A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

Wel­come to Part Two of my review of Max Star Music Fes­ti­val. Part One, cov­er­ing the week­days of the fes­ti­val, can be read here.

SATURDAY 21 AUG 2010

I turned up at Ditan Park on Sat­ur­day after­noon at 5pm, after pluck­ing up my courage to brave the rain (and check­ing that the fes­ti­val was actu­ally still on). I was con­cerned that I had missed the entirety of Laoya and was well into miss­ing Steely Heart. How­ever, in what was to be a very truncated-feeling day, I arrived to catch the last song of Laoya’s set and all of the rest. The rain didn’t keep the rock­ers at bay, but it did make for very tight sets after what I assume was an extended setup process after the hard morn­ing rains.

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Just shar­ing a few links, because I’ve got too many stored up and not enough time to go into any depth about most of them.

1. rock ‘n roll crosstalk & the revival of a uniquely chi­nese art form from Neocha EDGE
This is a great look at not only the fusion move­ment in mod­ern Chi­nese music, and the fan­tas­tic band Nancheng Brother, but also a brief his­tor­i­cal overview of one of China’s most inter­est­ing enter­tain­ment tra­di­tions — the crosstalk. If you’ve ever been in a taxi and heard a strange radio­play with two men talk­ing rapid-fire, and your taxi dri­ver starts to laugh, it’s most likely a cross-talk piece. The his­tory of that, and how Nancheng Brother winds it into their musi­cal reper­toire, makes for an inter­est­ing piece.

2. Anar­chy in the PRC from foreignpolicy.com
For­eign Pol­icy mag­a­zine is not where you’d look first for an arti­cle about Chi­nese punk music. But if you’re up for a refresher course, and ogling a few of Matthew Neiderhauser’s bril­liant D-22 shots, the cap­tions on these few pack a def­i­nite punch. It reminds you what it means to be liv­ing in a city with a real, liv­ing, and impor­tant punk scene.

3. sing for china: some reflec­tions from china music radar
An inter­est­ing look at last year’s Mod­ern Sky tour of the United States. The part I found most fas­ci­nat­ing was the fact that these groups — courted and touted by one of the largest Chi­nese indie music labels — never really had any expe­ri­ence trav­el­ling with their own equip­ment. In stark con­trast to every­thing I per­son­ally ever grew up know­ing about rock and roll — the story of the long road, the tour bus, the drag­ging equip­ment, com­plete with 1970’s haze à la Almost Famous — it seems that the Chi­nese groups were miss­ing an inte­gral part of their upbring­ing. But who can blame them?

4. queen sea big shark + con­verse = “let’s play” mv (heads up from Neocha EDGE)
Check out Queen Sea Big Shark’s new mv (music video) for their song “Let’s Play” here. The inter­est­ing thing about this video — and, indeed, the song — is that you expe­ri­ence it for the first time and it’s def­i­nitely got the marks of a QSBS song, and the style of the video is very them. How­ever, a large por­tion of the lyrics, ideas for the video, and even some extras in the video are crowd-sourced from Con­verse. Mak­ing this song, and this video, not just a prod­uct of QSBS, but some­thing much more indica­tive of their audience.

5. asia’s neglected music con­sumers from china music radar
This is a repost of a really inter­est­ing arti­cle from Typepad-blocked MIDEMNET about “Music Apartheid”, which describes the ostra­ciz­ing of the Asian music con­sumer mar­ket. Basi­cally, it talks about how legal online out­lets (like iTunes Music Store and Ama­zon MP3 down­loads) aren’t really help­ing bat­tle online piracy and offline boot­leg­ging of music by restrict­ing out­side (and largely Asian) pur­chas­ing of dig­i­tal music. It’s an inter­est­ing and in-depth read for any­one, even gen­er­ally con­cerned with DRM and new media policy.