Pierced Fans, Stiff Cadres and Hip Rock
Security guards watched fans at the Zhenjiang Midi Music Festival earlier this month in Zhenjiang City, China.
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: October 23, 2010
ZHENJIANG, China — A curious thing happened this month at the Midi Music Festival, China’s oldest and boldest agglomeration of rock, funk, punk and electronica. Performers took musical potshots at the country’s leaders, tattooed college students sold antigovernment T-shirts and an unruly crowd of heavy metal fans giddily torched a Japanese flag that had been emblazoned with expletives
Curious, because the event, a four-day free-for-all of Budweiser, crowd-surfing and camping, was sponsored by the local Communist Party, which spent $2.1 million to turn cornfields into festival grounds, pay the growling punk bands and clean up the detritus left by 80,000 attendees.
The city cadres also provided an army of white-gloved police officers, earplugs in place, who courteously endured bands with names like Miserable Faith and AK47 while fans slung mud at one another.
The incongruity of security agents facilitating the sale of cannabis-themed merchandise was not lost on the festival’s organizer, Zhang Fan.
“The government used to see rock fans as something akin to a devastating flood or an invasion of savage beasts,” said Mr. Zhang, a handful of whose events have been canceled by skittish bureaucrats since he pioneered the Chinese music festival in 2000. “Now we’re all part of the nation’s quest for a harmonious society.”
He is not complaining, nor are the dozens of malnourished musicians who finally have a way to monetize their craft — although no one is getting rich yet.
The shift in official sentiment — and among state-backed companies paying to have their logos splashed across the stage — has led to an explosion of festivals across China. In 2008, there were five multiday concerts, nearly all in Beijing. This year there have already been more than 60, from the northern grasslands of Inner Mongolia to the southern highlands of Yunnan Province.
Without exception the festivals have been staged with the help of local governments that have come to realize that pierced rockers flailing around a mosh pit are not necessarily interested in upending single-party rule.
More importantly, the governments have decided, for now at least, that music festivals can deliver something that even the most seasoned propagandists cannot spin out of thin air: coolness.
“All these local ministries want their cities to be thought of as fun, young and hip so they can draw more tourists and claim a public relations trophy,” said Scarlett Li, a music promoter whose company, Zebra Media, stages festivals, including one in Chengdu that draws more than 150,000 to a park custom-built by the government.
The more permissive atmosphere for indie music is a contrast to heightened Internet censorship and the crackdown on vocal advocates of political change. Skeptics say the government is simply trying to co-opt youth culture, but others view the spread of festivals as an encouraging sign that rock, punk and heavy metal might finally have a stage free from the financial and political shackles that have constrained them.
Even if the authorities still insist on approving lineups in advance, rejections are infrequent, organizers say, partly because more musicians perform in English, which can challenge all but the most learned censors.
“The government is happy for young bands to sing in English because that way the fans won’t know what they’re saying,” said Yang Haisong, the lead singer of a post-punk band called P.K.14 and a producer.
Too much of a good thing, however, can have its downsides. The sudden proliferation of festivals has led to sparse crowds as events compete for the limited pool of fans able to afford the 150 yuan-a-day (about $22) admission. Then there are the slapdash affairs that lack working toilets, edible food or decent sound systems. Nearly every seasoned musician, it seems, has been shocked by an improperly grounded microphone or stiffed by a promoter.
“There’s nothing quite like getting injured on stage and having to hobble out to the front gate of a festival because no one thought to provide an ambulance,” said Helen Feng, a Chinese-American musician, referring to her own fall during a recent performance.
Another problem is that China’s independent music scene is still in its adolescence, with quality and originality in short supply. Many festivals showcase the same acts, some of which might be charitably described as musically challenged.
“If every festival has the same three bands or if there is too much corporate advertising or if kids don’t enjoy themselves, they won’t come back,” Ms. Feng said.
The one festival that does not have a problem with loyalty is Midi, which began in 2000 as a recital for students at Mr. Zhang’s Midi School of Music in Beijing and has grown into something of a cultural phenomenon. In the years when it hasn’t been shut down by the authorities, the event has drawn tens of thousands to a Beijing park with dozens of bands and a freewheeling atmosphere of young sophisticates, pimple-faced thrasher rock enthusiasts and a smattering of angry nationalists who like their music loud and rough.
But last year, after one too many impromptu cancellations by the Public Security Bureau, Mr. Zhang decided to move his festival. Zhenjiang, in Jiangsu Province, was willing not only to create festival grounds on an island in the Yangtze River but also to offer generous subsidies, a 10-year arrangement and a hands-off approach.
Mr. Zhang insisted on keeping ticket prices low, at $9 a day, and limiting corporate advertising. He also persuaded the government to relinquish control over content. “They also wisely heeded my advice and decided not to have local officials take the stage and address the audience,” Mr. Zhang said.
The result was a refreshingly spirited festival and a crowd that was as countercultural as they come in China. When a downpour turned green fields into brown goo, images of Woodstock came to mind, albeit without the overt sex and drugs.
Offstage, vendors hawked vintage Mao buttons, bunny ears, glow sticks, neon-colored clown wigs, penis-shaped water guns and stuffed “grass-mud horses,” a mythical creature that has become a protest symbol against Internet censorship.
Then there was Qian Cheng, 25, who had scrawled out a cheeky sign offering to sell himself for 5 yuan, about 75 cents, to any girl who would have him. Mr. Qian, a television station employee from central China, sat on a sheet of plastic surrounded by a dozen people he had just met — all of whom had found one another online. Asked what they had in common, Mr. Qian looked around with satisfaction. “We aren’t pretentious and we are true to ourselves,” he said. “And unlike those in the outside world, we aren't obsessed with looks and money.”
One notable accessory was red scarves — the kind meticulously knotted around the necks of Communist Party Young Pioneers. But these scarves were bound around arms or legs, or drawn across the face for a bandit look.
Chen Chen, 22, an architecture student, explained that the scarf, which schoolchildren learn represents the blood of martyrs, has come to denote membership in a tribe trying to carve out space in a society that demands absolute conformity. “It is a symbol of our devotion to pure rock and to the fight against oppression,” he said proudly.
Most festivals, however, embrace more mundane diversions: apolitical entertainment, a distraction from daily pressures and perhaps an opportunity to do some shopping. At the same time that the Midi masses were squishing through the mud in Zhenjiang, several thousand smartly dressed professionals in nearby Hangzhou were lounging on a manicured lawn at a 1950s-era cement plant that is now a government-run arts center.
Zebra, the company that staged the festival in Hangzhou, set up an arts and crafts market and a booth for exchanging unwanted possessions, to highlight the theme of sustainability. There were no red scarves, and the music, much of it of the Pop Idol variety, was easy on the ears.
Although she said the festival would probably lose money its first two years, Ms. Li of Zebra said she wanted to introduce the concept of the music festival and expose young Chinese to different kinds of music. And, she said of the musicians, “I want these kids to see that they can turn their talent into a career.”
But Yang Haisong of P.K.14 could not help but feel cynical as he looked around at the Modern Sky Music Festival in Beijing going on at the same time as the others. To his right was a Jägermeister tent; to his left, an enormous line of well-dressed people waiting for free Converse tote bags. Asked if he thought Chinese youth culture might be on the brink of a tectonic breakthrough, Mr. Yang smiled and shook his head.
“The government used to see us as dangerous,” he said. “Now they see us as a market.”
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