Night rides

When I was doing fieldwork on rock music in Beijing in 1997, I lived at the campus of Beijing University. The concerts often took place in either the center of the city, or in the eastern part. Aside from my vivid memories of these concerts, Beijing in those days was also marked by the night rides on the ring roads in the little yellow vans, or bread taxis as they were called, back from the rock venue to the campus. Not hindered by traffic, the city would pass by in a flash, a miracle of lights, big buildings, and some remaining signs of the old Beijing, such as the Lama temple located on the north side of the second ring road. This spectacle of driving full speed through a city continues to mesmerize me to today; how I love these nightly taxi rides over the ring roads of Beijing. Used as I am to the highways in Europe, that are almost always located outside of the city, the ring roads turn the city into a graspable entity, a backdrop that provides security about one's location—“Ah, we are now at the Bird's Nest,” “Ah, this is Beijing University,” “Now we are at the CCTV building,” and so on (see Figure 8.1). The rides sparked off an interest in the meaning of these ring roads, an interest that increased together with the number of ring roads over the past years—up to seven, if we wish to include the ship-shaped seventh ring of 940 kilometers (of which only 38 kilometers passes through Beijing).

The ring roads serve as an important marker of identity in Beijing—they not only have come to signify one's class background, they also help people to easily locate others. Living around the third and fourth East ring road counts as a sign of luxury and inclusion, unlike the poor people and migrants who are located mostly beyond the fifth ring road. The ring roads are crucial for the cognitive mapping of the city; for example, when one asks someone where she lives, the answer is likely to be “between the third and fourth ring road in the East.”

This gestures toward a more general concern regarding megacities: how to keep them livable, how to grasp them mentally, and how to avoid people feeling lost and alienated?

When 25-year-old Yuan Yuan picked me up with his Volkswagen Beetle in 2011 to go for a drink in Beijing, I realized how much had changed in just two decades. The Beetle has now, for some, replaced the bike, bus or the yellow ‘bread taxi,’ the name of the latter referring to its bread-like shape.

Perpetual Disappearance

Since the closing of the Yuanmingyuan art village in the mid-1990s, a quite basic discourse has haunted the appearance and disappearance of art villages in Beijing: they are zones of freedom and creativity, usually located on the outskirts of the city, and always under the threat of demolition by an authoritarian state that cannot and will not accept artistic voices of discontent. This discourse of appearance and subsequent disappearance resurfaced in 2010 when the authorities announced the planned destruction of the Caochangdi art village, the village with Ai Weiwei as its unofficial yet highly prolific mayor. Huang Rui, artist and one of the founders of art district 798 in Beijing, wrote a piece titled ‘A City that Abandoned Artists’, which was posted on an e-mail list of which the accompanying text claims that ‘the destruction of the artists villages continues’ in China (MCLC list, 1 May 2010).

Somehow, this alleged cyclic appearance and disappearance of art districts in Beijing resonates well with a number of basic assumptions about art as a potentially subversive cultural form and the Chinese nation-state as an authoritarian state that does not and cannot allow such forms to proliferate freely. Such narratives all too easily ignore changes that have taken place over the past decade in urban planning in China, as well as in its art world. Driven by a desire to become a global player, the Chinese state has gradually formulated policies that are directed towards the strengthening of its creative industries, so as to be able to move from a ‘made in China’ image towards a ‘created in China’ image (Keane 2007). Apparently the work of Richard Florida has globalised even into the premises of Zhongnanhai. This turn towards the creative industries took place around 2004-2008, the same time that the value of the work of Chinese artists skyrocketed on the global art market.

An old man dressed in a Mao suit walks slowly into The Village, a new shopping area in the diplomatic and rich part of Beijing. He enters an Apple Store and anxiously looks around with bewildered eyes: the man remembers the old neighbourhood that has now vanished completely to be replaced by these icons of global capitalism. Utterly puzzled, he continues wandering, feeling forever lost in the city that used to be so familiar to him.

In his fictional documentary Beijing is Coming (2008), the Hong Kong filmmaker Bono Lee tells the story of an old man who returns to Beijing after 30 years. Like so many Asian cities, Beijing has grown dramatically over the past two decades. The unprecedented scale, scope and speed of these changes makes a returning visitor easily lose his or her way – as parks have been replaced by buildings, neighbourhoods have morphed into parks. In Lee's documentary, the Asian city serves as a trope for probing into the alienation that comes with China's speedy march into modernity. But the story steers away from being a onedimensional critique on the transformation of the city. Instead, it also speaks of the emergence of new intimacies that are rendered possible by the changing city. In the story, a love relationship unfolds between record shop owner Jun and a girl named Ling, who are both part of a new generation born after 1980. The girl had planned to study abroad, but she stayed to experience the summer of 2008, to be with Jun; or, as she wonders, maybe she stayed because of the city of Beijing itself.

Seductive Narratives

In this song, singer Wang Feng from the band Baojiajie 43 expresses a global concern that assumes commercialisation to be harmful to creativity. The artist collapses along with the world when thrown into the money-blender called society. This assumption is often accompanied by nostalgia for the good old days, when everything was pure, wonderful, and authentic. All that is considered authentic melts into the thin air of commercialism. Money corrupts the true rock spirit. The early rock bands of China represent the real rock spirit; their pure and authentic voices are not yet disturbed by the cruel forces of a market economy. The new bands only go for the money. The critical voice is most likely to be silenced.

