And so, the last few days in China’s fledgling indie music scene have been marked by negative and positive festival reviews, and an essay penned by Rock in China’s Max-Leonhard von Schaper on why Beijing music is so much more than just D-22/ Maybe Mars.
And so now, after all the years of adulation, are we experiencing a backlash? Journalists with no sense of perspective, no sense of how far we have come with music in China, but who have been hyped by the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and Wired, come and write with a witheringly patronizing bent about how shallow it is, how bad the bands are and how disinterested the audiences are. I’ve picked a few choice bits from “hallowed” journal, the HuffPo, in which the author shows a fairly sensationalist lack of compassion and understanding – expected from the tabloids, we suppose… full article HERE.
- Bands now sing about material things, observing people’s opinions on money and the need for affluent lives. Not only this, increasingly more people on the scene need to have an outfit first — an outfit that befits the lifestyle.
- The festival itself were becoming less about the music, and more about what we were seeing, staring at, and whispering to each other.
- The closing act of Midi day one was He Yong. It was common knowledge that the punk-child of the late 80s and early 90s had now become a bit crazy, fuzzy-minded, and fat. … Instead of being able to rally great inspiration in the crowd, what he instilled in people was a tiresome and overpowering sense of nostalgia — that rock with a spiritual purpose belonged to an era that had long passed.