Red Rock: The Long Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll
by Jon Campbell
Earnshaw Books
One of the peculiarities of Chinese rock'n'roll is that it has an exact birthdate: May 9, 1986, was the day Cui Jian, the mainland's 'godfather of rock', performed the song Nothing to My Name as part of a concert broadcast on TV.
Cui's tune went on to become an anthem of Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989, and the man himself embarked on a roller-coaster career of performance bans, stadium shows, hero status, awkward silences and singing with the Rolling Stones. But Cui's story is also a tale of what he has come to mean to generations of youth in spite of a web of censorship. It is the story of an irresistible wave of social change, and this is also the story of Chinese rock'n'roll.
Red Rock, the first book to update the history of Chinese rock in more than a decade, will be released 25 years after Cui's TV appearance and on National Day on October 1.
It is the authorial debut of Beijing-based journalist, musician and rock promoter Jon Campbell. Though the book often reads like a fanzine, attribution is loose, and the post-1997 history is swampy in its organisation, the stories are all there and some interesting arguments are advanced. One of them is that rock's development was actually helped by the 1989 crackdown, a watershed after which 'the Party decided to pull back in its vision of governing every element of every citizen's life'.
Campbell claims the Western media's coverage of rock music tends to exploit the 'rebellious elements of Chinese culture to point out China's problems'.
Rock may be a music of rebellion, but on the mainland that relationship has always been subtle, especially when it comes to 'dissent'. Cui did play in Tiananmen Square just weeks before the tanks rolled in, as did other famous musicians of the day, including He Yong and Taiwan's Hou De-jian. But neither before nor after the crackdown were these singers vocal critics of Beijing.