Following this line of argument, Barmé writes disapprovingly that ‘Cui Jian found the market, whether in political or commercial guise, to be an indulgent if fickle master’ (1999: 361). The general line in his work is that commodification signifies a full stop to subversion and rebellion. According to Steen, ‘the engagement towards the Long March of Rock’n’Roll evaporates, it becomes impossible to identify [rock] with provocative ideals’ (1996: 237). Jones argues along the same lines, and states that ‘rock music's gradual absorption into China's burgeoning market economy has defused much of its politically oppositional potential’ (1994: 149). Chinese rock musicians often express similar opinions. As Cui Jian told me:

The rock mythology produces a narrative – in both China and the West – that interprets the record industry and related forces of commercialisation that are assumed to have swept over China during the 1990s as being hostile to the ‘true rock spirit.’

Factor Analysis of Singers

Marginal Voices

Some voices are remarkably absent from the arguably fragmented world of rock in China. All the bands described in the previous chapters are located in Beijing; some of the singers moved from their hometown to the capital of rock to pursue their career in music. Releases from places outside Beijing are relatively rare; bands from, for instance, Shanghai are generally not taken seriously by the rock scenes in Beijing. Female voices are also rather scarce in Chinese rock, although their number has increased over time. Rock's aesthetics caters primarily to male identifications, so it seems, leaving little room for women to make rock. However central Gangtai pop might be when it comes to sales figures and media outreach, it is peripheral in the more ‘serious’ writings on music in Asia. As I have shown in the introduction, it is downplayed not only by China's rock musicians, but also by Chinese and Western journalists and academics. It is commonly assumed and asserted that a rock singer who has moved toward the world of pop has lost his or her soul.

Following Bakhtin, the rock mythology can be considered an authoritative discourse that generates uniform meanings and flattens out contradictions and ambiguities. In my scenic and genealogical approach in the previous two chapters, I have unpacked the productive power of the rock mythology, while I have simultaneously tried to address the underlying contradictions and ambiguities. In this chapter I will go one step further towards acknowledging the voices marginalised through the power of the rock mythology, and which can consequently be termed subaltern. The concept ‘subaltern’ is borrowed from a group of predominantly Indian scholars known as the Subaltern Studies Group, who tried to counter colonial discourse by giving room to heterogeneous and above all female indigenous voices (see Spivak 1988). As Spivak (1999: 281) asks herself: ‘Can the subaltern speak?

A Scenic Move

The term subculture was coined in the 1940s and has since been used to describe and analyze all kinds of social groups (punks, football hooligans, homosexuals). The Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies set the agenda in the 1970s with two major publications: Resistance Through Rituals (Hall & Jefferson 1976) and Hebdige's Subculture, The Meaning of Style (1979). Whereas the former predominantly uses class as the key to discovering subcultural meanings, the latter uses style and race as their organising principles. Hebdige unravels different youth styles, which according to him are ‘pregnant with significance. (…) As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the “silent majority”, which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus.’ (1979: 18) Oppositional styles, which deliberately transform the meaning of symbols of the dominant discourse, emerge to counter dominant culture. Through accommodation or neglect, mainstream society is in the end able to pacify the potential threat of subcultures. Subcultures thus do not allow much potential for real change; they are, as Kahn-Harris (2004: 96) puts it, ‘heroic failures.’

In later publications, Hebdige (1988) develops a more subtle approach, by adopting Foucault's ideas of power and surveillance. According to Foucault, ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. (…) We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.’ (Foucault 1983: 216) Heb dige shows how different forms of surveillance emerged around the category ‘youth’ during the 20th century. He traced two dominant images of youth: youth as fun, and youth as trouble. For Hebdige, the subcultural response is a new form of subjectivity. ‘Subculture forms up in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance, it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a hiding in the light.’ (1988: 35)

Cosmopolitan Poses and Haunting Questions

Much has changed, I realised, when I attended the Modern Sky music festival in October 2008 in Haidian Park in West Beijing. The crowds that were allowed to gather in a public park, the wide array of music genres ranging from death metal to urban folk, the lyrics now often sung in English, the trendy youth from the 80s generation, all turned the festival into a profoundly cosmopolitan experience. An experience simultaneously saturated with articulations of Chineseness, judging from the Chinese flags people carried with them or painted on their faces. For three days, old stars from the early 1990s like He Yong and Zhang Chu shared the stage with more recent bands like Carsick Cars and Re-establishing the Rights of Statues – whose English band names also attest to the cosmopolitanism of the scene. More than fifteen years since the album's release, audiences could still remember Zhang Chu's lyrics word by word – turning the evening of his performance into a collective ritualised experience. While walking from the main stage, where The New Pants had just performed their last song, entitled Bye Bye Disco, to the small stage, I ran into Shen Lihui, organiser of the festival, owner of the Modern Sky label and leading vocalist of the Beijing ‘Britpop’ band Sober. He plays a pivotal role in the cultural scene of Beijing, and can be seen as the embodiment of the economical, cultural and political changes which have taken place in China since the mid 1990s. In establishing Modern Sky in 1997, he made use of the increased liberties in the Chinese media market (Zhao 2008), and has since then been able to operate at the outer limits of the permissible, playing the political and economic game skilfully