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 The Asian riff This article is by Peter Micic. You can see an archive of his other writings on Danwei about music, language and culture here.
We've all heard it and know it has a name. Some of us have heard it and don't know it has a name. At worst, it can be interpreted as a musical parody, a musical construct of the 'Orient' or 'Asia.' At best, it covers too much area to mean very much at all.
Kung Fu Fighting featuring the classic Asian riff
The melodic phrase goes by several names: 'The Asian Riff', 'The Chinese Melody', 'The Stereotypical Oriental Tune', 'The Asian Jingle.' It was around long before 'Kungfu Fighting' and 'Turning Japanese' appeared, but the huge success of 'Kungfu Fighting' in 1974 definitely put it on the map. Its associations are so powerful that we only need to hear the riff to instantly convey an 'Asian' context.
I have always wondered how the 'Orient,' the 'Far East' or 'Asia' could be distilled in one musical phrase, but then again the 'Orient' is a construct, a homogenized Asian continent that has little or no relationship to a specific place, people or culture. And because it is not 'real,' there is no attempt to represent it as such. [1] An imagined construct of the 'other' was eloquently put forward in Edward Said's Orientalism:
[W]e need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is trying to do... is at one and the same time to characterise the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe. [2]
 Sheet music cover art A number of fascinating questions present themselves in any discussion on this most celebrated of 'oriental' riffs. Does the riff actually have any connection with an 'Asian' song or tune? How is the riff used that might parody or caricature a people or culture? What role has the riff played in moulding Asian stereotypes? How do we explain its lingering presence in live performance, recordings, film, television, cartoons, advertising, computer games? Can we know when this melodic phrase gained currency?
We can pinpoint its musical construct, as nearly as significant event can be, to popular music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But to find it would require us to comb early Disney and Max Fleischer cartoons and the hundreds of Asian-themed popular songs associated with Tin Pan Alley, parlour songs, ragtime tunes, and early Broadway musicals.[4] By searching for all possible variants of the riff we might eventually stumble across it. And when we do, it's very possible that we can find an even earlier version of the riff. One of the earliest examples can be found in a 1935 Fleischer brothers cartoon called Betty Boop Making Stars.  The riff means many things to many different people. It is a musical phrase that creates a sound world that is 'distant' and 'exotic', drawing the listener into a realm of fantasy and make-believe. Another way of saying that is to suggest that the riff is fictionalized so it can always be free to speak in its own manner and accent, far removed from the 'real' place. Composers have long been aware of its associations and used them intentionally and listeners have become familiar with it. Its associations, however, have become so familiar that in the minds of many listeners, the riff, to a large extent, has become very real and non-fictionalized.
Fantasy and make-believe aside, the riff and its many guises speaks in a language that goes way beyond the music, a language which has manufactured all kinds of offensive and lamentable stereotypes. Perhaps one of the spurs to musical constructs in the late nineteenth century was the growing presence of Chinese immigrants in goldfields in the US and Australia. Stereotyping any people or culture can be seen as a strategy of control, but as Scott-Maxwell writes, the racist elements found in Tin Pan Alley, parlour songs and other oriental-style songs 'may have also served to negate or at least minimise perceived threats and fears.' [3] The forces at play in the production and consumption of such stereotypes is a topic not to be treated lightly and deserves a lot more space then I can provide here.
There is nothing new about musical orientalisms. They have been around for centuries in musical theatre, popular song genres and western art music. [4] When a Turkish craze swept Vienna and Europe in the late eighteenth century, the music was inspired by the Janissary military bands of the Ottoman sultan who had marched into Vienna in 1683. By then, the the music had moved away from the battlefield and filtered its way into popular culture. Music alla turca, as it was called, was essentially drums and cymbals. Viennese piano makers of the day responded enthusiastically to the Turkish craze by inventing specially-designed pianos with built-in bells, tambourines, cymbals, bass drums, and other noise-makers designed to create a 'Turkish' effect. Some of the best known examples of music alla turca include Mozart's Rondo alla turca (Turkish March) with its distinct rhythmic and timbrel patterns and the Janissary chorus from Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio.
 In the days of silent movies, music was composed for all kinds of scenes. Music publishing houses created folios of mood music that was suited specifically for silent films and the theatre and musical phrases representing different cultural backgrounds. The pianist had a number of stock musical motifs for any particular setting or character. One film music folio brought to my attention by Bill Edwards and dated 1913, includes the following tunes all penned by J.S. Zamecnik (1872-1953), a prolific composer who wrote for silent movie theatre orchestras:
• Festival March
• Indian Music
• Chinese Music
• Oriental Music
• Mexican or Spanish Music
• Death Scene
• Church Music
• War Scene:
Part 1 (In Military Camp)
Part 2 (Off to the Battle)
Part 3 (The Battle)
These musical devices formed part of library or dictionary of 'labelled' tunes. As Rodney Sauer writes on the music composed for the Sam Fox Publishing Company in Cleveland:
Most musicians, realizing that they would be playing for thousands of films, would not invest in music that was only useful for only one picture that would be gone in a week. They wanted a permanent library of useful pieces from which they could compile their own scores to any movie. The classical repertoire and the popular music of the day were heavily used, but were not adequate for certain kinds of scenes. The Sam Fox Moving Picture Music series was designed to fill this need. [5]
Oriental exoticism in popular songs provides a fertile ground to examine formulaic musical devices. It was not just the music that was 'highly conventionalized and formulaic,' but all aspects of the sheet music production—titles, cover art, subject matter and lyrics. [6] The primary concern of the music publishing houses in New York, collectively known as Tin Pan Alley, was to sell music. Tin Pan Alley songwriters were required to churn out songs across a wide range of genres and compose to deadlines, and 'this undoubtedly contributed to the superficial, generic, almost parodic treatment given to many of the songs and the lyrics.' [7]
These songwriters and many others were not music anthropologists and they were certainly not hit over the knuckles for geographical inaccuracies in the final stages of publishing. Stated, simply, it was all about commercial success [8]. We can find examples in these songs where the setting and subject matter are all jumbled up. One parlour song called 'In China', composed in 1919, has a Geisha maid in China waiting for her 'melican' man.[9] Whether the place corresponded to a real or imagined setting, songwriters 'still had to find for each song some special feature, quality or gimmick that would somehow characterize the song and distinguish it from others.' [10]
The musical devices or gimmicks used to represent Chinese scenes and characters include parallel fourths and fifths, passages based on a pentatonic scale, short melodic phrases repeated at different pitch levels, and repeated staccato rhythms, all of which are 'in gross parody of spoken Chinese.' [11] and the way Chinese people presumably speak English.
