, lead guitarist (second from left), plays with me in my own outfit, Chunqiu (春秋) Spring & Autumn), and has from the very inception of the band back in 2001. He's a truly awesome player--taste, chops, and none of the ego ordinarily associated with being a guitar-god. You can see us on YouTube here, here, and here. I'm not going to bother to imbed these because it may roll slowly if you're reading this in China. I'll dig up some Suffocated vid links too.

E-mail me or leave a comment if you're interested in picking up a copy of Suffocated's CD--don't be put off by the Cookie Monster vocals, because there's amazing musicianship going on and some good lyrics--or if you want a copy of Chunqiu's disk, which we put out last year. Cheap cheap!

Cousin Arvin Wins a Silver Bear

  Holy Shit. My first cousin Arvin Chen (my mom's younger sister's older son) won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his short film Mei, which he shot in Taipei. It's a nice piece set in a noodle shop about the owner, his daughter who helps him out there but longs to study abroad, her young co-worker who's in love with her.It's just what a short should be. He'll be working on a new feature soon, which I've seen trailers for, and now that he has Das Bear, he's bound to find funding for it pretty easily. It's sort of Woody Allenesque (he compares it to Manhattan), and it promises to be very good. Arvin's a USC Film School graduate, and apprenticed under Edward Yang Te-ch'ang. He won't admit it, but he''s a heck of a good guitar player too. He's always been quiet and pretty modest, but he's actually one of the funniest individuals I know--savagely witty when he wants to be. With my younger brother Jay writing and producing musical theater in the Bay Area now--his second one, Homeland, just debuted in December--I'm betting I'll have a brother with Tony and a cousin with an Oscar before it's all over. (My Grammy hopes perished long, long ago).

Speaking of films at Berlin, one Chinese film I helped out on (translated the screenplay) was then called Lost in Beijing, but screened in Berlin, as I understand it, under the name Pingguo (Apple, the name of the female lead played by Fan Bingbing.) I haven't seen it yet, but read one pretty nasty review of it from the Hollywood Reporter, but the reporter lost credibility with me when he called director Li Yu a "first-time director," when she's done at least two films I know of--the Lesbian film Fish and Elephant and another festival success called Dam Street (or Hong Yan). I personally liked the "Lost in Beijing" screenplay quite a bit. Anyone seen it yet?