Beijing’s Underground Rock Scene

Photos by Joe Magliaro and Shu Hung

“I used to tell people I was an idiot because then they’d all shut up. I would hide my glory, my soul in my bones—but I’d know who was the winner.” –Xiao Rong, lead singer of Brain Failure

Twenty-first century mainland China could easily be the landscape of an oddly anachronistic musical, with a bizarre medley of characters. An Oliver-Twist-like beggar boy in a coal-stained city entreats subway passengers by placing his hands on their laps, singing a capella with disarming sweetness. Ten thousand Buyi minorities wear brightly-colored costumes on a mountaintop, singing songs to gods for a crowd of watching tourists. In back-alley KTV rooms, foreigners croon karaoke Carpenters covers from English lyric songbooks. And last but not least, long-haired boys in basements set aside their electric guitars to take a break from rehearsing, and squat outside with cigarettes and shishkebabs, the echo of rock still ringing in their ears.

That “bone soul glory” is very emblematic of the atmosphere of China today, the way it is trying to develop steadily and carefully—a kind of glory that comes from wallowing in obscurity, both enjoying it and hoping it has a latent payoff.

Since the days of Beijing’s Friendship Hotel, a haven for the international community in the late ’70s and early ’80s where expatriates influenced the birth of rock and live music, those boys (and girls) with guitars have sprung up tenfold, armed with pirated musical influences from around the world. From Shen Li Hui’s Modern Sky label, which represents more British-influenced bands like the Radiohead-resembling Convenience Store, to Secondhand Roses, a drag queen band with roots in a northeastern Chinese folk music called er ren zhuan, to Hang on the Box, a seminal girl punk band, the scene spans a number of genres and appeals to both locals and expats living in the city.

It is obscurity, the nooks and crannies, the looming underground spaces of possibility, the feeling of a genuine frontier, that is so seductive in Beijing. A punk club entrance down a crumbling brick alleyway, illuminated by drapings of red and green fairy lights. Underground practice rooms for rock musicians in sewer-like spaces full of serpentine pipage. A music school where rows of minimalist white buildings fan zephyrs of guitar, piano, and flute into the air across a backdrop of cobalt blue mountains and the occasional fuchsia-blossomed peach tree. Mics and amps set up in pingfang (traditional Chinese shacks), artists from around the world living in refurbished siheyuan (traditional Chinese courtyard houses).

Bands like Brain Failure, the first punk band in China ever to self-release an album, has been playing Beijing venues since 1998. Xiao Rong, the lead singer, is a punk with hair shaved and dyed into something resembling a leopard. On stage, he is primal and charismatic and self-possessed, exuding dangerous charm. In one of the bigger recent events in China, Brain Failure played in Inner Mongolia last summer with Cui Jian, the founder and “godfather” of Chinese rock music, in the second of a widely publicized “Chinese Woodstock” series of concerts.

Last year Brain Failure traveled the States opening for the Dropkick Murphys, a Boston-based punk band that’s generated enough heat to pop up on “Conan O’Brien.” “Not only did we play for a bunch of drunk Irish men, it was in a cool club called Avalon and there were 2,000 people there,” says Xiao. “On Halloween we went to Avalon again, to open for Big D & The Kids Table. The audience [recognized us and] all started to scream our name.”

Brain Failure later asked Murphy’s singer/bassist Ken Casey to produce their album, American Dreamer, and then they went on a tour of their own.

American Dreamer is solidly produced and has a tone of lightness and celebration. Its English lyrics are sometimes too blaringly straightforward (“Coming to the USA” and “Gimme the Cash”), without any of the cute eccentricity of Japanese bands; musically, American Dreamer has comfortingly familiar roots in the Clash and the Sex Pistols, and a few songs like “Such a Dangerous” feature sunny, ska-like offbeat guitars.

Brain Failure is due to produce six songs from their 16-track demo with Ken Casey in February, followed by their fourth US tour in the spring. One of the tracks will be a cover of “Cynic,” an old rock and blues song by a Chinese singer named Wang Di, and a slow ska song about the 2008 Olympics.

