Andy, how did you come to focus on the Chinese music scene?
I think that my overall project, which began when I decided to write a
dissertation on the influence of jazz-age nightlife on China in the
early 20th century, is about how globalizing cultures of dance and
music affect China. During the 1920s and '30s, Chinese people in
Shanghai and other big cities took to ballroom dancing and jazz music,
though it had to be played differently—watered down one might say—to the way it was played in the West.
Today when you visit China, you find that people are ballroom dancing
on the streets and it seems so natural, such a part of Chinese culture
now that you don't realize that it was a big struggle for them to
learn how to dance partner style. This is really the subject of my
first book: How China learned to dance between two world wars and a
great revolution.
My second book, which I'm working on with my colleague James Farrer, a
sociologist of China, is about how the Chinese passion for
international style dancing and music continued through the Mao
years despite suppression and reemerged in the 1980s and '90s through
a vigorous dance club and bar scene. I'm a historian by training, so
we can each tap into our strengths and create a coherent story about
Shanghai and its cultures of internationalized nightlife through the
entire 20th century. I draw on my research on the 1920s-50s, James on
his studies of dance clubs in 1980-90s Shanghai, and we both draw on a
wealth of personal data from years of observing the club and bar scene
in China as participant observers. But more recently while living
in China this past month I've become fascinated by the—for want of a
better word—independent live music scene.
What does the live music scene in China say about
the country's relationship with the world? Will the world see a
China cool, corresponding to Japan's gross national cool?
China has a dynamic relationship with the world, not just absorbing
other cultures but also feeding into them—and not just with
factory-made products either. We can already see the results in the
world of film: The Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese's film The
Departed was based on a film made in Hong Kong. It is only a matter
of time before other facets of Chinese culture become popularized in
the West.
Already there are many more people studying Chinese in Europe and
America and Australia than ever before. One of the American students
I currently teach here in Beijing has been studying Chinese since
elementary school and is already quite functional. There are
millions of Chinese living abroad and actively relating to the
societies they live in, not just sequestered in a Chinatown. So the
opportunities for cultural mixing are there.
In terms of music, China's independent music scene is diversifying
rapidly. Most people associate China with Cantopop or Taiwanpop which
tends to focus on singing idols who don't write their own songs, but
here in Mainland China live bands are becoming ever more ubiquitous.
I've been told there are over 600 bands actively playing in China,
which doesn't seem much compared to America or Europe or Australia but
if you graphed the growth of independent music bands over the past two
decades, I think you'd see an exponential rise that will only keep
growing. And these bands are creating their own music, albeit music
that is sometimes heavily influenced by certain genres and subgenres
in the West. Yet there is also an unmistakable influence of more
traditional Chinese folk music on some of the bands, suggesting that
the music is being glocalized to use a popular term in academia.
Since moving over here in June I have personally seen over 50 bands
playing live in festival concerts or in small clubs. They are
incredibly diverse, ranging from punk bands such as No Name, Joyside,
Scoff, Hedgehog, and the SUBS—all popular bands in Beijing—to heavy metal in all its diverse subgenres, e.g. the Shanghai band 45 or the
Beijing band Chun Qiu, to techno-pop a.k.a. the New Pants, to
experimental, to folk. Many bands defy a distinct genre and are
experimenting with a mix of influences. Banana Monkey, a Shanghai
band that I saw perform twice in the past three weeks, does a cool
mixture of grunge, metal, pop, and hip-hop and puts on a great act.
There is tremendous energy and vitality in this scene, as you will see
if you read my blog.
Are Chinese feeling freer to express themselves in
art generally? James argued that sexual rights are linked to political rights. Would you link artistic expression with free expression and speech in China?
Today there is much more room for free expression in the arts than
anytime since Mao's Rectification talks at Yan'an in 1942—as long as
it does not cross certain boundaries. Most artists get away with
subtle digs at the current regime, not outright protest but
expressions of dissatisfaction that are easy to see if you read
between the lines. This is true for the visual arts as well as music. Many bands sing in English, and if you read their lyrics, you can see that they are expressing a collective anxiety about China's past, present, and future.
But I think it goes way beyond China.
What these artists and musicians are expressing here is universal, which is why I think there is a market for their art in the West. One common theme is the march of post-modernity, which is affecting all of us all over the world,
though as William Gibson says, not all at the same time. People
living in any big city, especially Shanghai or Beijing, have seen these
cities transform completely over the past decade. Everywhere old
buildings are being knocked down, new ones growing in their place. At
the same time all sorts of influences from abroad—Hollywood films in
the form of pirated DVDs, music downloaded off the internet, American
TV shows, European fashion designers, foreign restaurants, clubs,
cultural events, concerts—are pouring into the country changing the
way people look at life. In the past few months, Roger Waters of Pink
Floyd and the band Sonic Youth played in Shanghai.
