A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

This week­end saw the unveil­ing of two new things in the Bei­jing live music venue scenes: the ren­o­va­tions at Dos Kole­gas, and the new Maybe Mars space at Di’anmen. I was lucky (and maybe just crazy) enough to get around to see­ing both first-hand.

First up, the ren­o­va­tions at Dos Kole­gas. They’ve taken over the old bath­room area in the front and extended back­stage, with room for more instru­ments and — just a guess — booze. The bath­room sink area next to it has been turned into a bar, but was empty on Fri­day; appar­ently it will play host to food events, like when they bring in a sac­ri­fi­cial lamb. Unfor­tu­nately for the wall­flow­ers amongst us, they’ve boarded up that door­way at the side of the stage, which means no more side-view pho­tos. The good news, though, is the new toi­lets. Even though there wasn’t any run­ning water on the first night, they still proved to be a step up. They’re squat toi­lets, and though there are male and female des­ig­na­tions, they’re func­tion­ally uni­sex. It might not be any cleaner, but then, what’s Dos Kole­gas with­out a lit­tle messy bath­room action?

Sec­ondly, there’s the “Unnamed Space” at the cor­ner of all the Di’anmens. The Sally Can’t Dance fes­ti­val went down really well, and their lit­tle unnamed space at Di’anmen is really lovely. It’s hid­den behind the most pop­u­lar chest­nut roaster in town, and though there was noth­ing in there but some quilts on the walls for sound­proof­ing, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be awe­some. There are plans to keep it open dur­ing the day as well, with per­haps a cafe space at the front, a record store, and any­thing else they can fit in. The bar area looked small, but even if you habit­u­ally can’t a drink back there, the space is very close to a handy 7/11. Which, it shall be noted, was cleared of all the cheap 500ml cans of beer by the end of Sunday.

All in all, venues look like they’re on the up and up. All we need is Yugong Yis­han to do some­thing about their sound sys­tem and Mao to do some­thing about their ven­ti­la­tion and cool­ing for the sum­mer and we’ll be pretty much set, gig-goers.

Okay, I’ll bite.

Every­one in this very small com­mu­nity of Bei­jing music scene blog­gers has been all over the recent arti­cles posted by the intel­li­gent and knowl­edge­able Mr. Max-Leonhard von Schaper over at Rock in China. I read the first arti­cle, Why No Bei­jing and D-22 are not worth the hype! before every­one else started talk­ing about it and I could have said some­thing then, but I saw it for what it is — what Max has admit­ted to it being — which was a con­tro­versy bomb designed to incite discussion.

If you don’t have time to read the whole thing (it bor­ders on tl;dr), basi­cally Max points out that it’s a bit unfair that the for­eign media gets to focus entirely on the Maybe Mars lineup, because that’s not all there is to the Bei­jing indie scene. (Max, I know you read this, so feel free to tell me what mas­sive points I left out by boil­ing your essay into one sen­tence )

Hav­ing been on the inter­net for far too long, I expected it to turn into a mud-throwing con­test. How­ever, the beauty of small com­mu­ni­ties — online or offline — is that they’re usu­ally civil and eas­ily man­aged. I was pleas­antly sur­prised when even Matt Nei­der­hauser, who was pretty per­son­ally impli­cated in the attack, retorted with a mea­sured argu­ment with­out tak­ing potshots.

So I thought I’d throw my opin­ion out there.

Quite sim­ply: no, Maybe Mars isn’t all that. It’s a great label, fos­ter­ing bands I sim­ply adore (and a bunch I don’t give a crap about); D-22 is a great venue, the one I credit with my falling in love with the Bei­jing scene (it was a bet­ter intro­duc­tion than Tiny Salt Cafe 2); the man­age­ment team is great, because they have con­nec­tions and funds and the know-how to get expo­sure to the West­ern (Amer­i­can) indus­try. But all of us here in Bei­jing know that it’s not “Chi­nese rock”. It’s not even “Bei­jing rock”. It’s a sec­tion of the Bei­jing scene, and an even smaller sec­tion of what’s going on across the nation.

But the prob­lem with media is that it is still local­ized — to where the pub­li­ca­tion is based or the cir­cle of friends the blog­ger has. Think about it: even if you read a New York Times arti­cle about the indie scene in the city, you’re not going to hear about all of the gen­res and bands that are per­haps wor­thy and inter­est­ing, you’re going to hear about the ones that reporter has been exposed to through con­nec­tions, funds, and know-how to get expo­sure. The effects of that are ampli­fied by phys­i­cal distance.

Maybe I’m naive, but I like to think that any West­erner with half a brain and an actual inter­est in Chi­nese indie music will look at an arti­cle about Maybe Mars and not say “okay, this is it”, they will say “wow, awe­some, I won­der what else is out there”. I’m pretty sure that most peo­ple gen­uinely inter­ested in indie bands these days knows how lit­tle actu­ally gets through to main­stream media.

What I’d like to see is a round-up of what inter­ested indie scen­esters in the West who have read and become inter­ested in Chi­nese inde­pen­dent music and have sought it out them­selves say about Maybe Mars. My guess is that it’s along the same lines as Max’s basic state­ment: they’re okay, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of the Chi­nese music scene.

I know that the lan­guage bar­rier for West­ern­ers is immense. But I also know a per­son, who I often credit with giv­ing me a kick-start with my gig-going and thus this entire site, who lives in the DC area in Amer­ica, who has never stud­ied Chi­nese for­mally, and for whom Chi­nese indie music has become a pas­sion. She’s on Douban, catches up with her favorite bands more than I do, and went to see Casino Demon & Hedge­hog per­form at the Chi­nese Cul­ture Fes­ti­val in Wash­ing­ton DC. Of course she’s the excep­tion to the rule, but all it takes is a few well-placed pas­sion­ate peo­ple like her in the West­ern blo­gos­phere to help every­one under­stand that Maybe Mars isn’t the only thing out there.

And I think it’ll hap­pen. The response Maybe Mars has got­ten in Amer­ica is heart­en­ing, and what I think we need to do, as peo­ple on the inside, is intro­duce as many for­eign­ers as we can — inside and out­side of China — to the Chi­nese music that they’ll like. We can’t be elit­ist, we need to squash the music snob inside of us that makes us cut down the tall pop­pies of Maybe Mars and Mod­ern Sky, because maybe if we intro­duce a punk fan to Joy­side or an electro-rock fan to AV Okubo or an indie pop fan to Life Jour­ney and give them the tools (web­sites like Rock in China, for exam­ple) to explore for them­selves, they’ll go look­ing and find a whole world out­side the walls of D-22 and the ring roads of Beijing.

Max might be com­plain­ing about the media mis– or under-informing peo­ple, but I’m con­vinced that what an indie music fan does when they hear about indie music in the main­stream media is explore fur­ther. So instead of com­plain­ing about it, we should boost our own sig­nals and get the word out to peo­ple search­ing in Eng­lish for more than just the Maybe Mars sound.

Which is really what Max, Matt, the Maybe Mars team — and each of us enthu­si­asts — is all about, in the end.