Ramblings on YAOGUN, Chinese rock music, by the author of Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll
Ladies and Gentlemen…
Tell your friends, tell your enemies and tell everyone else.
Red Rock: The AustralAsian Tour 2012 – A tour made possible by a Canada Council for the Arts grant – is upon us.
Below (and at jWc.com) a rundown, with room for additions, of what’s happening. More updates to come, but for now, here It is:
We have heard, and seen, yaogun on China Central Television. We have seen yaogun’s only real anthem reinvented in protest. We’ve even seen that anthem of anthems (“Nothing to My Name”) reinvented for the Idol set (2009’s Super Girl, the massively popular Chinese televised singing competition):
But we have gone from an age where yaogun, occasionally, is broadcast on television to an era in which brands now scamper after yaogun. And, in the spirit of the previous post, I give you, again, Anarchy Jerks.
Continue reading “Post-Punks: Of shoes, of sunglasses, milk and more”
Having written about yaogun’s long, strange march through today, I have been blessed to be writing in an age where Youtube offers glimpses – fleeting, yes, context-less, often, but glimpses, still – of the past. A few brave souls lugged what was heavy and user-not-so-friendly gear to shows, filmed away, and, eventually, some of them even uploaded the footage to the internet. Guys like David O’Dell, whose Youtube channel is filled with great pieces from the late-nineties and turn-of-the-millennium punk scene (and who wrote a memoir of that very period); when folks like Liang Heping and Vic Huey, who have been filming from day one, have their collections sorted and available, well, things will change.
What we’re also blessed with, those of us interested in glancing backward, is the occasional Big Score, usually, I’ve found, accidentally big scores. Such is the case with this video, which I came across while searching for goodies related to another post, soon to come, that takes us back to 1998, the height of Beijing’s punk scene…
Yaogun websites are, though less so these days, rare; yaogun websites celebrating eighth 
anniversaries are nonexistent, save one. IndieChina has just reached that mark. Begun as a basic 2004-era source of yaogun info heavy on the BBS, its focus shifted from an initial emphasis on overseas artists before going more heavily Chinese in content. Pretty soon, gig- and tour-organizing followed, and a record label, 1724.
Reports of the death of producer and musician Chen Yuli, from a car accident in Paris, have made the rounds, and China Music Radar does a good job of summing up Chen’s contributions to yaogun. In short: Chen was an accomplished producer of many young bands (and, oh yeah, the Beijing Olympics), and played with Arrows Made of Desire. He will be missed.