Beijing Punk / Underground Scene

I just watched a great documentary last night about the Beijing underground music scene. It's called Post Revolutionary Era by Zhang Yang and produced by Lola.

It's a little bit rough, which is only to be expected given the level of technology available in Beijing (at least to the average person), but it paints a vivid picture of the scene. When I visited my friend Rafi in Beijing sometime around '99, we hung out with some local punks, and this movie really seemed true to their lives. It also gave me some new insight into their world, however.

The lengths they go to for their music are pretty extreme. They've all moved to Beijing to follow their dreams, and they just barely scrape by while practicing and playing every day. Many of them rent apartments in a village on the outskirts of Beijing called Shu Cun (树村), which means Tree Village. This is a farming community that has opened it's doors the underground musicians, many of whom now rent apartments there. An entire band of 4 or 5 people will rent an apartment with several rooms, one of which they convert into a practice room. They're so poor that they can only afford about 200 yuan per month for rent, which is around $25. In fact, they're almost always late on rent, even up to 6 months late! One group mentioned that they couldn't afford to use their makeshift coal heater in the winter because it cost them up to 100 yuan ($12.50) per month for coal (at 1.8 yuan per brick) and didn't even heat them.

Chinese water is so polluted that even the locals can't drink it (unlike Mexico, where only the tourists get sick). All the apartment buildings I visited in China had a hot water boiler on the first floor, where everyone would fill up their thermoses with purified water. These guys were drinking water straight out of the tap even though it made them sick, just because it was too hot during practice in the summer.

One artist mentioned that he had lost 50 yuan ($7) once, and that was his entire monthly budget for food. This is especially shocking since a bowl of noodles on the street costs about 5 yuan, and dinner costs 10-15 yuan. When a band plays a gig, they'll often get about 25 yuan per person, which they usually blow on dinner and a couple of beers afterwards.

In spite of all their hardships, none of them were complaining. They were simply explaining their situation to the interviewer. No matter how hard their life was, they were free to follow their dreams, which is more than their parents had.

I highly recommend this film if you can get a chance to see it, which is unlikely given that it took a couple of months for the Yerba Buena Film Society to get a DVD of it, and that DVD was missing the last 45 seconds! The music was great, at it was really interesting to see the different directions all the bands go in.

Since mainstream Chinese culture is so monolithic musically (traditional, and pop), anyone who's doing something different is pretty much underground by default. There's a lot more mixing between styles than you'd probably see here. Punks and Rockers don't usually hang out that much in the US, but when I was visiting the punks in Beijing, they were hanging out after the show with Ciu Jian, China's Godfather of Rock, a hugely popular national rocker. Even though he is a commercial success, he hasn't been able to play much in Beijing because of government censorship of his music, although that may be changing slightly as he played his first official concert in Beijing in a decade in late 2005.

It was really inspiring to see the verve with which everyone pursued their music in spite of the challenges of extreme poverty and living in a Communist society.