Underbelly

There’s a band here in Chengdu called “Proximity Butterfly,” (click here to check them out). The name notwithstanding, these cats, well, with two drummers, a bass, a trumpet, and a lead guitar/vocalist with dreads to his waist and a big bushy beard and a voice like Perry Farrell in the early Jane’s Addiction era – they pretty much kick ass. We recently saw them in a spot called the Jah Bar, a cozy weed-inspired den with a stage in the round and a sweaty, enthusiastic crowd of half locals, half expats. They shred together a woozy, grinding mix of psychedelic sympathies and shrieky Jane’s-y lament, all jumped up with a heavy taste for metal and velocity. I dare you not to love it, even if they do look like hippies and ripped off a Fleetwood Mac cover for their band photo. However, I have to admit – I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to love these guys – we’ve been desperately seeking a hardcore scene here in town, and, when directed to P.B., our first question was, “Are they Chinese?”

Hell, no. One of the drummers is Chinese, and he’s very good. The lead singer is, I believe, American (though he speaks great Sichuanhua on the mic), and the rest of the group is a rotating cast of expats – sometimes German, sometimes Dutch, maybe a Canadian or so thrown in for variety. It’s a Western band, playing Western music. And we love it. But it raises the question – why do we so desperately wish they were Chinese? What is it that drives us to go to foreign places and find the same pleasures and reflections of ourselves that we had back home? If I wanted metal, I could have stayed in Portland. Grails and Om are on tour together – they just played the Knitting Factory in New York. What’s so important about finding it here? I think it’s interesting that we need to verify the arc of art as if it were all inevitable – as if we’re somehow more “advanced” with the mess we’ve made of Postmodernism and our flirtation with all things relative. As if, sooner or later, the Chinese (or the Moroccans or the Paraguayans or the Greenlandish) will arrive at the same conclusions as we have about what is good, what is fun, what is expressive, and ultimately, what is cool.

Many people think hip-hop is the music of globalization, the form that everyone can relate to. Alistair Pennycook, a linguist and scholar whom I admire very much and with whom I’ve had the great pleasure of drinking a beer and debating the cultural relevance of Burning Man, has written and lectured extensively on the subject of cultural and linguistic imperialism and the importance of the spread of hip-hop culture. It’s true that baggy pants and track jackets and bling have managed to insinuate themselves into some of the more unlikely corners of the globe; I have a cassette I bought on a street corner in Accra, years ago, with some Ghanaian rap that would blow your mind. But hip-hop is an art form born of oppression, and its power tarnishes quickly when that form is reanimated in superficial puppetry without the angry soul to move it. A few weeks ago, I saw two young Chinese rappers take a stage in full gear circa 1985, with pink Yankees caps and matching shirts buttoned at the throat. “Yo, yo, yo!” The effect was, shall we say, adorable.

Other, more noxious forms of entertainment have spread in poisonous ubiquity – the curse of “pop” with its lacquered-on, store-bought emotions and tinny vocals engineered by vapid ProTools whores. The Celine Dions of the world are photocopied onto face after airbrushed face and pumped out through the magical translation machine worldwide into elevators, taxicabs, and chintzy nightclubs. However, there is hope – amidst the fluff and polish and smugly universal appetite for saccharine rhapsodies about hollow relationships and materialism, there is, too, a taste for blood. Where there is light, there is also darkness, and it seems we have finally found the yin in China we’ve been searching for.

November 9 – Xiao Jiu Ba (The (New) Little Bar)

Widerfahren – an all-Chinese speed metal band, surrounded by an appropriately smoke-choked clutch of beer-soaked, jumping fans. There was none of the “scene” one might find in the States – no predictable blend of black clothes and boots and sleeveless tees, no eyeliner and feigned boredom. These kids were in poloshirts, Mickey Mouse sweaters, business suits, and school uniforms. They bobbed their heads, they clapped after songs. Some even smiled. The room was dark and had all the fancy design of a shoe box – a monitor showed the front of the stage on screen to the back of the room, but there was nowhere to stand that wasn’t already in full view of the band and their screaming, repetitive excellence. One wall was covered in posters of previous acts, neatly framed. The back was a lounge full of couches and books and CDs for sale – a polite, simple venue for a polite, earnest group of Chinese youth eager to have their eardrums burst and bleeding and their faces melted off by the relentless shred of feral guitars.

A stage dive in progress.

It was impossible to say whether the songs were in English or Chinese, or even if they were linguistically grounded at all – the lead singer, a round, happy man who kept pushing his hair out of his eyes and blinking in surprise as is he couldn’t believe they really had an audience (“They like us! They really like us!!”) – managed between grins to channel that chthonic primal growl and the bat-like shrieking that characterizes so much of metal, as if the only things worth expressing were a kind of tortured animal existence and the desire to shatter glass.

At the front of the crowd a pit formed, the organic, fluctuating rhythm of a collective mass of bodies eager to collide; they bounced and bobbed and coalesced into a single, sweating organism. Rather than circling and smashing into one another, they linked arms and elbows and formed a fifty-headed beast, a throbbing, happy, silly beast that sprouted devil horns all over its back, delirious with the walls of noise crashing down around them.

In accordance with the Rules of Rock and Roll, someone’s girlfriend was in the band, looking pretty and boring at the back of the stage, tinkling around uselessly on an oversized Casio. At unfortunate moments the rest of the instruments failed to drown her out, and her irrelevant fairy melodies floated out across the crowd like someone had knocked over a bottle of cheap teen perfume.

The bartenders, in particular, had it down. They had the carefully cultivated look of simultaneous ennui and depth, as if only they were possibly cool enough to work there, but also as if they would have killed to be anywhere but. The woman, especially, wore a delicate mask of patient endurance. She sat on a keg with her knees carefully together and her hands quietly knitted in her lap, her eyes focused elsewhere on an invisible sense of duty. Her outfit looked as if she’d purchased it whole and punched it from a card, folding the tabs over her shoulders and her paperdoll waist. They lined up bottles of beer on the bar, keeping them ready for demand. A cold beer is a rare treat, and this place was no exception. On the bar was also a metal statue of a voluptuous woman bending over and pulling down her pants, revealing a spherical ass, out of which a flame would come if you pushed the right spot, enabling you to light your cigarette from her sphincter, if you so chose. Another colorful detail was the roll of toilet paper that was stored for safe-keeping on the counter, held up by an African carving of a man with a demon’s eyes. We leisurely sipped our bottles of warm beer and eyed the crowd as much as the band, learning what we could about what moves the impassive faces around us, what makes their bodies twitch and their eyes close, what lights them up and turns them on. We were the only foreigners there until the show was nearly over.

I am no exception to the desire to find the familiar in the foreign. I loved these guys not so much because of their music – they play derivative, uninventive, predictable, cookie-cutter speed metal; every song sounded exactly like the last, and the effect of their stage presence amounted to that of watching your friends in the garage – just as exciting but somehow secretly perfect, somehow better because it’s yours. I loved them because they were so unlike the pop that we hear in every shop and taxi and campus public address system. I loved them because they will never be a downloadable ringtone. I loved their passion for sweat and their willingness to fling themselves gleefully off a cliff of noise and drag us all down with them, happy lemmings plummeting into the hidden side of a culture that prides itself upon impassivity and the quiet contemplation of tea. Of all the imported cultural threads to grasp onto, this is what they want: anger, energy, the freedom to scream, to bounce, to touch each other, to get drunk and wallow in rhythm and noise. I loved them because of all the ways to relate on a human level, this was the one that felt closest to home – a universal love for the dark.

~ by knifemaker on November 20, 2007.