The sonority created by parallel fourths and fifths, once the staple of medieval and renaissance music, stand out. These sonorities have long been considered 'awkward' and 'clumsy' in traditional four-part harmony and counterpoint. Parallel chord motion, however, was a late romantic device and explored by a number of nineteenth and early twentieth century composers (Puccini's Turendot, Debussy's Sunken Cathedral and John Carpenter's Little Indian readily come to mind). 'Chopsticks' which first appeared in 1877 in London and Glasgow as 'The Celebrated Chopsticks Waltz' also uses parallel chords.
Musical instruments are also used to represent different races of people, characters or settings. There are too many examples to enumerate here: drums for native American Apaches, brass fanfares for cowboys, and the cor anglais (English horn), that archetypal instrument used to paint exotic distant lands be they palm-fringed lagoons, deserts, opium dens, snake charmers or almond-eyed maidens. A website devoted to film music clichés includes 'digeridoos for Australia, cymbals for anything Oriental, a trumpet for Mexico and of course a whistle for Ireland.' [12]
We are all familiar with how a single melody appears into different forms or variations and how performers have the freedom to improvise a melodic phrase. In terms of pitch, melody and rhythm, the 'Asian riff' can appear in a number of different guises, but we still recognize it as the same tune. In Chinese music, the term 'qupai' ('labelled tune') refers to a stock melody that is freely borrowed and manipulated into many forms. [13]
Our celebrated riff is based on a five-tone pentatonic scale. 'Turning Japanese', for instance, is often thought to be based on a minor tonality 'because its phrase suggests the D and A are strong notes' [14], but the three pitches are based on a natural pentatonic scale. When Carl Douglas sings 'whoa-ho-ho-ho' in the opening of 'Kungfu Fighting', he is using 'a major-inflected, rising, natural pentatonic scale' [15]. In a similar fashion, the riff that follows takes it cue from a major, descending natural pentatonic scale.
There is a popular misconception that pentatonic scales are sui generis to 'Asian' music as though 'Asia' and the five-tone scale are velcroed together. Any scale that uses five tones within an octave is a pentatonic scale. If we look at scales around the world just as British physicist A. J. Ellis did in his seminal article in 1885 titled 'On the musical scales of various nations', we can find pentatonic scales almost everywhere from the folk songs of Ireland, Scotland, Hungary, Poland, to the songs of aboriginals in North America and Australia. Major and minor pentatonic scales are also used in jazz and rock music.
Alice Moyle who wrote the first PhD dissertation on Aboriginal music in Australia at Monash University in 1974 devoted a considerable part of her study to the subject of the pentatonic scale observing the descending five tone A-G-E-D-C progression is 'typically Australian.' Her study also demonstrated that pentatonic, diatonic, chromatic, even microtonic progressions existed side by side in aboriginal songs across the Australian continent. Why a pentatonic scale in Japan, for instance, will sound different from a pentatonic scale in China, Myanmar or Hungary, essentially lies in the pattern or sequence of intervals in the scale. How people and cultures throughout history constructed particular scales, intervals and tuning systems—favouring some while eschewing others—is fascinating, but that’s another topic.
Tin Pan Alley publishers were quick to see the commercial value of packaging oriental exoticism for a mass audience employing textual, visual and music language that was highly formulaic and conventionalised. Musical orientalisms didn't exist until Western composers invented them. Within the commercial world of music publishing, they formed a musical library of tunes performed to accompany silent films, live theatre or the soundtrack for film scores or animation. These tunes were not the sole property of any recording studio or publishing house, but freely used by performers and composers alike. As Bill Edwards writes:
It is true that much of the oriental or Asian or Arabic or similar forms of music heard in film and recorded media from the 1910s to the 1960s were influenced by a very few Anglican writers who took a basic snippet of what they heard and extrapolated on it. While it is not accurate in many cases, the intent was there. In some cases, genres were invented based on a simply motive. There was no such thing as "western music" (as in American West of the 1880s) until the movie composers invented it, Elmer Bernstein being one of the finest in that genre. [16]
Footnotes, Links and Sources
1. Aline Scott-Maxwell, 'Oriental Exoticism in 1920 Australian Popular Music', Perfect Beat, vol. 3, no. 3, July 1997, p. 45.
2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, originally published London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp.71-2.
3. Scott-Maxwell (1997:51).
4. For an excellent overview of musical orientalisms see Derek B. Scott, 'Orientalism and Musical Style', at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/critmus/articles/1997/02/01.html See also Scott-Maxwell (1997:28-57).
5. Rodney Sauer 'Sam Fox Moving Picture Music,' p. 24. The entire Fox folio can be viewed at:
http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/21_sfox1.pdf
6. Scott-Maxwell (1997:38) .
7. Scott-Maxwell (1997:44).
8. Scott-Maxwell (1997:44).
9. See: 'Away Places With Strange Sounding Names: Tin pan Alley Goes To Asia,'
http://www.parlorsongs.com/issues/2003-1/thismonth/featurea.asp
See also 'Parlour Songs: Music About Asian Places
http://www.parlorsongs.com/issues/2003-1/thismonth/featureb.asp
10. Scott-Maxwell (1997:5)
11. Scott-Maxwell (1997:40)
12. 'Film music cliches,' http://www.mfiles.co.uk/film-cliches.htm
13. See Bell Yung, 'The Nature of Chinese Ritual Sound,' in Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, edited by Bell Yung, Evelyn S. Rawski, Rubie S. Watson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 30.
14. Eli Marshall, personal communication, Beijing, April 28, 2008.
15. Eli Marshall, personal communication, Beijing, April 28, 2008
16. Bill Edwards, personal communication via e-mail, March 20, 2008.
This article is from Danwei.org
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While attending last night's candlelight vigil in Shanghai at People's Square, the lead singer and pipa player from the well-known Chinese band Cold Fairyland, Lin Di (林笛), shot the video below. Lin Di stayed up all night to not only edit it, but also write the lyrics / music and record the accompanying song. A very moving and impressive effort. Bravo.
- More of Lin Di's and Cold Fairyland's music can be found on the band's Neocha site
- Cold Fairyland was also featured in a recent episode of Danwei TV's The Shanghai Beat This article is from Danwei.org
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Here's a song from a Chinese punk band that provides some welcome perspective to all the angsting about nationalistic Chinese youth and CNN: I don't watch CCTV by Beijing-based band Defy.
A sample of the lyrics:
I don't watch CCTV
I don't watch this fucking channel...
... Ai, I don't like you...
... CCTV, CCTV, CCTV
Fucking channel
Fucking channel
Defy's MySpace page is here, their Douban page is here, and their home page on Chinese creative social networking site Neocha.com is here. This article is from Danwei.org
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According to Shanghaiist, Beijing's annual MIDI music festival has been canceled this year because of general Olympic worries and fears of unruly crowds.
