Long gone, it seems, are the days when Chinese officials feared Western rock music would bring down the nation. Asked about the release in 2008 of Guns n’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy”, former Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, said: “So far as I know, not many people are fond of this kind of music because it’s too loud and noisy. Besides you are a mature adult, aren’t you?”
Art often brings down artists in China, but rock stars continue to thrive as their music commands a huge following across the country. While artists like Ai Weiwei run into trouble with the Chinese government, Chinese rock musicians, highly regarded by youngsters and music lovers in general, seem to get away with murder.
According to Jonathan Campbell, author of “Red Rock: The Long Strange March of Chinese Rock and Roll”, that’s probably because Chinese rockers are saying things indirectly.
“Red Rock” chronicles the Chineses obsession with rock music, or yaogun as it’s known. Covering the decade from 2000 to 2010, when he was based in China working as a musician, journalist and concert promoter, Campbell traces the rise of rock from the late 1980s, when Cui Jian was considered the first rock musician in China and now the most influential artist ever. His song “Nothing to My Name” became the anthem for the young protesters and students in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
“People who heard the song knew it was not just a love song. It was a meaningful song to Chinese youths in 1989,” says Campbell, who was one of the guest speakers at the recent Singapore Writers Festival.
“Rock musicians and singers don’t usually conclude their ideas in their lyrics and lay out their points directly. They want people to think about things. Otherwise they might get taken away. China is still China,” says Campbell, “But what’s true is government officials don’t really care about it, which is interesting. If they cared, it would be a different matter.”
After graduating in 2000 with a master’s in international studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, Campbell moved to China to study Chinese and figure out what to do with his degree. Within weeks, he was involved in the local rock world, first as a drummer for several bands and later as chronicler, promoter and agent. In 2005, he started putting on gigs and arranging tours for bands from around the world.
In writing this book, Campbell wants to portray the world of rock music and offer some lessons about the relationship between an art form and official Chinese thinking.
Given its 25-year history, Chinese |rock ‘n’ roll has still a long way to go, Campbell believes. It’s alive and growing, he notes. He credits Cui Jian as the first Chinese rocker and says that it wasn’t until the release in 1986 of “Nothing to My Name” that rock music really took off.
The song, which mixes traditional Chinese styles with modern rock elements, recounts how a girl is scorning a man because he has nothing. Youngsters immediately recognised the lyrics as an expression of their own feelings of dispossession and disillusionment at the lack of individual freedom.
The song was released exactly 10 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, a time when the country was already set on its path to a “Revolutionary future”, as Campbell puts it.
He writes: “In its wake, there were two kinds of ‘Nothing’. There was the plain-old literal Nothing, in terms of musical 14 Red Rock options to hear and play, but, even more significantly, there was the Nothing about which Cui sang: the disillusionment and disorientation that so many Chinese felt as their society emerged from Maoism.”
In the years following the death of Chairman Mao, society was destined to be the “combination of the efforts of the collective”, but rock fans saw “an out of-control rush to a me-first mentality”, which was well echoed through yaogun.
Through Jian and other rockers, Campbell seeks to highlight how yaogun can speak about important issues and offer options. The key message is over the past four decades, there has been a series of “New Chinas” and some people are stranded and marginalised in the drive for change,
“Rockers are seeing other possibilities away from the conventional society associated with ‘the wife’, ‘the car’, ‘the job’ and ‘the house’.
The point is some people are left behind as the country is moving forward and changing. Rock music makes people think about their own society.”
And the message of rock music can be powerful. Campbell says one of Jian’s campaigns is against lip-syncing among pop singers.
“He says lots of pop stars are not doing what you think they should be doing. He gets his message across without saying, “now look at the government, they are the mouthpiece of blah blah blah. What about other people in other areas?”
Campbell believes that the strength of rock music has to do with the fact that rockers can reveal sordid truths in society without actually talking about them directly.
“It’s easy to be a controversial artist in China. But rockers can and do command a huge following without having trouble. The fact that it exists as an art form is amazing,” he says. “It has taken off to a certain extent and I hope one day a rock band in China will tour the world.”