Ramblings on YAOGUN, Chinese rock music, by the author of Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll
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.
Over at Beijing Daze, Badr posted a video of the scene that opens Red Rock, which made me realize that my search for footage of that event had been too-long dormant. The Scene takes place on May 4, 2010, the final day of the Midi Music Festival, when heavy rains forced the festival to stop the action. By this time, Midi was claiming to draw upwards of 20,000 people per day to the festival; a long, strange march from their days of a few hundred students and their friends back in the inaugural 2000 edition.