2021, A Year With Sinophone Music
It’s now becoming a tradition, reviewing the past year in music – as we did in 2020 or in 2019 with a review of the past decade. To be honest it’s complicated to top last year, with the (very) long...
Catégorie : English
So Rock! Magazine (我爱摇滚乐) CD Archive Project
Table of Contents: We previously talked about 1990s rock magazines in China, as “Punk Generation” (朋克时代) or “Freedom Music” (自由音乐). They pretty much all disappeared after one or two years. One fanzine however became so popular that he was distributed...
[UPDATED] China’s Ministry of Culture New Karaoke Regulation
What can we do? KTV! Where can we go? KTV! Brain Failure 脑浊, “KTV” [UPDATE] The regulations have been adopted. To see what has changed from the draft to the actual regulations, see this part at the end. Since the...
[English] Visual Archives: Documentaries on Chinese Underground Music
In this post, I will try to list all the documentaries that were produced on Chinese independent music. A lot of these documentaries can be found online, but there is no systematic listing, and some are unknown to the general...
Remembering Tiananmen with Music
For the first time, there will (probably) be no vigil to commemorate the 32th year anniversary of the repression of the Tiananmen movement in the Sinophone world, due to the COVID situation in Taiwan, or the National Security Law (NSL)...
What Remains of 2020
2020 is already gone… It was a strange year indeed. The COVID-19 pandemic of course, and at its epicenter Wuhan, probably the city I talk the most about in here (you can check my Wuhan playlist here). During the Wuhan...
Hang On The Box, Brain Failure, The 5.6.7.8’s, Quentin Tarantino and Kill Bill
What do the Beijing punk bands Brain Failure 脑浊, Hang On The Box 掛在盒子上, the Japanese garage-rock band The 5.6.7.8’s and Quentin Tarantino have in common? To my surprise, it’s Kill Bill (volume 1), the 2003 critically acclaimed movie directed...
A Playlist for Wuhan
Wuhan has been at the center of the world’s news lately, as the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. But as I already said in a article on RadiiChina, Wuhan is first and foremost the birthplace of Chinese punk, and has...
Chinese Alternative Music in the 2010s: A Lost Decade?
In a few days, the 2010s will be over, and everyone is making his own list, discussing the best and worst of the 2010s (like the best and worst movies of the decade – a piece of advise: if the...
“如此生活三十年直到大廈崩塌”… Music and the 30th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Student Movement
2019 marks the 30 years anniversary of the Tiananmen democratic movement, and its bloody crackdown. These past 30 years had a huge impact on Chinese popular music, from the official crackdown on Beijing rock’n’roll community after 1989 to the recent...
“I Am China” by Guo Xiaolu and the Question of Representation of Chinese Punk in a Work of Fiction
Guo Xiaolu 郭小橹 was born in China in 1973, and grew-up in Zhejiang province. A complicated childhood which is the subject of her 2017 memoir, Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up. In 1993, she...
The First Chinese Hip-Hop Crew? Hi Bomb (黑棒), “嘻哈第一棒”, 2004
I was going through a pile of Mandopop albums in a tiny Chinese music/video store located in a basement of Los Angeles’ Chinatown when I stumbled upon a dusty album published in 2004 displaying on the cover two guys dressed...
Da Qingshan Music Festival – 大青山音乐节, Beijing, 24 November 2018
On March 10, 2018 the Inner Mongolian metal band Nine Treasures (九宝) organized a festival in Hohhot, with 9 (Inner) Mongolian metal/rock bands. The goal of Nine Treasures was to develop the Inner Mongolian metal scene by providing both famous...
“Sub Jam”, Yan Jun’s fanzine, 1998
It’s not the first time we talk about Yan Jun (颜峻). A rock critic and experimental musician from Lanzhou, Yan Jun was at the frontline of the Chinese “new sound movement” of the 1990s – like the title of a...
“对话摇滚乐”, “Conversation on Rock and Roll”, 1992-1994
In her PhD dissertation, Peng Lei provides a copy of all the “Conversation on Rock and Roll” (“对话摇滚乐”) articles that were published between 1992 and 1994 in the magazine 音像世界 (The World of Sounds and Musics). Those articles, written by...
