Ramblings on YAOGUN, Chinese rock music, by the author of Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll
To be fair, they asked me, so it’s not like I went fishing for reasons to drop one-billion-click words into this humble blog… When the Asia Society had me up to their NYC headquarters for an on-camera chat, the talk turned to Psy, the Korean mega-star, and his and “Gangnam”‘s implications for yaogun. So I try to yaogunify things.
Video, below the jump.
A long, intense, strange trip, which, in classic fashion, ended before our hero could properly blog about it. Alas…
You were last left in the Shanghai region, where, many time zones ago, I spoke to Lit Fest audiences and university students alike. Then it was on to Beijing, where awaited the Bookworm International Literary Festival. First, though, two audiences, one of grades 6-8, another of 9-12, at the Canadian International School of Beijing seemed to be more taken by yaogun than I’d given them credit for. At the Bookworm, I participated in the Pop-Up Magazine event, in which I provided the gathered readers of the Beijinger magazine a bit of a quick look at whence the yaogun of the magazine’s pages came. The blooze-rock outfit I left behind, Black Cat Bone, reunited for one last gig, as did, in a new form, my other former band, RandomK(e), with a late-nite/early-morning fiesta at the best little rock club in the world, 2 Kolegas…