A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

Okay, I’ll bite.

Every­one in this very small com­mu­nity of Bei­jing music scene blog­gers has been all over the recent arti­cles posted by the intel­li­gent and knowl­edge­able Mr. Max-Leonhard von Schaper over at Rock in China. I read the first arti­cle, Why No Bei­jing and D-22 are not worth the hype! before every­one else started talk­ing about it and I could have said some­thing then, but I saw it for what it is — what Max has admit­ted to it being — which was a con­tro­versy bomb designed to incite discussion.

If you don’t have time to read the whole thing (it bor­ders on tl;dr), basi­cally Max points out that it’s a bit unfair that the for­eign media gets to focus entirely on the Maybe Mars lineup, because that’s not all there is to the Bei­jing indie scene. (Max, I know you read this, so feel free to tell me what mas­sive points I left out by boil­ing your essay into one sen­tence )

Hav­ing been on the inter­net for far too long, I expected it to turn into a mud-throwing con­test. How­ever, the beauty of small com­mu­ni­ties — online or offline — is that they’re usu­ally civil and eas­ily man­aged. I was pleas­antly sur­prised when even Matt Nei­der­hauser, who was pretty per­son­ally impli­cated in the attack, retorted with a mea­sured argu­ment with­out tak­ing potshots.

So I thought I’d throw my opin­ion out there.

Quite sim­ply: no, Maybe Mars isn’t all that. It’s a great label, fos­ter­ing bands I sim­ply adore (and a bunch I don’t give a crap about); D-22 is a great venue, the one I credit with my falling in love with the Bei­jing scene (it was a bet­ter intro­duc­tion than Tiny Salt Cafe 2); the man­age­ment team is great, because they have con­nec­tions and funds and the know-how to get expo­sure to the West­ern (Amer­i­can) indus­try. But all of us here in Bei­jing know that it’s not “Chi­nese rock”. It’s not even “Bei­jing rock”. It’s a sec­tion of the Bei­jing scene, and an even smaller sec­tion of what’s going on across the nation.

But the prob­lem with media is that it is still local­ized — to where the pub­li­ca­tion is based or the cir­cle of friends the blog­ger has. Think about it: even if you read a New York Times arti­cle about the indie scene in the city, you’re not going to hear about all of the gen­res and bands that are per­haps wor­thy and inter­est­ing, you’re going to hear about the ones that reporter has been exposed to through con­nec­tions, funds, and know-how to get expo­sure. The effects of that are ampli­fied by phys­i­cal distance.

Maybe I’m naive, but I like to think that any West­erner with half a brain and an actual inter­est in Chi­nese indie music will look at an arti­cle about Maybe Mars and not say “okay, this is it”, they will say “wow, awe­some, I won­der what else is out there”. I’m pretty sure that most peo­ple gen­uinely inter­ested in indie bands these days knows how lit­tle actu­ally gets through to main­stream media.

What I’d like to see is a round-up of what inter­ested indie scen­esters in the West who have read and become inter­ested in Chi­nese inde­pen­dent music and have sought it out them­selves say about Maybe Mars. My guess is that it’s along the same lines as Max’s basic state­ment: they’re okay, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of the Chi­nese music scene.

I know that the lan­guage bar­rier for West­ern­ers is immense. But I also know a per­son, who I often credit with giv­ing me a kick-start with my gig-going and thus this entire site, who lives in the DC area in Amer­ica, who has never stud­ied Chi­nese for­mally, and for whom Chi­nese indie music has become a pas­sion. She’s on Douban, catches up with her favorite bands more than I do, and went to see Casino Demon & Hedge­hog per­form at the Chi­nese Cul­ture Fes­ti­val in Wash­ing­ton DC. Of course she’s the excep­tion to the rule, but all it takes is a few well-placed pas­sion­ate peo­ple like her in the West­ern blo­gos­phere to help every­one under­stand that Maybe Mars isn’t the only thing out there.

And I think it’ll hap­pen. The response Maybe Mars has got­ten in Amer­ica is heart­en­ing, and what I think we need to do, as peo­ple on the inside, is intro­duce as many for­eign­ers as we can — inside and out­side of China — to the Chi­nese music that they’ll like. We can’t be elit­ist, we need to squash the music snob inside of us that makes us cut down the tall pop­pies of Maybe Mars and Mod­ern Sky, because maybe if we intro­duce a punk fan to Joy­side or an electro-rock fan to AV Okubo or an indie pop fan to Life Jour­ney and give them the tools (web­sites like Rock in China, for exam­ple) to explore for them­selves, they’ll go look­ing and find a whole world out­side the walls of D-22 and the ring roads of Beijing.

Max might be com­plain­ing about the media mis– or under-informing peo­ple, but I’m con­vinced that what an indie music fan does when they hear about indie music in the main­stream media is explore fur­ther. So instead of com­plain­ing about it, we should boost our own sig­nals and get the word out to peo­ple search­ing in Eng­lish for more than just the Maybe Mars sound.

Which is really what Max, Matt, the Maybe Mars team — and each of us enthu­si­asts — is all about, in the end.