I just had Kristin Winsents, a DJ from P3, Norway’s answer to Triple J, call up to chat about the music scene in China. Apparently if you go to Kristin’s website and under the headline “musikkmisjonen i opptak” click on the date (20/09) you can listen to the show.
I’ve barely been able to see any bands and music because I’ve been off to Oslo for Oya, chasing up jobs here and generally getting to know a new city. Anyway I ended up on my mobile at 10:30 last night chatting live. So what is my take on the music scene.
There isn’t a strong band scene in Shanghai, it seems pretty culturally imperialist to expect a bunch of indie bands, but there’s not much evidence of a strong youth music scene. The only record shop I’ve seen was a Chinese folk/new age one at the excellent Moganshan Lu artist/gallery compound. Otherwise, there’s only street stalls selling pirate dee-vee-dees and cee-dees. And mostly the range is pretty abominable: Celine Dion, Oasis and so on. Apparently there’s another stall somewhere doing a roaring trade in Belle & Sebastian and other indie type records. But you know that’s one dodgy pirate stall in a city of 20 million.
The lack of a music industry as such – I don’t count the local Idol incarnation Super Voice Girls… PR phenomenon? marketing genius? yes, probably, but not music. Anyway, there’s no local hub for music to form around, the kind of hub you’d usually rely on record shops for.
Shanghai does appear to have appeared on the touring DJ list, though it’s mostly second rate jocks like Rennie Pilgrem or John 00 Fleming that make it here, as well as third rate Australian DJs – the latest is some character called Mark John, who is apparently one of Australia’s most revered jocks. That’s why the visit from Jori Hulkkonen was so great the other week. A combination of really great and definitely some odd music is a breath of fresh air. The next day Common, Derrick May and Ian Brown played in Beijing too, though I stayed in Shanghai.
Other than that it’s pretty slim pickings for touring acts – you get your Whitneys and Michael Boltons – but not much more. Shanghai has some great people and good bars, but being a finance city the focus is on venues with generic jazz or typical house or smooth rock. But underneath it all, things are exploding. We went across the river the other day to Pudong to see Nanjing’s PK-14. Pudong is the corporate capital of Shanghai and a memorial to the skyline of the Jetsons, but being there it’s hard to believe it didn’t even exist five to 10 years ago. It was just rice paddies. So with that massive rate of ‘progress’ it’s easy to imagine that within a few years things will have changed dramatically again.
Plus the past year has seen some killer local bands getting levels of exposure and confidence to get out and explore. Subs (pictured), of course, are one of the best live bands China has to offer and increasingly one it’s best known internationally. But there are plenty of others. PK-14 play angular indie songs influenced by the usual suspects atm, Joy Division, Gang of Four. Ma Fei San play an uncompromising sound somewhere between hardcore, post punk, post rock, experimental and noise. And D!O!D!O!D! (they have to be influenced at least nomenclaturely by !!!) play improv sounds drawing on rock and free jazz.
PK-14 – 她丢失了信仰
PK-14 – ç‡¥çœ å¤œ
PK-14 – 这辆红色列车
There’s a growing pool of other bands making cool, if often derivative sounds (but then again isn’t most rock?) and plenty of them are playing at the Midi Festival in Beijing over the next week. I’m interested to hear more of punk girl band Hang On The Box.
Piracy is the biggest problem for music here. It’s so easy to get fake CDs and so hard to get the real things. No record shops and mail order can take a LONG time, the only reliable sources for music are a handful of pirate stalls that sell fairly obvious alternative CDs or downloading music. So the scenes here don’t have that local record shop locus that has focussed so many music scenes (though of course that’s a trend on a larger scale than just China). From what I hear though, musicians, especially underground punk and electronics, are starting to connect via online hubs (one that’s open to non-Mandarin readers is Wuhan Punk). Most are pretty closed to foreigners right now, but it could be the start of something pretty interesting.
Check out Beijing-based music journo Jon Campbell’s column at Pop Matters for local knowledge. He’s the English speaking face of Subs, he’s written for the Wire and most English language press in China, so he knows what’s what.