Popular music in China

mos dan

fact music
As in: music that is popular with young people in China, be it Western or Chinese. Anyone got any ideas? I assume the likes of U2 and Coldplay are big in the big cities.. my utterly unsubstantiated guess would be that there's a certain amount of fetishisation of Western music and style in Shanghai and Beijing, in the Universities, and so on.

And does anyone know if they have charts in China? I assume so, but couldn't find anything online.

But I did find some interesting stuff about Chinese rock music (http://web125.burns.kundenserver42....?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=28) and a passing mention of 'C-pop'.

I ask because I'm writing some stuff for www.chinadialogue.net about music and climate change that will be aimed at young people. The Chris Martin hypocrisy issue (he professes to be green-fingered, but flies everywhere by private jet) is an obvious starting point, but I'm trying to find out if the Chinese yout dem are likely to have heard of Coldplay in the first place.

Merci beaucoup.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Just got back from Beijing, Cheng Du and Shanghai. It's kinda like talking about what's popular across the whole of Europe to say music in 'China', I'd concentrate on Shanghai really. The taxis outside Shanghai play alot of Thai type ballads, and Beatles covers. But they probably changed the music for us when we got in. Shame. Boy bands ( skinny, feathered floppy hair ) are played alot on the TV. Stevie Wonder and George Michael in the malls."I just called to say I love you' was fucking everywhere, the 12 inch version where he goes into just the vocodered bit, weirdly.

Shanghai's pretty much like any other metropolis, except more modern lol, lots of avant-jazz gigs, Justin and Madonna and Gwen Stefani coming from boutiques. MTV-type station playing girl bands ( one rather good tune with faux-electro beats and the girls all standing behind Dansette type record players, scratching ) and pop metal boy bands singing nonsense lyrics ( Money Make Me Home I think was one ). Fun stuff. From the look of the kids, electro and hair metal is big. I think the kids still do that standing still and shaking their heads type dance, but didn't do any gigs, I was too busy in the restaurants :)

No names of the bands unfortunately, sorry, my Chinese isn't that good yet! There's a few papers from Shanghai with listings etc that you could probably get hold of, a couple of the gig venues looked like fun. As an aside, the artists colony in Shanghai was wicked, there's some really good art out there.

So yeah, they'll definitely have heard of Chris Martin. If not I'm sure people will be happy to look him up, but they will have done.

Shanghai was the most modern place I've ever been. It's quite frighteningly 21st century. The only things that are inaccessible really are US blogs and porn, though weirdly I could get onto dissensus :)
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
i think i still have the first punk 7-inch to ever come out of china :D

a friend tells me hiphop is huge right now. and there are chinese hiphop bands... but it's the worst combinatiion of bling and pop shit...
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
i think i still have the first punk 7-inch to ever come out of china :D

a friend tells me hiphop is huge right now. and there are chinese hiphop bands... but it's the worst combinatiion of bling and pop shit...

What was the punk 7 inch Zhao?
 

zhao

there are no accidents
What was the punk 7 inch Zhao?

it's called 5000 Years Punk. featured a cool drawing of the Monkey King (mythical folk hero) on the cover. a compilation of bands that sound like Exploited era brit punkrock. sounds pretty good actually, the chinese language works really well in this context, if entirely derivative. good story too: i started talking to this german girl randomly on the street because she had a cool jacket with chinese characters on it. turns out she's a journalist living in Beijing, writing for chinese newspaper (was visiting her family in LA for holidays). we became friends and she gave it to me claiming that it was the very first piece of punk vinyl to come out of Beijing. and i believe her because her boyfriend was in one of the first punk bands there. i hope to god that i still have it... gonna be really angry if some asshole stole it! :mad: :mad: :mad:
 
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mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
it's called 5000 Years Punk. featured a cool drawing of the Monkey King (mythical folk hero) on the cover. a compilation of bands that sound like Exploited era brit punkrock. sounds pretty good actually, the chinese language works really well in this context, if entirely derivative. good story too: i started talking to this german girl randomly on the street because she had a cool jacket with chinese characters on it. turns out she's a journalist living in Beijing, writing for chinese newspaper (was visiting her family in LA for holidays). we became friends and she gave it to me claiming that it was the very first piece of punk vinyl to come out of Beijing. and i believe her because her boyfriend was in one of the first punk bands there. i hope to god that i still have it... gonna be really angry if some asshole stole it! :mad: :mad: :mad:

That sounds so great! I picked up loadsa Monkey DVDs out there of varying types, funny enough.
 

mos dan

fact music
Steve Barker contributed to a blog post i wrote about China with some insights on Chinese music here

oh yeah! duh! that was one of my fav blackdown posts ever (no homo lol ;) ), so much depth.

and thanks for the report sloane, very enlightening. hopefully i'll get to go out there for the Live Earth concert in Shanghai (that's what I'm working towards). either way i'll update the thread if i find anything to match '5000 years punk' or similar. off to check links, cheers!
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
oh yeah! duh! that was one of my fav blackdown posts ever (no homo lol ;) ), so much depth.

and thanks for the report sloane, very enlightening. hopefully i'll get to go out there for the Live Earth concert in Shanghai (that's what I'm working towards). either way i'll update the thread if i find anything to match '5000 years punk' or similar. off to check links, cheers!