City Weekend quotes the festival organizer who says there will be an announcement tomorrow. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Chinese innovation: NEXT Neocha.com is a networking website for Chinese creative communities, i.e. musicians, designers, photographers, artists, filmmakers, etc. They have just launched a new feature called NEXT.
NEXT plays songs from Neocha.com's library of user-uploaded music, from within a web browser, or from a downloadable widget. All of the songs are 100% original works from Chinese independent musicians, in genres spanning garage rock, electronica, hip-hop, shoe-gazing, indie-pop, art rock, folk, ambient, dance, metal, post-rock, etc. The widget is fully bilingual (unlike Neocha's Web site which only has Chinese), so it addresses the "where to find Chinese indie music when you don't know where to start" question for non-Chinese readers.
Neocha founder Sean Leow says that NEXT is a "way of giving its musician users a broader platform for exposure to not only different Chinese audiences, but also audiences all over the world... we want to give our users the chance to be discovered "next," that's part of the inspiration behind the name." The widget has essentially only one button that takes you to the "next" song; it's extremely simple to use.
Neocha is rapidly adding users, especially musicians, so expect NEXT to be tapping an ever-expanding library of original independent Chinese music.
Click here to download NEXT or give the web pop-out player a spin.
Click here to check out the music section on Neocha's site.
For any questions related to Neocha or NEXT, feel free to leave a comment, Sean will be popping in to reply. He can also be reached directly at sean@neocha.com (Chinese or English)
For more on Neocha, check out this recent Danwei TV episode of The Shanghai Beat interviewing site co-founders Sean Leow and B6. This article is from Danwei.org
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Iceland's avant-garde art-rock songstress, Bjork, performed to a sold-out crowd last night at the Shanghai International Gymnastic Center; her first-ever show in Shanghai – she performed once before in Beijing, circa 1996.
Never ceasing to draw attention, Bjork closed the show with a 2nd encore performance of "Declare Independence" – a rousing power-to-the people anthem containing such lyrics as: "Declare independence!" "Don't let them do that to you!" "Start your own currency!" "Make your own stamp" "Protect your language" "Make your own flag!" "Raise your flag!"...etc. [lyrics]
You can imagine where this might be going.
At the end of the song, just before walking off stage, Bjork left the crowd with two words: "Tibet.....Tibet"......fully audible, in English.
"Declare Independence" was originally written with the Faroe Islands and Greenland in mind, not Tibet.
Your correspondent hasn't been able to find a reliable video clip of this yet; however, I can attest to it happening because I was there.
As expected, online Chinese discussion boards (i.e. Douban, Tianya) are ripe with commentary with some saying "who cares" and showing support, but with most expressing shock and outrage.
A few quotable gems (translated):
"If she was yelling free Shanghai, that would be great! Free Shanghai! Free Shanghai!"
"Those who put on the show should be severely fined and not allowed to bring this kind of trash in for performances.”
"Call the relevant authorities! Be gone with her! What a ***! ***!"
"Doesn’t surprise me that she’d do something like this."
"Very yellow, very violent!"
"I don’t think there is any issue, so what if she sang a few lines about Tibet, we don’t need to berate the woman to death. Is our government really that sensitive?"
"I don’t understand, why do Western stars give a *** about Tibet. Isn’t Tibet ours?! Mind your own business!”
"Wow, the nerve! Where did she get the courage to do this! Weirdo!”
“I like Bjork, it's ok for her to have a different point of view, but for her to do this is disrespectful to fans here, very selfish of her."
It's unlikely Bjork will be performing again in China any time soon, if ever. Bravo.
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Forever, eh? The national anthem of the United States of America is "The Star-Spangled Banner." With lyrics scrawled by Francis Scott Key on the back of an envelope during the bombing of Ft. McHenry in 1814, and a tune cribbed from the drinking song "To Anacreon in Heaven" by John Stuart Smith, the full version continues through four bellicose stanzas and is practically unsingable.
That notwithstanding, the anthem was performed at the recent New York Philharmonic concert in Pyongyang. Chinese blogger Fuluzhenxiang noticed that the South Korean media's Chinese-language account of the concert used an unusual translation for the song's title: 星星闪烁的旗帜 ("Flag with glittering stars").
Media reports from mainland China, on the other hand, used 星条旗永不落, or "The Stars and Stripes Forever." That's actually the title of another tune, a march composed in 1897 by John Philip Sousa.
This mistranslation is widespread throughout the Chinese media, from national agencies like Xinhua down to local papers. For example, a Guangzhou Daily article last September concerning revisions to the US citizenship test reported that one new question was "Who wrote the US National Anthem, 'Stars and Stripes Forever'?" Trick question! Try again next time.
Fuluzhenxiang suggests that the confusion of the two songs is not the only reason that a new translation would be a good idea:
Translating "The Star-Spangled Banner" as "The Stars and Stripes Forever" confuses two tunes and implies a glorification of the United States. But whenever the Chinese media mentions the US National Anthem, it always uses the name "Stars and Stripes Forever," even Xinhua, China's national news agency. The reference material on Xinhua's website regarding the US National Anthem mixes up "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "The Stars and Stripes Forever," treating them as one song.
Naturally, Americans are pleased when you say "The Stars and Stripes Forever," just as the English had the old saying, "The sun never sets on the British Empire." Are the Chinese engaging in a bit of flattery by over-praising the US? They don't even have that intention themselves.
"The Star-Spangled Banner" was once translated into Chinese as 星条旗之歌 ("The Stars and Stripes Song"). Although this translation may not be stirring enough, it does fit quite well with the American flag. And it's neutral—neither laudatory nor disparaging. I think that we ought to revive that translation, not to be anti-American, but to call it what it is.
The American National Anthem is "The Star-Spangled Banner" and not "Stars and Stripes Forever," which is actually the National March of the USA. I hope that we can all amend our ways; I'll go first and see if I can't get things going.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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Found via Zhongnanhai blog, this is a music video for the band Electric Six, shot and produced by video artist Rob Slychuk, who currently lives in Beijing.
This video was almost entirely shot in the bowels of Beijing's subway system.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Time magazine has chosen Asia's five best bands, or rather five acts to watch in 2008. The band from China is Beijing-based P.K. 14:
P.K. 14's thrashing chords, dark bass lines and frenetic beats resonate with echoes of Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Fugazi and the New York Dolls. But the Beijing band's charismatic vocalist, Yang Haisong, 34, says he takes his lead from songwriters such as "Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and a whole generation of protest musicians." Think of P.K. 14, in other words, as neither punk nor postpunk but postfolk.
