Andrew Field
is a lecturer at the University of New South Wales
School of History and lectures mainly about
Chinese and East Asian history and culture. He has
also taught in Shanghai and Beijing and is fluent
in Mandarin and Japanese. Field speaks to Devin
Stewart.
Devin Stewart:
Andy, how did you come to focus on the Chinese
music scene?
Andrew Field: I
think that my overall project, which began when I
decided to write a
dissertation on the influence of jazz-age
nightlife on China in the early 20th century, is
about how globalizing cultures of dance and music
affect China. During the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese
people in Shanghai and other big cities took to
ballroom dancing and jazz, though it had to be
played differently - watered down, one might say -
to the way it was played in the West.
Today when you visit China, you find that
people are ballroom-dancing on the streets, and it
seems so natural, such a part of Chinese culture
now that you don't realize that it was a big
struggle for them to learn how to dance
partner-style. This is really the subject of my
first book, which concerned how China learned to
dance between two World Wars and a great
revolution.
My second book, which I'm
working on with my colleague James Farrer, a
sociologist of China, is about how the Chinese
passion for international-style dancing and music
continued through the Mao Zedong years, despite
suppression, and re-emerged in the 1980s and '90s
through a vigorous dance-club and bar scene.
I'm a historian by training, so we can
each tap into our strengths and create a coherent
story about Shanghai and its cultures of
internationalized nightlife through the entire
20th century. I draw on my research on the 1920s
to '50s, James on his studies of dance clubs in
1980-to-'90s Shanghai, and we both draw on a
wealth of personal data from years of observing
the club and bar scene in China as participant
observers. But more recently, while living in
China this past month, I've become fascinated by
the - for want of a better word - independent live
music scene.
DS: What does
the live music scene in China say about the
country's relationship with the world? Will the
world see a China cool, corresponding to Japan's
gross national cool?
AF:
China has a dynamic relationship with the world,
not just absorbing other cultures but also feeding
into them - and not just with factory-made
products, either. We can already see the results
in the world of film: the Oscar-winning director
Martin Scorsese's film The Departed was
based on a film made in Hong Kong. It is only a
matter of time before other facets of Chinese
culture become popularized in the West.
Already there are many more people
studying Chinese in Europe and America and
Australia than ever before. One of the American
students I currently teach here in Beijing has
been studying Chinese since elementary school and
is already quite functional. There are millions of
Chinese living abroad and actively relating to the
societies they live in, not just sequestered in a
Chinatown. So the opportunities for cultural
mixing are there.
In terms of music,
China's independent music scene is diversifying
rapidly. Most people associate China with Cantopop
or Taiwanpop, which tends to focus on singing
idols who don't write their own songs, but here in
mainland China, live bands are becoming ever more
ubiquitous. I've been told there are more than 600
bands actively playing in China, which doesn't
seem much compared to America or Europe or
Australia. But if you graphed the growth of
independent music bands over the past two decades,
I think you'd see an exponential rise that will
only keep growing.
And these bands are
creating their own music, albeit music that is
sometimes heavily influenced by certain genres and
sub-genres in the West. Yet there is also an
unmistakable influence of more traditional Chinese
folk music on some of the bands, suggesting that
the music is being "glocalized", to use a popular
term in academia.
Since moving over here
in June, I have personally seen more than 50 bands
playing live in festival concerts or in small
clubs. They are incredibly diverse, ranging from
punk bands such as No Name, Joyside, Scoff,
Hedgehog, and The SUBS - all popular bands in
Beijing - to heavy metal in all its diverse
sub-genres, eg the Shanghai band 45 or the Beijing
band Chun Qiu, to techno-pop, also known as the
New Pants, to experimental, to folk.
Many
bands defy a distinct genre and are experimenting
with a mix of influences. Banana Monkey, a
Shanghai band that I saw perform twice in the past
three weeks, does a cool mixture of grunge, metal,
pop, and hip-hop and puts on a great act. There
are tremendous energy and vitality in this scene,
as you will see if you read my blog.
DS: Are Chinese feeling
freer to express themselves in art generally?
Would you link artistic expression with free
expression and speech in China?
AF: Today there is much more
room for free expression in the arts than any time
since Mao [Zedong]'s Rectification talks at Yan'an
in 1942 - as long as it does not cross certain
boundaries. Most artists get away with subtle digs
at the current regime, not outright protest but
expressions of dissatisfaction that are easy to
see if you read between the lines. This is true
for the visual arts as well as music. Many bands
sing in English, and if you read their lyrics, you
can see that they are expressing a collective
anxiety about China's past, present, and future.
DS: But I think it goes way
beyond China.
AF: What these
artists and musicians are expressing here is
universal, which is why I think there is a market
for their art in the West. One common theme is the
march of post-modernity, which is affecting all of
us all over the world, though as William Gibson
says, not all at the same time. People living in
any big city, especially Shanghai or Beijing, have
seen these cities transform completely over the
past decade.
Everywhere old buildings are
being knocked down, new ones growing in their
place. At the same time all sorts of influences
from abroad - Hollywood films in the form of
pirated DVDs, music downloaded off the Internet,
American TV shows, European fashion designers,
foreign restaurants, clubs, cultural events,
concerts - are pouring into the country changing
the way people look at life. In the past few
months, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and the band
Sonic Youth played in Shanghai.
The
parallels with the early 20th century when
Shanghai was the gateway between China and the
world are obvious, but the pace of change is much
more rapid now than ever before. I think that the
artists of China are capturing how they feel about
the changes, a mixture of elation and anxiety,
bewilderment and surprise, and above all, a deep
uneasiness about where the world is going. You can
see this if you go to the art district in Beijing
known as 798, where over 80 galleries showcase the
latest trends in Chinese visual arts.
This
to me helps explain why punk and heavy-metal bands
are so popular now. Chinese are taking the musical
idioms developed in the West to critique society
or to express a primal scream about
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