When asked to tell a story about his childhood that reveals his true nature, Xiao Rong says, “I used to tell people I was an idiot because then they’d all shut up. I would hide my glory, my soul in my bones—but I’d know who was the winner.” That “bone soul glory” is very emblematic of the atmosphere of China today, the way it is trying to develop steadily and carefully—a kind of glory that comes from wallowing in obscurity, both enjoying it and hoping it has a latent payoff. “When I was in high school I was a big fan of all the big Chinese rock bands and musicians, like Cui Jian, Tang Chao, Hei Bao,” says Xiao. “In 1994, I discovered foreign music from a music program called New Rock Magazine in Beijing. DJ Youdai used to play all kinds of artists on his program. The Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Metallica, Nirvana, Green Day, and more.

“In 1996 there was still not much foreign music for sale in China, but we used to get them in an underground way: dakou CDs.” (Dakou CDs or literally, “saw gash CDs” are a phenomenon whereby CD retailers in various countries throw away unsold CDs. To mark them as trash, the CDs are notched with saws, taking a small chunk out of each disc. These notched CDs—which are still playable, minus a couple songs—are often shipped to China as landfill. Scavengers pick them from the trash and sell them to re¬tailers, giving them a second retail shelf life.)

There’s a rich vein of material in Chinese culture analogous to the medieval/fantasy stuff that western bands tapped into—successfully romantic, heroic, ass-kicking. It supplied some inspiration for the look of the band [Tang Dynasty], for the visual images we wanted the band to conjure up with its music.

One of the Chinese bands that Xiao Rong mentions as an influence, Tang Chao, or Tang Dynasty, was the first heavy metal band in China and was co-founded by American-born Kaiser Kuo back in 1984. Kaiser is a longtime veteran of the scene and even helped foster it.

“Most people in the music scene of the late 1980s,” explains Kaiser, “didn’t really understand the different genres and sub-genres of rock and the ideologies they were intimately tied up with. It was easy enough to understand that punk was about iconoclasm and maybe even nihilism, but it took some explaining to make my friends in Beijing understand why the average devotee of a hair metal band like Poison or Warrant tended to be very different than, say, an Iron Maiden fan.”

Part of the search for a unique voice seems always to have been related to finding the right blend of East and West:

“There’s a rich vein of material in Chinese culture analogous to the medieval/fantasy stuff that western bands tapped into—successfully romantic, heroic, ass-kicking. It supplied some inspiration for the look of the band [Tang Dynasty], for the visual images we wanted the band to conjure up with its music. It’s not like we took to the stage wearing armor and Chinese battle gowns; it was hairstyles we sometimes wore, a red sword tassel I used to hang from my guitar, that sort of thing. The videos from the first album had lots of this sort of wuxia imagery.

“I don’t think this idea was fully realized in Tang Dynasty, and so I’ve tried to keep part of that alive in my current band, Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn). Other elements of ‘Chineseness’ in it include lots of pentatonic-based melodies, harmonies based on fourths and fifths (very common in Chinese music), and Chinese-sounding instrumentation.”

While the possibilities within Chinese rock loom large, perhaps it has yet to truly succeed. Like other types of artists in China, bands are often shackled by a reliance on imitation, or they replace creative risk-taking with political statement.

“The ecosystem necessary for the development of a real rock scene isn’t in place yet in Beijing, let alone other cities of China,” continues Kaiser. “By contrast, there’s a very advanced rock music ecosystem in the States: venues, equipment vendors, shops, teach¬ers, studios, you name it. And a much, much bigger market. It’s more competitive, too, forcing bands in the States to work much harder to get gigs, and to promote yourself.

“It’s not like in Beijing, where on a typical night there are six or seven bands playing, each with only a 20-minute set, so bands can write five or six songs and just play those same tunes again and again. In the U.S., if you can’t play a 90-minute set, you’re not a real band.”

When it comes to rock, what saves us all, is the emergence of boldly unique sounds. And while that has to do with awareness and availability of resources, it is equally if not more important to give ourselves up to the sudden emergence of unusual combinations of influences (a factor which is not at all lacking in Beijing) and most of all, to stay true to and believe in one’s impulses.

After all, the greatest value of obscurity comes more from observing the faintest murmurs of our souls, rather than in biding time toward glory.