Speaking of anniversaries…
In late May, Beijing venue 2 Kolegas, known as “dos kolegas” celebrated its seventh birthday. I can think of no better way to honour and celebrate that occasion than this…
Author: admin
It was twenty-three years ago today…
Twenty-three years ago, it was June 4, 1989.
I lived in Beijing through ten anniversaries, but the significance of the date, in what must sound, to those who didn’t live there over the past few years, odd, seemed to shrink over my stay. Until, however, I looked into yaogun’s history, and saw that the movement that brought thousands to Tiananmen Square was nourished at the same teet as was the passion for rock and the drive to yaogun. Citizens in the Square and yaogunners on stages were after the same thing: It was about possibilities. There was so much that was new, and there was a hunger to discover it all, and more. And there was so much hope.
Yaogun: 3D!
There has been talk for a while now about the possibility of a 3D film based on Yaogunner Number One’s 2010/2011 New Years’ Eve and Day concerts. For those two shows, Cui Jian turned the tables on his former employers, the Beijing Symphony Orchestra. Cui had blown the trumpet for the group through most of the 80s, until the Orchestra told him that his extra-curricular pop and rock activities had to stop. Luckily for us all, he chose yaogun, and left the Orchestra before the
decade was up.
Kid Koala, Here, There, Then and Now
Still blown away by the amazing Kid Koala Space Cadet Headphone Experience show at Toronto’s 918 Bathurst last night. If you’re remotely interested in animation, music, scratch-DJing, comics, art, video games or lying on the floor with headphones and experiencing music, I can’t recommend it enough. Here’s another way to put it…
China’s Dick Clark
Dick Clark’s passing has elicited much ink over his role, via American Bandstand, in bringing rock and roll into the households of America at a time when the heads of those households wanted to bar the music from ever getting into the ears of their familes’ younger members. 
Ditto the reports on Soul Train‘s Don Cornelius and his role in popularising — legitimising, even — African-American music among the mainstream, when it, too, was left at the fringes of popular culture. The deep marks of both men remain on popular (and unpopular) music, despite the void left by their passing.