Rock ’n’ roll show rewinds fans’ recollections
It may sound like just a catchy melody but for some rock aficionados the lyrics with it are the very essence of life itself
Two weeks after the debut of an internet variety show named The
Big Band a few months ago, Xu Bin shared the performance of a 25-year-old song that had featured in the show through the social media app WeChat.
Xu, 54, a journalist with Zhejiang Daily who says he seldom posts anything on WeChat unrelated to his job, wrote: “Out of the blue, this song took me back to the golden era of Chinese rock ’n’ roll. Time has flown, but that doesn’t seem to have taken anything away,” followed with a crying-face emoticon.
On May 9, 1986, Cui Jian performed the rock songs Nothing To My Name and Not
About Understanding at a concert in Beijing celebrating the international year of peace. The two songs later featured on an album tribute to the concert, marking the birth of Chinese rock music.
In 1994 rock ’n’ roll opened up a remarkable chapter in China. Dou Wei, Zhang Chu and He Yong, known as “Three Standouts of Magic Stone” (their record company), each released a new album. In December that year the three and The Tang Dynasty, a heavy metal rock band, held a concert in Hong Kong that stunned the audience. From there the popularity of rock music and rock stars took off in China.
Xu, born in a village in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, has two sisters, but he was the only one in the family to go to university, thanks to his mother borrowing money from neighbors to pay for his tuition fees.
It was while he was in his third year at Renmin University of China in Beijing that he became acquainted with rock music after one of his roommates bought a pirated tape of the memoir album. At the time one of the musical voices that held sway was that of the Taiwan singer Teresa Teng with sentimental numbers such as Tian Mimi (Sweet Honey) and Yue Liang Daibiao Wode Xin (The Moon Represents My Heart).
“Teng’s songs were like candy melting between teeth and tongue, but Cui’s songs crushed me like a stone from the sky,” Xu says.
“The lyrics perfectly reflected the struggles I was facing.”
Those challenges included preparing to leave school and face the world of work and to take on the responsibilities of full adulthood.
“I had nothing to my name, but the pursuit of love. I wanted to pursue love, but I had nothing to my name.”
Kong Dongbei, 32, born in Beijing but who now works for an investment bank in Hong Kong, agrees that good songs reflect reality in an artistic way.
After working in the finance industry for more than 10 years, Kong says, he is now paid 3.5 million yuan ($500,000) a year.
Kong says he feels fortunate to be materially well off at such an early age, and that he empathizes with his contemporaries who need to fight to make ends meet.
He goes on to recount the early days of his career when, in his first year after graduating from the University of Toronto, he found it difficult to find the ideal job. For more than six months he worked for the Bank of China in Toronto, being paid 8,000 yuan a month, he says.
“After paying rent, utilities, telephone and internet I was left with 1,000 yuan. I saw no hope for promotion or a raise, and my life was a hopeless mess. ”
He then begins singing the song People Without Ideals Have No Sadness, performed by the group New Pants, which took part in The Big Band:
“When you’re fighting for ideals, What you’re really fighting for is money. … I have no desire to die the lonely death of a failure; and I don’t want to live underground forever;
The deception of materialistic pleasure; Running around like ants under pressure; Uncultured people have no sadness.”
“For me that song’s like a time machine,” Kong says. “It takes me back to the days when I was confused.”
Kong’s friends refer to him as “the reciter” because of his propensity to recite lyrics, lines from films and poetry that inspire him.
After the show he can even recite backward, and fluently, New Pants’ lyrics. Kong then gives some clues to how extensively those lyrics have overshadowed his life:
“‘The girl in the cubicle looks pretty as time goes by’ — that’s me starting to enjoy office romance with the girl sitting next to me at the time — ‘People got no money and got no place to make love’ — also me when I had to get my girlfriend to pay the hotel room deposit because my money covered only the room rate, at a hotel close to her home when I was 18.”
New Pants, which was established in 1996 in Beijing, was The Big Band winner, just at it has been a longtime winner for Kong.
It is not only the lyrics that draw him to the band but also the performance of its lead singer, Peng Lei.
It was only after the fifth episode was broadcast that Kong began to watch the show, when a friend gave him a video of New Pants performing an adapted Chinese rock song, Firework.
On the stage Peng would by turns mutter through gritted teeth and then sing at full tilt, almost to the point of going off key, his mouth agape, his face contorted and his torso quivering.
“I was almost convinced that the world was going to end the next day, and that this was going to be the last song they would ever sing,” Kong says.
“As I watched Peng seemed to leave his last drop of sweat and strength on the stage. It was like hearing a loud slap across the face, reminding me of life’s difficulties, and then gaining the courage to continue my journey to overcome any difficulties.”
Yang Zeyu, born in 1989, an entrepreneur in Beijing, was also highly impressed by how Peng performed Firework.
“I know passion takes many forms — painters bury their passion in paintings, athletes mix their passion with sweat. In my case, in many years of training in finance and business, my passion has been hidden by rationality and persistence.