The P.K. 14 music video below was inspired by early 20th Century silent films and completed in late September 2005 by New Zealand filmmaker David Harris. The song "Tamen" (他们 -- Them) is taken from the album 白皮书 (White Paper). The costumes and props were supplied by the PLA run Bayi Film Studios.
This article is from Danwei.org
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This article by Ed Peto, a Beijing-based promoter, music consultant and journalist, originally appeared at The Register. It appears here courtesy of the author.
 Kang Mao of SUBS How To Do Business In China, China CEO, The New Chinese Consumer… my shelves here in Beijing are stacked full of such books, all trying to throw some light on a country and market of seemingly endless allure to the west. A population of 1.3 billion people has marketeers around the world girding up their loins to do business here, each with a How To Do Business In China book tucked under their arm.
Unfortunately for the western music entrepreneur or artist, these books are helpful in only the most general terms. While there is a slew of practical, detailed advice on how to deal with rubber-ball factories and sales chains, the fledgling music industry here is such a bewildering state of affairs that fully-rounded advice simply isn’t available yet.
As in most other Asian markets, pop music has a real stranglehold over the mainstream—Mando-Pop, Canto-Pop, J-Pop, K-Pop—glossy, inoffensive music that satisfies the censors as well as the ‘bland criteria’ necessary for across-the-board media coverage. Despite the diverse musical heritage of China, mainstream pop is almost entirely informed by western music, from the basic pop song format through to instrumentation and lyrical content, although general production quality is still fairly poor. The Chinese audience, therefore, are already well familiar with all of the stock traits of western music: guitar solos, crap raps in the middle-eight of pop songs, warbly diva vocals, key changes at the end of ballads, pseudo-rock bands, pseudo-hip-hop bands etc. Your average western band, therefore, does not sound totally alien, it’s just that no one is willing to spend money promoting an international (and therefore niche) act when 90 per cent of CDs are counterfeit and an even higher percent of online music is pinched. It’s all about hitting the mass market straight out of the box and selling big, if you want a chance of making money.
Such a high piracy rate leaves you with a legitimate physical market of only $86m a year (2006 figures), making China—a country of 1.3 billion people, remember—into only the 20th largest market in the world. Physical has never really had a good time in China. The all-important distribution process never really found its feet, and labels find it a constant battle to get their product on the shelves before, or instead of, the pirate versions. The pirates, though, were given a surprising headstart…
The arrival of western product in the early 90s came courtesy of ‘saw-gashed’ CDs: Excess stock and deleted titles from western majors attempting to avoid taxation and disposal costs. These CDs had their cases cut to mark them as defective and were then shipped in to China through free-market economic ports like Guangzhou, only to end up on the black market. An end result that can be seen as a partial ‘shooting-in-the-foot for the western majors who then had to come in and fight against the pirate networks they inadvertently helped set up.
 Sawgash CDs A standard pirate CD retails for about 60p, whereas the legitimate product goes for around two to three times that—£1.50 to £2. This obviously makes piracy a big business with plenty of people profiting, plenty of vested interests and not a whole lot of will to change. There is the occasional very public haul of counterfeit CDs, but realistically this is already a lost battle when you consider the impending end of the CD format.CD manufacturing plants are mainly state run but this does not deter rampant ‘third shift piracy’ in which, once the two normal daily factory shifts are completed, a third one goes on through the night to make the same product for the pirate market. That’s right, state-run piracy.
As with most areas of business, the retail sector is a black hole of statistics, where misinformation and mendaciousness are key pirate protection devices. A visit to China will clear this up for you nicely as you only have to wander around a few streets and speak to a few ‘legitimate’ retailers to see the impossibility of gathering any meaningful statistics. Even legitimate retailers like FAB stock some pirated goods and it takes a very keen eye to spot the difference in some cases, although most pirated CDs are laughably poor quality.
As you might imagine in this environment, the major labels are shadows of their western motherships and there is a gaping hole where the independent record label scene should be. While the traditional record label model isn’t exactly going through a golden age in the west, it never even had a golden age in the Middle Kingdom. In order to survive it has become necessary for labels to take over an artist’s entire life—recording, publishing, management etc.—obsessively tapping all revenue streams in order to survive. You can count the number of recognisable independent labels on a pair of chopsticks.
Modern Sky is one such label. It has just celebrated its tenth year in existence and, much like its rabbit warren of an office in West Beijing, it’s business model is a convoluted arrangement of media company, record label, artist management and design house—a model that has allowed it to survive in this most hostile of environments. In the process of surviving it has also amassed a significant percentage of the Chinese rock catalogue. Physical releases are practically a loss leader for Modern Sky with digital revenue also remaining a minor consideration.
Label Manager Meng Jinhui explains that they normally take over management, allowing them to promote the hell out of the artist rather than the album. Resultant brand co-operations with these artists and the label itself generate the bulk of Modern Sky’s income, alongside consultancy for mobile content and a wide range of video production and design projects. You have to be versatile to survive for 10 years in China.
The ‘big four’ majors are all over here in some form or other. However, like all foreign companies wanting to operate in China, they have had to enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies, yielding 51 per cent of the new China collaboration in the process. Warner Music Group created Warner Music China, EMI joint ventured with Push Typhoon, SonyBMG with Shanghai Audio And Visual Press, and Universal Music partnered with Shanghai Media Group.
Normally taking up just one or two floors of an office building, the majors have also had to adopt different tactics in order to survive. They own the lion’s share of domestic pop music (”domestic” in this case would be better translated as “regional”—Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong all contribute heavily as their less pirated markets allow for better artist development) but with regards to international repertoire, they stick very much to front line releases and global priorities with the occasional catalogue title. Universal Music China, for example, is pushing its reggae catalogue throughout the year to see if it can find any sort of audience.
Danny Sim, international marketing manager at Universal Music China, is optimistic about growth in western music sales. UMC will release 40 per cent more international titles this year—bringing it to roughly 100 albums—and expect to see a 10-15 per cent growth in revenue. Sim puts his optimism down to: “a) More people getting a better education, and therefore more people with English as a second language, b) More western music spread through the internet, and c) More media channels will become western music friendly.”
Sim has neatly summed up the problems facing western music marketers in China. While there is already a smattering of English in a lot of homegrown music, a full English language track is a different thing altogether. Learning English is a high priority for your average urbanite and consuming English language media and entertainment is a natural part of this. There is some way to go, however, before this manifests itself in legitimate music sales. As Sim points out, a good starting point would be an increase in western music coverage in the media. As a niche concern, very little western music is played on China’s state-run radio. An exception would be a station like Beijing’s HitFM which plays US and UK Top 40 hits to an audience of English language students, expats and western-trend-conscious young people. This is an exception, though.
