America's last export: Rock and Roll

[Ignis]

Tight pants, cool haircuts and rock music. They’re commonplace, even cliché, in the United States, but they’re now the icons of a complex transformation in China.

The country’s ever-growing consumer culture almost requires an increased sense of individuality and its own counterculture. And considering the shape and energy of its emerging underground music scene, it’s hard not to project a parallel mindset onto China similar to that of the United States in the 1960s and ’70s.

{snip}

"I feel that if anything bonds these musicians together, is that they are repelled by and don’t wish to participate in a largely vacuous and inherently unsustainable consumer culture taking hold of China. While they might not brazenly attack the government, their embrace of such a fringe lifestyle along with the music they produce is a powerful statement in and of itself. This choice comes with a social stigma that is hard to imagine outside of China.

There certainly is something authentic about the burst of creativity in Beijing’s music scene, and it definitely stems from some of the tougher circumstances performers face there. I am not saying this can’t happen in the United States anymore, but compared to my own experience in New York before returning to China, the performers in Beijing have an unaffected air that I couldn’t really find in Manhattan or Brooklyn."

-- Wired @ http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2009/12/gallery-beijing-rock-underground/



I hope to make it to Beijing as part of a longer Asia (business) trip next year. I'm a music fan and attend my share of live shows, but even in San Francisco, it's difficult to find those really good, hungry musicians who are playing what they want to play rather than what the label wants them to promote. Maybe I'm jaded or they are (or both!), but it'll be refreshing to see some angry young kids screaming some rock-n-roll loud and proud.

[Ignis]

1. More pics:

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[Ignis]

2. And a last round of pics:

This series is one of my favorites:


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