Kaiser Kuo has been around a bit. Starring in one of China’s first metal bands Tang Dynasty in the early 90’s, he now plays in ChunQiu (春秋), a more “mature” model. He is also one of the foremost commentators to the West across the industries of Chinese tech, geo politics and finance. You should also try to catch his recently inaugurated Sinica podcast with other brainy Beijing types.
In his “Ich bin ein Beijinger” column in the Beijinger magazine this month, he talks about the difference between music genre tribalism in his native USA when he was growing up, and the relative genre agnosticism of the nascent Chinese music scene. You can read the full article HERE, but in the meantime, this paragraph sums things up nicely
It was an epiphany – or the beginnings of one, anyway. Growing up in America, one becomes imbued with a kind of musically determined tribalism. Your genre allegiance was supposed to matter. Musical subgenres basically defined the subcultures: Goths, Stoners, Punks, Clubbers, Hippies and what have you. You wore the uniform, you adopted the outlook on life. But when different forms of popular music were transplanted to the alien soil of China, they took on a different meaning. They were missing their original context – the peculiar flavors of angst bred in American high schools, for instance. And for much of my time in China, I had believed that mixed-up genre identities were something of a handicap – an inauthentic element, a mutation that occurred during the process of transculturation.
We feel we’ve read this article before, but no matter, it’s worth reading again.