The government is very protective of its airwaves and rules its own network of regional licensee stations with a rod of iron, both in broadcast policy and physical presence. The live studios are frequently under armed guard for fear of them being stormed by subversives. The same applies for TV as the Chinese government are acutely aware that broadcast media is the most effective medium for delivering key cultural and political messages. China Central Television (CCTV), the state-run national station operates a range of channels, which, in the main part, are barefaced propaganda and state trumpet-blowing. Their large scale, televised music galas showcase traditional and government approved music forms and are regularly watched by audiences in the hundreds of millions. These are the kind of viewing figures that excite people about China, but in reality the shows are impregnable fortresses of glittery, spandex-clad state guff.
When Pop Idol imitator SuperGirl hit China in 2004, the final was watched by 400 million people. The rush of mobile votes sent the government into a panic and severe restrictions were implemented, preventing the show ever happening in the same format again. The idea of a democratically decided pop show proved too much for a one-party state to countenance.
So for international music marketeers there is a limited spread of outlets through which to promote artists. This is especially true when you consider that music coverage is based more on cold hard cash than on merit. You could turn up to one of the few music-specific TV channels like Newscorp’s Channel V or MTV (which has a minute presence in China) with the best pop video in the world looking for airplay, but the response is likely to be “What’s in it for us?”. In this sort of climate—where media needs to be bought—the returns simply do not justify a label allocating a significant marketing (or coverage) budget to “break” niche foreign artists. They generally rely on larger artists’ spill-over publicity from the west.
As in the rest of the world, the internet is changing everything. Where broadcast media and press are government owned or heavily government-monitored, the internet is seen as a more effective way of promoting releases, with freedoms and readership figures that make printed press almost insignificant.
It’s actually possible to find niche audiences and interact with them effectively on bustling chat boards and blogs. While the internet is reportedly monitored by 30,000 “internet police”, the sheer volume of activity means that smaller, non-threatening outfits can operate in a relatively uncensored capacity.
The problem is that niche online audiences are very niche indeed. Genre awareness is perhaps one of the biggest spokes in the wheels of music development in China. It is possible to find all major genres—as well as a great deal of sub-genres—represented in tiny fan-groups online. However, the elaborate categorisation of music we seem to so enjoy in the west is the preserve of only a few music obsessives in China. While Converse trainers and drainpipe jeans might make your average Chinese high street hep-cat seem like an alternative cognoscenti, the chances are that understanding is lacking and there is very little consistency between any two elements of their identity, including music preference. Whilst hanging at the bar in Beijing underground live venue D-22, I noticed a Chinese girl next to me with crazy hair, blackened eyes, torn clothes and black fingernails. I got talking to her and asked her what kind of music she listened to. “Backstreet Boys,” was her immediate reply.
The kind of deeper involvement with a genre that would mean a goth could never admit to liking the Backstreet Boys is noticeably absent here. This girl is just as likely (or unlikely) to go out and download an Aaron Carter track as she is a Lacrimosa one. Music online is rarely searched out or bought according to genre. In fact, not only is your average MP3 not sold as part of a genre, it is also almost certainly pirated, completely DRM-free, with no meta data attached and, in a huge number of cases, doesn’t even have a file title. You are left with a completely ‘naked’ piece of audio. China simply never went through the age where music was bought at a premium on vinyl, cassette or CD, then lovingly horded, categorised and put on display for all your dinner party guests to see, encouraging in-depth dinner discussions about prog-rock or jazz.
Today’s China sees single-track, naked MP3s being Bluetoothed, file-shared, emailed, flash-disked, hard-drive-dumped and herded around the digital sphere in complete anonymity. Targeting potential listeners for your band in this scramble of a market is incredibly difficult because, in a great deal of cases, even your potential listener doesn’t know what he or she is listening to.
Despite this, digital is the hot topic in China. Due to the under-developed, pirate-dominated physical market and burgeoning mobile environment, China is on track to becoming the world’s testing ground for the digital age.
The statistics are pretty staggering, with some suggesting a digital market of US$1.5bn by 2010. With the second largest broadband network in the world, the advent of 3G later in 2007, 460 million mobile users and five million new mobile subscribers a month, who, on face value, would doubt them?
The view from the ground, however, is that all of these statistics need to be taken with a bucket of salt. All attempts by the Chinese government to combat online MP3 piracy, including all public ‘victories’ against pirates, should be seen as totally superficial—a lip service to the lobbying western majors. Internet MP3 piracy remains endemic, with fewer than 10 per cent (a very generous estimate) of downloaders actually paying (average price) 14p/download for the privilege.
Even the big boys are at it, with market leader Service Providers (SPs) like Baidu (over 50 million users per day) openly hosting ‘deep links’ to pirated tracks and making money through advertising while they’re at it.
Legal sites such as Top100 and 9Sky are on the rise, but change will be painfully slow due to a dislike of DRM, lack of will from the government, and a public who have been getting free music off the internet from day one. It is becoming increasingly common for record labels to give away MP3s for free in order to build profile for a track and then profit from where the real money potentially lies, namely Mobile Value-Added Services (MVAS).
While only a tiny percentage of Chinese people own a credit card (thereby making online download purchases difficult), the cash-pre-pay nature of mobiles means there is an established, digital payment system existing between the user and the mobile operators.
This allows for easy purchase of MVAS such as ringtones, caller ringback tones, background music and wallpaper. MVAS generate revenue of over half a billion dollars (US) a year but accounting is far from sturdy—SPs are habitually siphoning off millions of dollars by simply under-declaring sales in what is known as “accounting piracy”.
Even the legitimate numbers don’t look too rosey at the moment. The breakdown on your average truetone (for example) looks something like this:
15 per cent is returned to the telco, and 10 per cent to the publisher. Of the rest, the service provider takes half, with the remaining 37.5 per cent being split between the aggregator and the sound recording rights owner, with the aggregator taking anywhere from 20 to 50 per cent for his troubles. In this example, assuming you have a 50/50 deal with the aggregator, this leaves you with a grand total of 2.6 pence for every ringtone sold.
Micro numbers like this are hard to get excited about, but if the devil is in the detail, then the angel is in the scale. Music and the booming Chinese nation are at the start of a wonderful relationship on a scale that will dwarf any other territory in the world. It’s just that no one is making any money out of it—certainly not with conventional, western business models.
China needs to be seen as a blank canvas. While the numbers might suggest it is already going through a “boom” period, this is clearly not the case in relation to the copyright dependent industries. The boom is yet to come and the salient business models are yet to show themselves. What is certain is that the record label as you know it is dead and in its place have risen “digital entertainment companies”, who only produce single-track MP3s and are just as savvy at dealing with brand partnerships, pre-loaded mobile content and online guerilla marketing as they are at making music. While all these facets are increasingly important in the west, they are essential in China.
