Category: General

You know, general musings, stuff of that ilk.

Newness @ jWc.com and Beyond

It’s not just Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll season. It’s also new content at jonathanWcampbell.com season, as well as high time I lead you to some jWc/Red Rock news Out There on the world-wide interweb.

First, at “home”: You’ll find a new section at jWc.com: RED ROCK: THE BONUS TRACKS. Unlike Red Rock: The Liner Notes, which give more footnote-type illuminations on the text of the book, the Bonus Tracks bring elucidations of a multi-media kind. I’m time-releasing these bad-boys, to let you do some reading before you dive deep beyond Red Rock‘s pages. Oddly enough, I’ve opted to start with Chapter 1.

Next, “Out There”, where word is slowly starting to spread:

The Library Journal said very nice things about Red Rock. Read those things here.

The China-based Global Times newspaper ran a story about yours truly and Red Rock. That story is here. A companion piece on yaogun’s journey is here.

PopMatters.com published an excerpt of Red Rock‘s first chapter.

Not long ago,the Taipei Times ran a lukewarm review of Red Rock. The same author wrote a warmer review for the South China Morning Post, which is behind a paywall.

I appeared on web-tv channel That Channel’s Liquid Lunch in late September. You can see the video of the entire episode here.

The Beijinger, an English-language events magazine, ran a profile in their tenth anniversary issue, viewable online here.

As previously mentioned, Time Out (Beijing) asked me to chart Five Major Moments on yaogun’s path.

And don’t forget: Red Rock is available via Amazon:

Librarians Dig Red Rock

Librarians can rock with the rest of us, despite their reputation. To wit: They used the following words, in a recent Library Journal issue, to describe Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll:
“Indepth“, “Thoughtful“, “Well-written“, “an especially welcome addition”

The full review (which is from their website):

One does not usually associate rock ‘n’ roll with China, but a passion for this music has been growing there since the post-Mao era, when yaogun (Chinese rock) began to emerge, speaking to the confusion and frustration of the younger generation. From certain defining events, including a landmark 1986 performance by Cui Jian, to the latest Midi Music Festival, musician/promoter and journalist Campbell traces the history of this phenomenon. He discusses the behind-the-scenes workings of groups that molded music from a different culture into something uniquely theirs that they can, in turn, introduce to the world. Drawing from a wealth of sources and personal experiences, Campbell explores the individuals and their philosophies, the cultural conflicts, and the singular challenges inherent in this musical movement—from the artistic to the political—and raises provocative questions about how far yaogun has come and where it is going. VERDICT This in-depth, thoughtful, and well-written book will appeal to those with an interest in rock ‘n’ roll and related genres of contemporary music on an international level. An especially welcome addition to world music collections.—Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ

 

More of “Nothing”, Finally

The casual follower of rock and roll in China will have heard that Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name” (一无所有) was the song that started everything and that it was first performed, in 1986, to a stadium and a television audience that immediately took to it like it was their own (which, for all intents and purposes, it was). One of my favourite experiences writing Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll was doing the play-by-play on a video of that performance. I watched and re-watched the only clip of that performance I could find, a clip with a voice-over covering up the second verse, and, worst of all, an abrupt ending in the wake of the suona (a traditional combination clarinet-oboe-soprano sax) solo halfway through the song.

Though continually coming empty, I continued to search for a better, more complete version of the performance. Today, I lucked out and found, finally, a different cut of the same show, this time in all its four-minute-plus glory.

First, let’s recap what It all was: In May 1986, Cui Jian, then a trumpet player for the Beijing Song and Dance Ensemble, was one of the lucky few to have heard a bit of Western pop music at a time when even hearing that there was a thing called Western pop music was rare. He was singing other peoples’ songs – Chinese songs written for him and Western pop tunes reworked in Chinese – and was tinkering with his own material on the side. He joined up with over a hundred of his fellow pop singers united, as the Hundred Stars (百名歌星) under the banner of the International Year of Peace to sing a song called “Let the World be Full of Love” (让世界充满爱), the Chinese response to “We Are the World” et. al. Cui was one of the Hundred Stars who got to perform their own tunes in addition to the big number. This is when yaogun, Chinese rock & roll, was born.

There are problems with this video: The sound quality is less than ideal and the video doesn’t synch up with the audio. And in contrast to what I assumed was the only video I’d be able to find, the actual playing of the music comes out here much more clearly as not fantastic. But, like any great rock and roll, technical skills are only a part of the story. Here, it’s a very tiny part, and the footage is too important for any of that to get in the way. What’s most important is that the video provides a better glimpse than anyone’s had in twenty-five years of what went down on the day yaogun was invented and when a trumpet-playing Cui Jian transformed from semi-famous pop singer to Infamous Yaogunner #1.