ASIAN POP CULTURE AND BEYOND DISPLAY THRU JUNE 4.99/US 5.50/CDN
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Save the Sharks Beijing’s Rotten Generation Hot Summer Daze The Lost World Strange Boys Oriental Flavor Shintaro Ohata
PK Unit
words by Martin Wong pics by Ben Clark
I think any art is about honesty, and if you can’t be honest it’s a crock of shit.
Yang Haisong looks like an Asian version of Milo (Descendents), but is really more like Guy (Fugazi) from Beijing in both politics and musical style. His band, P.K. 14, which formed in 1997 and is a touchstone of Chinese punk, plays a brutally honest, political, and empowering style of punk. During an in-store signing at GR2, I talked to Yang and drummer Jonathan Leijonhufvud (born in Sweden, raised in Hong Kong, based in Beijing) about the influential band and its first taste of the West Coast. GR: This tour is really great, but is there part of you that wishes you came to the U.S. when you were younger? JL: There weren’t that many opportunities. Who cared about Chinese bands 5 or 10 years ago? YH: Nobody cared. And I think that a lot of older bands in China have broken up. GR: Is there a tangible interest now? Do you sense that Chinese music is cool now? JL: There’s definitely more attention after the media hype of the Olympics. People are trying to find things to cover and they see these kids making music. It’s something they can relate to, and the scene has never been healthier than it is right now. It’s really good timing. GR: Your sound is informed by post punk, but it doesn’t sound old. The style sounds new, and it’s not like you’re just trying to be Joy Division or The Cure. YH: That’s how we started, but now we have more of a rock sound. Actually, making music for us is open. We want to involve more materials and elements in our music and change. GR: While the musical influences are Western, the lyrics are totally regional and Chinese. A song like “Let Things Slide” is very topical and political, yet really poetic at the same time. YH: I wrote poems. I write poems even now. I love poems. GR: But no one listens to poetry when they’re on the bus or driving around in their cars. Poetry doesn’t draw crowds or get girls. YH: A lot of the lyrics have a message, but the music is like a manifesto. To me, that’s beautiful. JL: How many times or ways can you say “I love you”? We’re not interested in writing love songs. Music that’s just brainless, sugar-coated pop is a brain drain. At the same time, you can’t be forcing politics down people’s throats. But if you can find a way to have social commentary you can dance to, that’s the greatest mix. GR: That particular song is very critical of the Chinese government trying to follow the West’s capitalist ways. Giant Robot 65 47
YH: The people in power now are very, very old. “Let Things Slide” is about opposing that generation and letting the kids have their say. GR: The band has played New York City and Austin, but this is the first time you’ve driven through the U.S. in a van. Did you have the visions of punk movies like D.O.A. or Another State of Mind? How has the experience compared to thos sorts of images? JL: The metric of touring has changed so much. It’s almost mechanized now, not like back in those days.
Left to right: Xu Bo (guitar), Jonathan Leijonhufvud (drums), Yang Haisong (vocals), Shi Xudong (bass)
yourself is very hard. To me, that’s punk rock. GR: I liked how there is jamming between your songs on the new album. It shows a different side to you than the songs. JL: You’re the first person to pick up on that.
YH: Touring in China is a lot more like those movies!
GR: Instead of presenting themselves as these polished rock stars, it reveals flaws, luck, and vulnerability. YH: I think any art is about honesty, and if you can’t be honest it’s a crock of shit. And anyone in the punk scene should have a built-in bullshit detector. You know what I mean?
GR: It’s quite easy to be a punk in the U.S. these days. JL: If it’s just about clothes and attitude, then yes. And “punk rock” has been through the washing machine so many times and is so commercialized it really is a business. Coming here is like a wake-up call.
GR: I think punk informs the way you dress, the books you read, the movies you like, your politics, how you eat, which store you go to, and everything. JL: Yeah, and we only go to McDonald’s, Burger King, and Pizza Hut!
YH: To be punk and question authority is quite easy. But to question
YH: And we support China, so we only go to Wal-Mart.
MEN FROM MAYBE MARS P.K. 14 toured the West Coast as part of a bill assembled by the Beijing indie label Maybe Mars not to take over the U.S. but to generate energy to bring back to China. I talked to tour manager/merch guy Nevin Domer (right), who I met with co-founder Charles Saliba (left). GR: How did you guys meet? Who else makes up the Maybe Mars crew? ND: The club, D-22, was founded and financed by Michael Pettis with help from Charles and a guy named Mark who set up and ran the sound system. At the time, I was playing in a punk band. About two months after the bar opened Michael asked me to handle booking since I was friends with everyone. I initially said “no,” but eventually agreed, and haven’t had a day off since. Duties at the club naturally extended to those at the record label, as Maybe Mars grew out of the D-22 community. GR: What is D-22’s relationship with Maybe Mars? ND: D-22 came when there were no real clubs supporting the local music scene in Beijing. We knew that there was a lot of potential but it needed to be nurtured and given a stage, and was missing good, solid recordings that would document the bands and help them reach new audiences. GR: Maybe Mars seems to have a “local” feel, kind of like how Posh Boy pushed L.A. punk or Dischord represents DC hardcore. Can you talk about that angle? ND: The Chinese music scene is still small, and Beijing is far and away the most developed scene in the country.