It is understood that DRM is not the horse to back. The pay-per-download system is also looking shaky and attention is increasingly turning to subscription models. China will be quite a way ahead of the west in turning the corner into this more fluid consumption of digital music.
So while there is no How To Make Money Out Of Music in China handbook yet, I suspect that when it is eventually written, it will be translated into a hundred different languages and ultimately be tucked under the arm of every music industry executive in the west, from London to New York.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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The people behind the Yue Festival have released a video of highlights of the concerts in Shanghai and Beijing earlier this year. Performers included Faithless, Talib Kweli, Ozomatli, Yacht, Banana Monkey, Hedgehog, IZ, SuperVC, Uprooted Sunshine and Bananas Soundsystem.
There is also a version of the video on Tudou.
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Analgesic for wasted youth This article by Mark Godfrey was originally published on the Irish music website Cluas, and is reproduced here with the permission of the author.
It started with a Van Halen album when he was 11. “That was first album that blew me away totally,” says Hua Cai, editor of Painkiller, China’s only national magazine dedicated to heavy metal music. Hua Cai's tastes have gotten louder and heavier since that first encounter with big haired, cheesy hard rock on an imported casette purchased on a backstreet Beijing music store.
The September issue - number 26 - of Painkiller, which comes out every two months, features Californian trash metal pioneers Testament on a cover flagging other articles on Scorpions, Pain Of Salvation and Nightrage. There’s reviews of albums by Behemoth Blitzkrieg and Heaven Shall Burn. The magazine's New Found Power section features Chinese band Puppet Butterfly.
Readers of the 25,000 copies of Painkiller published each issue are mostly students and blue collar workers. A national book distributor and Post office subscriptions get the magazine from Painkiller's Beijing office to fans around the country. An A4-sized glossy, Painkiller has been around for more than three years, born out of fanship and a commercial choice. “Yang the boss predicted this music will be big in China.” Hua read the first issue during his second year in high school. “I said ‘wow we have this in Chinese!'" says the man who signs himself “Dirty F” in his emails.
Sitting at a glass table in the corridor outside Painkiller's office in an anonymous commercial centre in Beijing's college-cluttered Haidian district, the 24 year old Beijinger speaks English with a fast fluency. He thanks Iron Maiden for that. “I wanted to understand the lyrics,” says Hua, who has never been abroad. “Van Halen is about entertainment. Maiden is more about faith...” Iron Maiden remains his favourite “because they have everything I want, power melody and great lyrics, epic personality. I like everything epic.”
The hardest part of an adolesence listening to Iron Maiden and Metallica was getting the CDs. “Before there was so very little chance to get into the music... I needed to be an angry teen,” says the very mild-mannered Hua, who introduces himself as Freddy. Broad and bulky, hair shaved to a neat one-centimetre stubble, it’s like he’s overcompensating for his normal down-to-earth-ness. “When I was 11 or 12 I realized that popular music would kill me.”
With those neat black rectangular-framed glasses resting on his nose, he could be the accountant or an advertising salesman most of his class mates became. They however would unlikely wear his olive-green sweater, emblazoned with the flame-like logo of Swedish metal band In Flames, who gave it to him. A thick ring on the right hand is styled like an Iron Cross, with a Coptic star in the turquoise-coloured centre. Ozzy Osbourne wore something similar in his Black Sabbath days. “A British friend got it for me,” says Hua, happy I notice.
Heavy metal was why he majored in journalism and communications. After graduating at the Xinan University of Nationalities he came back to Beijing – Chengdu had “hot girls and hot pot,” says Hua in an endearingly naïve way nice rock stars have of confirming to the rock star cliché of sex, drugs and rock n roll. He talks the talk, and in December walked the walk, in to Painkiller to ask for a job. "I was talking to chief said I was biggest fan since school.” A week later the clearly impressed publisher called back inviting him to start.
The editorial job has gotten easier as more bands add China to their tours: Testament and Slayer played here, while Linkin Park play Shanghai later this month. Hua wrings his hands with delight while describing the phone interview with vocalist Tom Araya, known for his trademark shouting singing style. “We got the first China interview with Slayer!”
That chat was set up by Universal’s branch office in China. Labels are keen to set up interviews for each issue. Smaller, specialist heavy metal labels have a contracts with Painkiller to contribute two songs for the CD that goes with each issue. Most of the tracks are by Western bands, says Hua because there’s not enough local talent good enough to make the cut. Yet most of the music isn’t available in china: readers have to buy online.
For the rest of its content Painkiller searches the international fanzines and magazines for Section 8 Crazies: whacky stories behind music like the world’s most famous husband-wife bands. Painkiller staff also write an Audio Powers section, its title borrowed from the film Austin Powers. “It introduces classic albums and pioneers of rock,” says Hua.
The latest issue of the magazine runs the gamut from hard to classic rock, with a few pages on horror films in between. “At the start we were very focused on metal and now we’re more open minded.” Stories on local punks Brain Failure and Sonic Youth-admiring indie stars Carsick Cars are a sop to local non-metalheads. Painkiller fills pages dedicated to the local scene with words and photos of local CD releases and shows at local venues such as 13 Club and Yugong Yishan. “We pick the best of new bands and predict the future stars,” says Hua.
Coverage of indie artists is part solidarity in a music scene where rock music of whatever variety remains a minority taste, banished from national radio and TV. “In China metal belongs to the indie scene…” The two will grow together. The rock fanbase is getting bigger, society accepts this kind of music than ever before.”
Painkiller's horror film section is staple fare for fans of gothic rock. “We want to be a heavy alternative magazine.”But Painkiller can only follow the rock code of rebellion so far. “Some people realize this music stands for power showing people to truly believe in yourself and fight for what you want, but not politically.”
Getting the magazine onto the street was tough enough to begin with. The publisher had to drive two days south west from Beijing around Henan province to find the state-owned sponsor every publication needs to get the magazine a barcode. A book publishing company in Zhengzhou was eventually persuaded. Changchun and Harbin are tops of the 20 mainland cities - the publication is also distributed in Hong Kong - where Painkiller sells. “People up there are more aggressive probably,” shrugs Hua.
A staff of six in a cosy-but-cramped office in one of Beijing's anonymous fast-built new real estate development whose unfinished glass exterior suggests the developer got the location wrong. Two in-house designers spend periods between issues mapping out designs for the stacks of t-shirts piled on office shelving either side of the office door. Most are original designs meant as tributes to well known metal bands.