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| Chinese are taking the musical idioms developed in the West to critique society or to express a primal scream about the nature of
humanity and are applying them to Chinese society. |
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The parallels with the early 20th century when Shanghai was the
gateway between China and the world are obvious, but the pace of
change is much more rapid now than ever before. I think that the
artists of China are capturing how they feel about the changes, a
mixture of elation and anxiety, bewilderment and surprise, and above
all, a deep uneasiness about where the world is going. You can see
this if you go to the art district in Beijing known as 798, where over
80 galleries showcase the latest trends in Chinese visual arts.
This to me helps explain why punk and heavy metal bands are so popular
now. Chinese are taking the musical idioms developed in the West to critique society or to express a primal scream about the nature of
humanity and are applying them to Chinese society. While for various
reasons their influence is limited here, it's obvious when these bands
play that both Chinese and foreigners in the audience get what they
are doing. They don't have to get it cerebrally, just viscerally, and
you can see that when they writhe and dance to the music or sing along
to the songs.
What has been your experience with your blog so far?
I actually don't know who reads my blog exactly, aside from friends
and family and the occasional comment by an anonymous reader. I do
know from statistics that are available to me through my platform that
the subscribership has jumped in the past three weeks from around 300
to over 1200, and I expect it to keep climbing. The other day a
Chinese woman posted a comment about my blog on Wei Hui's book
Shanghai Baby, which I'd posted a couple months ago. It was obvious
she'd taken some time to write her comment and that she was laying out
her genuine feelings and insights, while challenging some of my own
opinions. I was so thrilled that I turned her comment into a blog.
I'd really like to encourage more people to comment on my blogs or to
send me stuff that they have written, which if it's of good quality
I'm happy to post. I'm hoping that this will develop into a dialogue
about China, where it's been and where it's going.
Do you have many Chinese readers?
There are two things that limit my audience here in China. One is
that I write in English. The other is that this site, for unexplained
reasons, is blocked in China. There is no reason for it to be blocked
here since it is by and large a celebration of China, though I do
throw in a critique here and there. My guess is that many sites that shouldn't be blocked here are because the system is like a sawed-off
shotgun. Maybe there are one or two sites on my platform Squarespace
that are controversial here, and that is enough to get the whole
platform blocked. To be honest, I really don't know how that works.
So most of my audience I think is abroad, though I do have a
myspace.cn site that I hope is reaching more people here locally,
where I post my blogs as well. But I'd be really happy if they
unblocked my shanghaijournal site.
What inspired you to start a blog?
I think what originally inspired me to create a blogsite was that for
a long while I was actively participating in a lot of online or email
discussions in various forums including H-ASIA and MCLC and Asia Times
Online, and I felt that I had a lot of things to say that didn't quite
fit the academic format of books and articles.
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| My guess is that many sites that shouldn't be blocked here are because the system is like a sawed-off
shotgun. |
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At the same time, I've been an avid photographer and more recently a filmmaker in China and I wanted to publicize some of my photo and film collection so that people could benefit from it. Most of these photos and short films are didactic in nature, describing a certain historical or
contemporary site, an event such as a performance, or lunch at a
restaurant. To be honest I haven't put together films lately for my
blog because I am already spending a lot of time on the blogging
itself and the filming I'm doing now is more serious and oriented
towards a long-term project.
A third reason I built my blogsite is that I feel that the standard
media focuses way too much on the more sensational aspects of China,
giving people in the West a slanted view—take the current shoddy
products campaign in the western media, which has been hyped ad
nauseum. I felt that I could take some of my academic knowledge and
apply it to people, places, and things that I encounter in China
through daily life or through my projects. Not that I wanted this to
be an academic website—in fact, I try to stay away from the
four-syllable words that we academics tend to string together into
long and convoluted sentences just to show how clever we are. I
prefer short declarative sentences and try to be as accurate as I can
in describing things, places, and people, adding my own reflections
and insights now and then.
You have used many mediums in your work, including movies and blogs. What's next for you?
I have another project based around the assassination of a Japanese
officer in Shanghai in 1935, which is a fascinating case study in
local and international politics during the vital period prior to the
outbreak of a full-scale war between China and Japan. I've already
done archival research on this case in Shanghai and Tokyo and have a
pretty good theory of what happened and why it's important to tell
this story. Sino-Japanese relations is one of the most vital issues
in this part of the world, as anybody following the news would know.
As Walter Benjamin once wrote (I'm loosely paraphrasing here), history
is constantly changing because it is constellated with our
understanding of the present age. My historical research is conducted
with an eye on illuminating the present. More and more I'm becoming
interested in capturing certain aspects of contemporary China as they
grow and change—history in the making so to speak. I consider myself
an inheritor of the Benjaminian way of documenting past and present,
though I don't possess his aphoristic skills. One thing I have that
he didn't is film.
My latest film project, which began last month, is to document the country's live indie music scene. Over the next few months I want to get to know the bands, the club owners, the promoters, the record producers, and the audience. This weekend I plan to attend a concert in Hunan featuring veteran rocker Cui Jian and a Beijing-based punk band called the SUBS. I don't know yet where
this project will lead, but I've invested a lot of money in a new HD
camcorder, and a lot of time in filming and documenting the scene, so
I'm hoping I'll be able to recoup my investment in time and money some
way or other.