I went into a shop that sold alot of the hugo catalogue - which I was really excited about - and picked up a whole load of flyers etc, but the people working in the shop were kinda stuck up. I got a real Recommended Records vibe from the place, dunno if you remember it. Like uber-Wire readers. So I left, lol.
 

mos dan

fact music
thanks! off to read that now.

slightly off-topic, but this piece is so on-point: journalist and rock star Kaiser Kuo's hilarious guide for Western journalists writing about China:

Fill in the Blanks

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China offers journalists new to Beijing this useful template for your first files. It has been used with great success by big-name reporters hundreds of times! Just fill in the blank with the appropriate phenomena, supply some names for sources, and voila! Instant China story.

_________ Comes to China

BEIJING, November 18, 2004 - China is in the throes of another 'cultural revolution,' but this time it's not politics, but a growing class of hipoisie leading the charge. The latest western fad to breach the fabled Great Wall? (FILL IN THE BLANK), which many are calling the most revolutionary thing to hit China since Mickey Mouse.

It's a revolution in cool," says (PROFESSOR), who teaches contemporary Chinese cultural studies at (UNIVERSITY). "It's not for your Average Zhou," he quips, "but ______ is really catching on with young people."

"It's all the rage these days," says (CHINESE NAME), who runs a fashionable shop specializing in _____ near the stylish Sanlitun Bar District, where it's not uncommon to see young women wearing makeup, western-style blue jeans, and even sporting dyed hair. Young couples hold hands and even show bolder signs of affection on occasion - behavior that has prudish, older stalwarts shaking their heads.
 

minikomi

pu1.pu2.wav.noi

this is pretty cute :)

Oh qq love

Is who is really assumes to guess

Perhaps opposite party he is the outstanding roentgen

Since cannot distinguish clearly the quality

Also has not won the defeat

One enjoy their splendor
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound

this is pretty cute :)

Oh qq love

Is who is really assumes to guess

Perhaps opposite party he is the outstanding roentgen

Since cannot distinguish clearly the quality

Also has not won the defeat

One enjoy their splendor

The backing vocals are kindof chop-you-up-and-leave-you-in-a-bath-of-sand creepy though.
 

arcaNa

Snakes + Ladders
Haven't Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten) just moved to Beijing?
There must be loads of european expats/homegrown artist types around, but is there a "scene" there for that sort of stuff, I mean the Chinese authorities must be a bit wary/scared of the potential dissent inherent in experimental art (or non-authoritarian, independent thought in general)?
There must be a high degree of self-censorship going on among the artists...
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Haven't Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten) just moved to Beijing?
There must be loads of european expats/homegrown artist types around, but is there a "scene" there for that sort of stuff, I mean the Chinese authorities must be a bit wary/scared of the potential dissent inherent in experimental art (or non-authoritarian, independent thought in general)?
There must be a high degree of self-censorship going on among the artists...

haven't heard about Blixa (very cool. hope to hang out with him in my home town soon :) ) but my X saw Pan Sonic and Ryoji Ikeda play in... forget if it was ChengDu or ShangHai last year.

from what little i know, there is def a scene of "experimental music". and not much the authorities can do in terms of censorship. there are many performance artists pushing the envelope to breaking point with extreme Herman Nitshe type stuff.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
LOl that's so funny, in the airport going into the first class section to Beijing there were two people with kind of suits and weird plastic moulded backpacks and straightened hair ( I saw them from the back first ) and I was lookin at them thinking 'god people who work in advertising look really fucked up nowadays, I almost miss the ponytail look' and the bloke turned round and it was Blixa! I then spent the entire journey wondering if I could send a message via a stewardess, or just wander into first class and go 'Oh hi, Blixa? I'm a friend of so and so' or something but of course I didn't. For some reason seeing him made me feel hopelessly inadequate.

They were fasttracked through passport control n all.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
I'd also add that it made perfect sense for him to be there, there's so much building work going on in China at the moment that the prevailing noise is that of jackhammers and industrial work, it's everywhere in the background.
 
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