Most of Painkiller’s advertising comes from instrument makers and sellers. The other half of Painkiller’s revenue comes from concerts. Beijing-based Twisted Machines recently headed a Painkiller six-band show that included seasoned groups, newcomers and bands with new albums. Finding good bands is hard, says Hua. “Most Chinese musicians talk about their instruments and equipment but pay little attention to the music… Some of the musicians don’t know how to match melody and singing.”
A new wave of bands singing “more and more” in English is also proof of the lack of originality. “Even in Heilongjiang bands are just copying western fads. That’s the biggest problem now, there’s no originality.” China made better metal in the past, when the country was far less plugged into global music trends. Hua’s pick of the best Chinese bands, Overlord and Tang Dynasty, retired in the late 1990s. Spring and Autumn, formed by core members of the latter, is a pale shadow of the original, says Hua.
The medicine Chinese metal scene needs is more live music: “more chances to see good metal.” Even though 1,000 people showed up to see Testament’s summer gig, high ticket prices are proving prohibitive to fans. “No one, especially students will pay RMB300 for an hour and a half long show.”
Proof that China has fans willing to travel: die hard fans from Tianjin and Heilongjiang paid up to RMB660 for tickets to a recent Beijing show by Swedish glam metal band Arch Enemy at the Haidian Exhibition Hall. The band, which features on a recent Painkiller cover story, drew 1000 Chinese fans, “not bad on a Wednesday night,” nods Hua. But high ticket prices are not sustainable in China, says Hua. “I couldn’t believe what some people were paying, 660 yuan is half my salary!,” says Hua.
The solution is to bring younger, lesser known bands who are willing to share some of the costs and sleep in cheap hotels. A May concert at Beijing’s Star Live club by Denmark-based Hatesphere organized by Painkiller drew sponsorship from a Danish corporation while concerts in RMB50 and RMB30 in Zhengzhou, Xian and Shenyang were helped by distributors of Schecter guitars in the cities. The band took trains between venues packed with attentive fans and local musicians keen to learn some new tricks. The Zhengzhou bill support came from a brutal death metal band while in Shenyang several black metal bands - "the screaming type" opened for the Danes. “The crowd went wild.”
Tours by foreign bands are growing the fanbase for metal music, says Hua. Arch Enemy took a week off after a Japan tour to check out the Chinese scene before going on to Australia. Painkiller estimates 900 people gathered at the Painkiller Stage at the recent Modern Sky music festival in Beijing. The indie label organising the festival gave Painkiller a stage to fill for one day. Several Japanese bands have via Taiwanese promoters, paid their own way.
The increasing mobility of young Chinese is grooming Chinese heavy metal fans - and Painkiller readers. Reviews and interviews come from Chinese students in Germany, Canada, Finland and London. “They’re fans of metal music and emailed us and said want to be your writer or distribute you.” One of them, a Chinese-born German, Yang Yu, has brought connections and PR know how. Webmaster and PR for Painkiller Yang Yu is also the force behind www.rockinchina.com
“Metal music will grow by us organizing shows and writing about them,” says 'Dirty F.' "We have to show people how cool this music is, and help them understand this music’s expression.”
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Xiao Mei and Ji'erhuleng, a "long-tune" or changdiao singer, Sunite Left Banner Region, 1996. Musicologist Xiao Mei is one of the funniest and most fiercely intelligent people I know.
When she goes on fieldwork trips across China she describes her experience as something "akin to a baptism" as if she is initiated or purified by what is about to unfold. She is inspired by a number of theoretical models, but her writings "in the field" are all about the human dimensions, the human interactions. Echoes in the Field: Notes on Musical Anthropology (Tianyede huisheng—Yinyue renleixue biji) published in 2001, reads like a musical travelogue. She tells her then six year-old daughter that she has a dream to travel across China to document musical performances. Her daughter tells her that she also has a dream to travel the world when she grows up.
Xiao traverses back and forth from her fieldworks to Beijing and Shanghai comparing herself to an astronaut returning home to planet earth. She returns to her home in Beijing, but has yet to regain her sense of gravity. The first thing she does is to head straight to Haagen Dazs. It's the ice cream that grounds her.
Xiao has been on many journeys over the past twenty years—she has trekked across many regions of China to document music performances, worked with UNESCO on "endangered" living musical traditions, collaborated with Dietrich Schüller, Director of the Phonogrammarchiv at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on sound and video recordings in China, and gathered a large international circle of friends including the American-based musicologist Bell Yung, the distinguished author and scholar of Indonesian music, Margaret Kartomi, and the American composer Eli Marshall.
Chinese music scholars have collected and compiled the nation's living music traditions for over a century. This is not to say that Chinese historiography did not document music, but the official dynastic histories contain virtually nothing on the living music traditions of the day, recording instead the musical styles and practices of bygone dynasties—specifically yayue (lit: "refined, elegant music")—court music that had to be strictly maintained and preserved in accordance with time-honoured musical practices.
The early twentieth century changed all that. Chinese intellectuals began the task of compiling histories of Chinese music that included the music of ordinary people. In time, musical performances, the voices of elders and the custodians of music traditions were recorded. These traditions were not necessarily found in notated scores, but invariably transmitted over time through a process of oral transmission. Yang Yinliu (1899-1984) considered by many to be the doyen of ethnomusicology in China, and his cousin Cao Anhe (1905-2004) worked together on some of the most important fieldwork recording projects from the late 1940s onwards. Moon Reflected in the Second Spring (Erquan yingyue), one of the most popular of all Chinese tunes, recorded by Yang and Cao on a Webster Chicago wire recorder in the summer of 1950, was performed by Hua Yanjun (A'bing) several months before he died. Other recordings supervised by Yang included the twelve muqam—large-scale suites consisting of sung poetry, dances tunes and instrumental sections—in 1951, and wind and percussion music in Wuxi in 1962. These recordings, as many others became part of the Chinese Traditional Music Sound Archive at the Music Research Institute in Beijing.
It is not only the Chinese who have conducted fieldwork and documented musical performances. Stephen Jones—long smitten by the rustic soundscapes of northern China—has done extensive fieldwork on the music associations in Nangaoluo village in Hebei province. He has collaborated with Xiao Mei and other Chinese musicologists that spans some twenty years. Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China (2004) has given Nangaoluo a past that otherwise would have been lost to English-speaking audiences.
