China’s power pop
In October 2012, U.K. producer Terror Danjah, the so-called Godfather of Grime, made his first tour of China. Grime emerged as an East London phenomenon at the turn of the millennium, heavily propagated by a pirate-radio underground that was broadcasting increasingly aggressive strains of bass music. At first glance, Terror Danjah’s arrival in China seemed to confirm the global arrival of Beijing’s rapidly expanding (albeit predominantly expatriate) dance-music scene, which has been incorporating ever more adventurous streams of electronic music.
But Terror’s visit had strange roots. In 2003, grime had spawned a subgenre, Sinogrime, as London producers set their sonic sights east. By appropriating everything from martial-arts-movie soundtracks to cheap video-game muzak, grime’s East London soundworlds were briefly submerged in East Asian glitz. For a genre obsessed with futuristic aesthetics, this shift meant much more than a momentary orientalist indulgence. Music journalist Dan Hancox saw Sinogrime as part of a sociopolitical vision, reflecting the “current, gradual shift in superpowers from west to east, incorporating China, and rejecting America: in terms of the U.S., it’s notable that grime has always been not hip-hop.”
Sinogrime pointed to the reversal of a long one-sided and humiliating musical exchange between the West and China. A 2011 performance by the New-York based Chinese pianist Lang Lang at a White House state dinner in honour of China’s President, Hu Jintao, also reflects this. Lang Lang performed the Korean War anthem “My Motherland”, whose original lyrics boast “we deal with wolves with guns” — an explicit reference to the U.S. As Lang Lang wrote in a blog post the following night, “I was telling them about a powerful China and a unified Chinese people.”
Beyond delighting the Chinese delegates present, it is remarkable just how Lang Lang’s performance managed to channel the political intent of Beijing. This is a pianist who is celebrated in endorsement contracts that stretch from Adidas to Montblanc. Why does the music of the People’s Republic continue to exert such a nationalist project in the reform period? Unveiling the entwined relationship between market and state is crucial to understanding the drivers behind Chinese pop culture. The state still engages in the direct fostering of Sinopop. But parallel to overt policy, the state also deploys its silent control through the market itself.
Pop sounds from the People’s Republic of China walk a fine line between dabbling in adventurous experimentalism, selling out to the lure of big business, and negotiating political pressures. When I visited the capital last year, the finishing touches were being put to Beijing’s Dada club, which had already started hyping appearances from a whole host of dubstep pioneers including Pinch and Kode9. Meanwhile the vast National Centre for the Performing Arts, nicknamed ‘the Egg’ for its organic, titanium architecture, was featuring an evening of patriotic opera. One night in Beijing offers a kaleidoscope of incongruities, from manic pop-stardom to triumphalist hipsterdom.