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Mainland pop stars, long accustomed to living in the shadows of
counterparts from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, must now deal
with a push by international labels onto their home turf.
Gotan Project has played venues as geographically and culturally
distant as Beirut, Buenos Aires and Beijing. A keen observer of
local social and cultural phenomena, from atop the Great Wall,
band leader Philipe Cohen Salal reflected on the breakneck pace
of change since he came to a “very different” China
in 1997. “You immediately see KFC and Starbucks and Carrefour
now. China is bursting with the freedom to consume.”
International musicians like Salal will be hoping some of China’s
newfound wealth and freedom express themselves in consuming music
too. But the group’s multi-visual stage imagery, laden with
symbolism and social commentary, may have been a little subtle
for a Beijing audience brought up on the glitter of lip-synching
Mandopop concerts that pack out the city’s Worker’s
Stadium every summer. Tickets into Gotan Project’s show went
for RMB 60 and many were given away. Standing area tickets for
pop star Faye Wong’s show, held around the same time, changed
hands for RMB 800. Only she could have such selling power among
the Beijing masses.
Crowds milling around the Worker’s Stadium before Wong’s
show told their own story: Cantonese divas shift tickets faster
than any other music act. Local acts too are left standing on
their home turf by the polished Hong Kong and Taiwan music machines.
Mainland musicians are slow writing a hit and few mainland stars
top the charts with any regularity. Aside from perennially popular
love balladeers Sun Nan and Han Hong, mainland pop music is beaten
every time on home turf by acts from Hong Kong, Singapore and
Taiwan. Just like Cantopop, the genre of pop music that comes
out of Hong Kong, Mandopop, the variant produced in the mainland
and Taiwan, is rarely experimental and treads carefully along
a tried and tested formula of accessible bubblegum pop. It’s
inoffensive and catchy, and almost always about unrequited love,
the lyrics often grafted onto a rhythm lifted from a Western pop
hit.
Asian music is dominated by solo balladeers like Sun Nan and
Han Hong interpreting songs written and produced by hit-making
machines in Beijing and Hong Kong. In Chinese music shops the
CDs are usually organized into two categories: guys and girls.
Instead of being stacked in alphabetical order the CDs are slotted
under Chinese family names, in order of the number of strokes
in the Chinese characters that make up the surname. It’s
confusing, as most artists choose a single English first name
as their stage persona. Thus “Faye,” “Eason,”
“Aaron,” and “Cecilia” dot the Cantopop charts.
In most cases they’re also actors, and many are better actors
than singers. Cantopop superstars Edison Chan and Andy Lau gave
stirring performances in the gritty film series Infernal Affairs,
making it all the more difficult to watch them sing syrupy lyrics
in kitschy music videos.
Chinese pop album sleeves look uniformly wholesome, all dyed-brown
hair and pearly white teeth. Tongue piercing is not common among
graduates of the Mandopop school of social etiquette. Better to
be boy band Energy, from Taipei, who promoted their album of hits
in Beijing recently by responding to journalists’ questions
with anodyne answers and smiles. When asked what part of their
body they’d change if they could have plastic surgery done,
singer Ah Di said “A man’s beauty is determined by his
heart,” while role model-appropriate Kun Da said he’d
first ask his parents’ permission.
That kind of sweetness may be in keeping with the roots of Chinese
pop, which stretch back to the late 1920’s when an influx
of European culture in Shanghai produced local jazz and cabaret
stars. They had their heyday in the 1930s and the 1940s. Later
musical instruments and gramophones were seized by the Red Guards
and only patriotic anthems and operas were permitted until the
1980s when young Chinese again dared to hum a frivolous tune.
Even with the steady influx of cultural products from mainland
China that flowed into post-handover Hong Kong after the 1997
handover – increased radio and television programming in
Mandarin and an increasing prevalence of simplified Chinese characters
– Hong Kong Cantonese popular culture is holding its own.
Beijingers may look with disdain on the more brash popular culture
of more adventurous southern China and Hong Kong but Cantopop
is irrepressibly popular in the capital and throughout China.
The heyday of pop music may have passed however as increasingly
slick rap and rock bands make more noise in Chinese cities. Rock
acts offer some profundity to an increasingly educated and soul-searching
youth, an escape too from sugary love ballads. The hugely popular
The Power of the Powerless, the latest album by godfather of Chinese
rock Cui Jian, combines jazz, rap, funk, rock and elements of
classical Chinese music into a curious but fresh musical style.
Cui Jian’s lyrics speak of love and relationships while railing
against post-modernism and social angst. His seminal Balls Under
the Red Flag was hailed as a piece of social commentary worthy
of the leftist early years of America’s great singing bard,
Bob Dylan. Yet Cui’s infrequent Beijing shows pale in profile
next to gigs by Whitney Houston, who, struggling for an audience
in traditional territory, played a high profile show in a Beijing
stadium last summer.
Sappy power ballads like All Out of Love are wildly popular in
China. So where then is the room for more intellectually charged
foreign musicians like Gotan Project, already planning a return
trip to China? Despite making “really interesting contacts”
on his visit here last year, Pascale Forté, managing director
of EllaProd Records, hasn’t managed to sign any distribution
deals. But he did set up a tour for one of the artists on his
label, a jazz trio that toured China for three weeks in May. The
tour is a crutch for possible distribution deals. But is there
an audience for EllaProd’s brand of music in China? “I
have the feeling that there is a huge potential of curiosity,
and Chinese people seem to be happy to discover new music. I’m
working only in jazz, which is not really developed for now in
China, but the artists I represent had a great welcome from music
professionals during my meetings in China.”
French labels seeking distribution deals here may be comforted
by the experiences of local Chinese label. Distribution problems
rather than piracy are the biggest problem facing his rock and
electronica label Modern Sky, says label manager Jin Huimeng.
“Many of the distributors personally dislike rock, and won’t
accept rock albums, so we never reach those areas. China is a
huge country, it’s hard enough for bands to get heard.”
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