Metallica in China: This Time, It’s Real

News has broken that a a permit for a Shanghai Metallica show this August has been issued. A permit, one is quick to add, that answers the question we know you’re wondering: Metallica rolls in a ninety-four-person posse.

Timely, then, to look back, as so often this space does, on the last time Metallic rumbles were sent through the Middle Kingdom.

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Duck Fight Boos

So Slash was the latest rock star to pass through the Middle Kingdom, playing a show at Shanghai’s Mixing Room & Muse, the in-house club of the Mercedes Benz Arena. Bigger news, perhaps, for those of us interested in this blog, is that Shanghai math/prog/experimental rockers Duck Fight Goose were brought in to open the show.

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Shanghai Pranksters

In light of a recent piece in ChinaFile on the wackiest bunch of Shanghaiers in the land – and, for anyone in Beijing this weekend, in advance of the band’s performance there – I thought it appropriate to revisit the phenom that is Top Floor Circus.

The band’s frontman and founder, Lu Chen, who started out singing pop songs following his love of karaoke, dismissed Nirvana as the worst band ever when he first heard it, but came around soon thereafter, deciding that his goal was to make a band louder than Nirvana. Lu is finally ok with his pop roots: as he told ChinaFile, “we don’t mind being a pop band.” And he is bringing that pop to more folks than ever…

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From Motherland, back to Homeland

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

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Still in the Motherland…

Red Rock‘s first China event, at the Shanghai International Literary Festival was, in no small part thanks to the man with the guitar, below, a rousing success.

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