Scottish Mike vs. Pinkberry: A Tale of Mismanaged Expectations

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Over on Tumblr, Scottish Mike from Shanghai bands Girls Like Mystery and Xiao Xin Yi Yi has written a couple of blog posts about his experiences playing at 696 Livehouse’s Sunday Live show with Shanghai band Pink Berry. Long story short, Mike’s pals organise a free Sunday afternoon show at 696 Livehouse, invites a bunch of bands including Pinkberry, Pinkberry are late for sound check and do not communicate this to Mike*, they play and leave immediately afterwards, Mike posts about Pinkberry’s “indifference” and “disappointing performance” then sends said post to the band via Weibo, the band responds in a way Mike deems “abusive slander” which he immediately posts and responds to in a subsequent Tumblr post. Whew. Got all that? Trust us, the long version is even harder to follow.

So let’s unpack all this. Scottish Mike reposts all of the “abusive” (quotations because we quoting directly from his post, this is not editorializing) Weibo posts from Pinkberry’s band members and responds to them one by one. He freely admits that his Chinese isn’t good enough to communicate with Pink Berry in Chinese, and does not reveal how/who translated the Weibo postings. Here is the first one, plus his translation/response. Our response will be below that:

所以说真的是很讨厌老外啊 如果你尊重我们你会跟我们说中文 或者如果你觉得你骂了我们还要at我你真的是… 我还真的就讨厌你们这些看演出的组织演出的了 我们演出是给中国观众看的 不是给你们 在中国混就低调点学点儿中国的事 你试试三天三场演出你试试看如果你可以你再骂 不过你们也接不到演出 好笑

This is basically xenophobic towards foreigners. The gist of it is that she resents our opinions on this and if I respect the band, I would tell them that in Chinese. I would: it’s not good enough to do so, however. She goes onto to say that “the chinese audience are not looking for us to perform here” blah blah. She wasn’t saying that at either of these 2 events where I ended up giving them 1400rmb and 900 rmb respectively which we promoted a lot, particularly having them as the selling point for the event.

Just from a cursory glance, Scottish Mike gets this about half-right. Whilst Pink Berry’s Yoi might not win Miss Congeniality for the tone of the Weibo, she does raise two important points: 1) Wanting to be spoken to in Chinese, when you are in China. 2) Pink Berry exists as a Chinese band, for Chinese audiences. For the first point, we get it. It’s a point of pride to be able to communicate with a fellow musician in their native language, when you are, technically speaking, guests in the country. Don’t think it’s an unreasonable request. As for the second, if that is the type of band Pink Berry want to be (and it certainly seems that way), then no one should tell them otherwise.  We haven’t been to any of the Sunday Sessions at Live Bar so we cannot judge whether or not the audience is expat or Chinese majority.

This next post to be fair wasn’t abusive and explained why they sat outside and whatever. Here it is and if that is the case, then fair enough.

我们不是不理你,因为我们很累,都挂着眼袋,我们已经是以最快的速度赶过来了,事先已经跟场地方打过招呼会迟到,不试音了,场地灯光昏暗,没跟你打招呼,可能是没看到你。演出完了一直在外面坐着,因为里面座位有些是有人要坐的,大热天的,谁不想吹冷气啊,只是不想影响其他人罢了

This post actually explains Pink Berry’s perceived attitude towards the other bands – this was the third show they played in three days, they had just rushed over from Ningbo that day and had already communicated prior with the venue staff (not promoter) about being late and forgoing sound check. Although communication is key in all shows, it sounds like Pink Berry bypassed the (foreign) promoters in favor of directly contacting the venue. Inconsiderate perhaps, but not uncommon and certainly not unexpected considering their first post about wanting to be spoken to in Chinese.

There have been numerous complaints, on this blog and others, about the perceived lack of effort by local Shanghainese bands to organize shows, get their names out there and generally self-promote. But when a local band does get involved (and in our experience, Pinkberry have been active and exceptionally enthusiastic // hard working for many years now (if memory serves, probably about 5 – perhaps a record for a local Shanghai band)), some guy is just waiting to Complain On The Internet about XYZ reasons that band sucked and were horrible human beings. This probably won’t be a huge incentive for other local artists to get involved in the Sunday showcase.

Finally, the foreign resident vs. local resident paradigm. Sunday Live is organised by two Shanghai expats, ostensibly for local university students. They occur in the afternoon so no one has to worry about getting a cab back or missing dorm curfew. It is honestly great when anyone goes to the trouble to organize music events in Shanghai that showcase new and upcoming music.  This is a huge prerequisite to building a scene, and while no PR is bad PR, let’s keep it civil, people.

Interested to hear how Mike’s drink with Pinkberry went last night.

 

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