“Through the performance I saw passion in its most tangible form being presented before my very eyes. And it made me realize that I’ve chosen a life of passion spread over a long time. There are other paths you can take in life in which passion can be highly condensed into a very short time. And when the energy suddenly explodes it’s as though a life is burning out.”
Rock ’n’ roll may be harsh medicine, but it’s not everyone’s choice as a cure, at least not discovered by Kong and Yang before this summer.
At an event on New Year’s Eve 2017, Cui performed Greenhouse Girl. Introducing the song, he said: “People didn’t know who we were during the rehearsal, but they’ll l realize who we are once we start singing this song.”
About 20 years earlier Chinese rock music had been in decline. In 1995 Zhang Ju, one of the founders of The Tang Dynasty band, died in a car accident. Then Zhang Peiren, the founder of Magic Stone, left Beijing and went back his roots in Taiwan to cultivate younger pop stars. Some performers even found themselves being sidelined because of delinquent behavior. However, by the turn of the century Chinese rock music had begun to get its act together to be presented in a different way.
The rock stars and bands of that generation, including Wang Feng, Xu Wei, The Miserable Faith and Reflector, attempted to produce music carrying more positive meanings, even combining some popular musical elements. In fact they couldn’t stop mainstream Chinese music from being replaced by more relaxing, unreflective pop music.
“The era of peace arrived,” Xu says. “People’s living conditions had improved; they no longer had to act out their anger or fear, which they had been carrying in the age of turbulence, through rock ’n’ roll. And the development of the internet and technology kind of intermediated the close bound between the fans and the music, heavily dependent on live performance. Internet benefited other types of music and stars more naturally suited to the context.”
Kong was a fan of pop music in his youth, especially love songs, whether bitter or sweet.
“Undeniably, love is an important part in life, but there is much more worth exploring. Unconsciously, our vision and imagination are shaped by pop culture, including music.”
Also, most pop songs are not so difficult to sing, which allows Kong to perform at karaoke gatherings and have fun with friends.
“After watching The Big Band I realized that I’d been eating fast food,” Kong says, “low barriers to entry, easy to enjoy, but with little nutrition.”
Yang also grew up in the 1990s surrounded by teenage friends obsessed with pop music and by pop stars, mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Nevertheless he has never been truly touched by music of any type, even though he has been learning to play piano from 6 to 9 and passed piano grade examination stage 5.
Yang listens to music, mostly quiet classical music, as background music when he is reading.
“In my 30 years of life I have never closed my eyes, and have paid absolute attention as I enjoyed the music. I regard it as a tool to help me concentrate.”
He first started to watch The Big Band on the recommendation of a highly respected friend, and soon was putting aside two hours every Saturday to watch it.
Blue Daydreaming is a song created by Hedgehog, a band established in 2005. Yang says it was of the most talented but underrated bands in Beijing before the show began.
For him Hedgehog conveys “optimism alongside constant struggle” in its songs, the fruit of the group’s own non-straight forward path in pursuing its dreams in rock music.
“Once you get what they want to say, you sort of develop a bond with the band, and that bond is not going to simply vanish. I can now see that my own experience and this music have something in common. I think the ‘I’ factor is always the most important part of the individual appraisal of every art form: ‘I sympathize’, ‘I understand’, ‘I was cured’, ‘I was touched’, ‘I was inspired’. All have happened to me.”
Yang says the artists also taught him how to think about life. For example, one of the participants of the show, Mr Sea Turtle, a band established in 2004, preaches that rock music really is about propagating “common sense and courage to act with common sense”.
“These kinds of suggestions are enormously valuable but not commonly put into practice when people make decisions.
“I think The Big Band made such a profound impression on me because it not only revealed my blind spots, but also helped me identify values that I, the music, and the artists share.”
Xu describes the mid 1980s to the ’90s, when Chinese rock music was born, as “an immaculate period”.
“People were learning and absorbing from the outside world with an open mind and a positive sprit, feeling confident and critical.”
Xu thinks a sense of helplessness often heard in rock music comes from criticizing reality soberly and always striving after better things.
In the 21st century Xu bought his first car, a black Santana, and his daughter went to primary school. Magnetic tape was slowly replaced by CD and the Walkman after the appearance of computer technology and the internet.
Almost every weekend, as he drives to a picnic in the tea field of
Longjing village in Hangzhou, he plays cheerful non-Chinese songs such as Hotel California and
Lemon Tree that he has downloaded from the internet and burnt onto a CD. He recalls his daughter humming along in the back seat sitting alongside his wife.
He also recalls that in December 1992 he carried a heavy recording machine to a concert by Cui in Hangzhou that lasted three days. He enjoyed and recorded every single second of, utterly satisfied — and at the same time wishing that this moment would never end.
I think The Big Band made such a profound impression on me because it not only revealed my blind spots, but also helped me identify values that I, the music, and the artists share.” Yang Zeyu an entrepreneur in Beijing