These stories celebrate village life and the music rituals that give meaning to that life. These stories also celebrate elemental things, the rhythms of the working day, the labour of the fields, the lighting of the cooking fire, and the preparation and eating of food. The writing of such stories is also a biography of Jones himself, his encounters and interactions with local villagers. "If England had colonized Hebei province instead of Hong Kong," Jones has jokingly commented, "I'd be its governor. Music that accompanies funerals, ritual festivals and temple rites would be performed in my residence every morning..."*
The young American composer Eli Marshall is another musical explorer who has done fieldwork recordings in China's southwest. He's blown away by all the musical treasures this country has to offer. "Fifty-six official ethnicities, each with their own internal differences, each a little sound universe and then there are the popular or 'modern' manifestations, and a rich history of Western classical music as old as America's.*
In the summer of 2002, Marshall heard a peasant wind and percussion ensemble in Nangaoluo village which opened up a world of sonic colours. "It was a wall of sound hitting me in the chest, so many timbres in a cymbal, something we were not taught in orchestration class in the United States." Almost a century earlier, the American violinist, conductor and composer Henry Eichheim (1870-1942) was dazzled by a wind and percussion ensemble in Wuxi, Jiangsu province: "I can't imagine that with only eight people, music of such depth and richness can be created: I am an admirer of this music, but with no understanding."*
Fieldwork is very personal. It gives us a deeper appreciation to understand music as an integral part of social and cultural life with a value that transcends aesthetics or entertainment. We also observe that music making is not a spectacle, but a ritual where participants explore and cultivate relationships. When Marshall was in the Yongning Basin in southwest China in the early autumn of 2004, he was reminded of how music can articulate some of our deepest values and impulses. "I talked to many older people who in their youth had sung as part of their daily life. They were in touch with something special, something genuine, where every sound and nuance had a real meaning in their lives."*
 Yi instrumentalist at a Yi Cultural Tourism Fair, Meigu county, Da Liangshan, August 2005. (photo: Olivia Kraef) Olivia Kaef, who has done fieldwork research on the Yi people in Liangshan since 2004, recalls that it was the singing that drew her in, but she says it could have easily been the people she interacted with first, then the singing. "I went from listener to participant observer, to performer and back again. I've lived with them: the mountains that generate the songs, the drinking, sharing and the emotions transformed again back into these songs. For me, Nuosu songs are so real; they are a living testimony to the spirit of a great people."*
 Wallace wth mourners at a village funeral, Shanxi province, September 2005. One of the most exciting stages for me in fieldwork is to just observe the sonic gestures, the latent musical possibilities of what might happen. In the summer of 2005, I accompanied a music discovery tour group from the US who included the composer Stuart Wallace and the writer Amy Tan to Guizhou (Wallace has collaborated with Tan to write an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter's Daughter). We were in the heartland of a northern Dong (Kam) village. It was a hot muggy late afternoon, the humid air laden with the smell of ox dung. A group of us were walking along a narrow path and commenting that a "mosquito happy hour" would soon eat us all. An old woman carrying a bundle of firewood stopped and began to sing.
It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was trying to filter emotions, hidden narratives of this old lady's past. Raw emotion from any singer always hides the technical effort, the discipline and training of the voice. It was a direct display of natural reflexes, but it was obvious that this old lady had been singing for most of her life. Her nuances of her voice spoke of the land, the mountains and rivers. I was here and now in the present, but her voice took me back to some distant past, long ago and far away.
Note 1: Quoted in Yang Yinliu. "A Bewildered Western Musician." Chinese Music 7(1), 1984:4
Note 2: Personal communication, September 18, 2004.
Note 3: Personal communication, August 20, 2007, Beijing.
Note 4: 'Thoughts on the plains of Hebei province' ('Yizhong pingyuanshangde sixu'), in Zhang Zhentao Zhuye qiule lu, Jinan: Shandong chubanshe, 2002: 11.
Note 5: Personal communication, August 25, 2002, Beijing. This article is from Danwei.org
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Here's a look at China's popular music three decades ago from journalist Yang Lang:
Popular songs from 30 years ago
by Yang Lang / Mirror
Thirty years ago, or more specifically, in 1977, what songs were popular in Chinese society? I almost got stumped when I asked myself this question. Each age has its own popular things. Just because that concept didn't exist in the Cultural Revolution era doesn't mean there wasn't popular music, and just because a particular political environment infused music with particular content doesn't mean that the music was not "popular."
But what songs did the people of that era like to sing? Or to put it another way, what songs from thirty years ago have left an impression on people today?
1977 was a special time, just after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution but before the start of the reform and opening up. In broadcasting, today's A/V technology had not yet arrived, there were no tapes, much less CDs, and TV was not widespread. The most influential ways of circulating music were radio, movie songs, and public performances; in recorded music, vinyl records were most common, but they too were far from widespread. So in those days, being inserted into a movie was the most effective means of song transmission.
I reviewed all of the movies shown between 1976 and 1977, thirty-six films in all. They were:
In 1976: Beijing Film Studio [5 films], Changchun Film Studio [10 films], Xi'an Film Studio [3 films], Shanghai Film Studio [5 films], August First Film Studio [3 films], Zhujiang Film Studio [3 films], Emei Film Studio [1 film]; in 1977: Shanghai Film Studio [2 films], Beijing Film Studio [3 films], Changchun Film Studio [2 films], Guangxi Film Studio [1 film], Emei Film Studio [1 film]. [note: some films were shown multiple years; for names, see the original article]
Obviously, the majority of these movies have already been forgotten. The songs in these movies that are still sung today include the theme song to Storm Over The South-China Sea (南海风云), beginning with the free chanting and moving through the middle passage "I love my hometown" that has a sweet note held out long. Beijing Film Studio's Haixia (海霞) has a bit from "By the ocean..." sung by Lu Qingshuang ["A fisherman's daughter by the ocean"], a song that's been alive all this time and after thirty years was performed again by Black Duck. And "Stars Twinkle in the Dark Sky" from Enterprise Building (创业) is also a very nice song. Good songs from other films, like "A girl looks for her brother with tears streaming" from Little Flower (小花), and "The water in the borderlands is so clear" from Black Triangle (黑三角), may reemerge after a few more years.
Before 1977, the movie songs that were constantly being sung were the two themes from Sparkling Red Star (闪闪的红星) that showed in 1974, and "Follow the socialist road ahead" from Qingsongling (青松岭) in 1973.
A few other songs belonged to 1977: "Beloved Chairman Hua", "Jiaocheng Mountain", and "Embroidering the tablet with golden thread". As Guo Lanying's performances were moving audiences to tears, Su Xiaoming had just begun her career at 20, Cui Jian was just 16, and Pu Shu had just left his crib. And Tan Jing, that army singer who sings Shaanxi folk songs just like Grandma Guo, would not be born for another two months.
Links and Sources
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An experienced Chinese journalist doing a story marking the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley — August 16 — is looking for Elvis experts.
Ideally the expert should either be Elvis himself, or have met Elvis, but mere mortals with knowledge about the man the Chinese call Cat King (猫王) are encouraged to get in touch: elvis@danwei.org.
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