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Many bands move here for that reason. As a matter of fact, most of the members of “Beijing bands” are not originally Beijingers. However, we are very local in our support of Chinese bands that are searching for their own sound, and the local scene that is creating a “Beijing” or “Chinese” sound. GR: What sort of local substance do you look for in a band? ND: One of the really cool aspects of the Chinese rock scene is how it’s not as fragmented into entrenched “styles” or “genres,” and doesn’t come with the baggage that it has in the West. The kids here ended up getting all this music at once, and listen to everything from Woody Guthrie to Steve Reich to The Clash. A lot of their influences are from the West but they play and experiment with different styles in a way that brings forth something completely
new. Combined with the fact that the ideas and emotions they are trying to express are based on their daily lives, it becomes very hard to argue that the music they are making is not distinctly Chinese. GR: How popular is your scene? Chinese kids are only starting to be exposed to rock music, unlike Mando-Pop, which is everywhere. This is changing fast, however, and it won’t be long until the “underground” bands of today are the mega rock stars of tomorrow. How the scene will react to that remains to be seen.
To be punk and question authority is quite easy. But to question yourself is very hard. To me, that’s punk rock. GR: Where have you played besides Sweden and the U.S.? JL: We just played Vietnam. They aren’t known for punk, but they have a strong heavy metal scene. For us, that’s good enough. That’s cool. YH: And we’re playing Taiwan soon. GR: What about Hong Kong? YH: We played there two years ago. GR: Hong Kong has been open to the West forever and had all the hookups from England, but the popular music is still really lame. It’s like they blew it. Why is that? YH: Hong Kong is very commercial–more commercial than Shanghai and Beijing. Elks Lodge in Highland Park, CA (April 9, 2010)
GR: The new album that was recorded in Sweden has strings and high-end production. Are all your albums like that? YH: The new one is the fourth one. The third one was also recorded in Sweden. The others are more raw. GR: Was Sweden an (International) Noise Conspiracy thing? JL: When I brought the Noise Conspiracy to China in 1997, P.K. 14 opened in Shanghai. That’s how I met them, and I was blown away because it was so different than anything else in China at the time. We kept that tie, I joined them, and when we toured Sweden while recording, it was with the Noise Conspiracy, which was awesome. GR: Although the CDs aren’t easy to find out here in the U.S., the booklets still have the lyrics translated into English. JL: Well, the fact is that the songs are only in Mandarin, but we wanted them to be accessible. A lot of the music in China now is about wanting to make it big and playing overseas, but you can do that in your native tongue. You don’t have to sing in English. Chinglish is okay live, but on a recording? No! GR: Maybe for cover songs.
YH: Even cover songs, we’ll rewrite them in Chinese. GR: Did you start in the garage playing covers or are you music school guys? YH: We’re all self-taught over many, many years. GR: Doing it yourself and being self-reliant run contrary to how a lot of business is being done in China now. It seems like people aren’t trying to run shops but start corporations. YH: We’re just being comfortable with what we’re doing. GR: But where did that come from? Were you born with it, brought up with it? JL: The DIY thing was definitely inspired by punk bands and that whole scene. Also, in China, if you didn’t do it for yourself, no one was going to do it. No one cares! YH: We cannot wait; we just try to do something. GR: If the first tapes you heard were like The Cure and Bauhaus, when did punk and hardcore enter the scene? JL: You could find Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols tapes, or sometimes something a bit more obscure like Bad Brains or Minor Threat, but one big turning point came when the Japanese hardcore band, Envy, played in China.
JL: It’s a very conservative culture. YH: It’s horrible. JL: But it’s really expensive just to keep a roof over your head. I have friends who keep two or three jobs there just to make ends meet. YH: Maybe there’s too much pressure there. GR: Maybe Taiwan’s excuse is that they have the army and Hong Kong’s is that people have to work. JL: But one of the coolest bands in Beijing, The Offset: Spectacles, moved from Hong Kong. They packed their vintage gear and their cats and took the train all the way up. They’re super cool. GR: Beijing is that happening? JL: It is.
YH: That was in 1997. GR: Did people think, “Oh, it’s just a Japanese version.” YH: No, it wasn’t just a Japanese version. Giant Robot 65 49