In Ben Greenman’s novel Please Step Back, there’s a moment when an aspiring musician stops a pair of small-time rock icons on the street to say, “I just wanted to say that I saw you guys play ... and it was cool.”
Their reply is brusque, “Get your own band, man.”
“I’m starting one,” says the young cat.
Photo courtesy of StreetVoice.com
“Sure you are,” they shoot back. “My kid brother is, too. And my grandmother, and the little girl down the street. You all are. One day it’s going to be nothing but bands, with no one left to see them. We call that day the Future.”
This exchange is set in the late ’60s San Francisco, but the novel is new. Greenman wrote it just a few years ago, and his predictions for “the Future” are easy to graft onto the present of 2014, when it sometimes seems there are more bands than fans, when ticketed gigs only draw a few dozen traditionalists, and when even music festivals need to be free.
There is a new music festival in Taipei this weekend that is exploding my head with these kinds of futuristic thoughts. The Park Park Carnival is a free, weekend-long event with more than 100 bands and DJs playing in a dozen areas. There will be no stages, and the bands get to play because they signed up on a Web site. Basic sound systems will be set up in front of parked cars, the cars that the bands use to drive themselves to the festival, and performances will take place flat on the sidewalk. It is non-hierarchical in the extreme, the kind of Internet era playing field that journalist Thomas Friedman defined as “flat.” Given the weather and location, it will probably also be hot and crowded.
Photo courtesy of StreetVoice.com
So are we truly entering the collaborative commons, an age of Star Trek — like perfect socialism, where everything is as free as the information on Wikipedia?
“The idea is to have it be like street performances,” says Lydia Lu (陸君), the marketing manager of StreetVoice.com, the festival’s organizer.
“This is not really packaged as a music festival. It is not really packaged at all. We are just trying to let the bands create their own aesthetic.”
Photo courtesy of StreetVoice.com
The Park Park Carnival is organized by StreetVoice.com, a Chinese-language social network focusing on young creativity, especially music, art and design. Founded in 2006 (just two years after Facebook), anyone can upload their songs, drawings, designs or photos to site. Users’ works appear in each other’s feeds as well as searchable galleries. The site now has 60,000 members, with more than 50,000 of them in Taiwan and the rest in Hong Kong or China. StreetVoice is closely related to the Simple Life Music Festival (coming in Taipei and China later this year) and the Taipei live house Legacy (which will open a Greater Taichung branch next month).
At the Park Park Carnival, each stage-like performance area will be defined by three to five parked cars, and one big stage, which is actually a truck. The truck is where the specially invited international acts will play, at a slight rise above the pavement. (Alas, a hierarchy!) They include half a dozen acts from Japan, China and Hong Kong. Though the Hong Kong bands registered online, just like the Taiwanese bands, the Japanese and Chinese artists are something of exceptions to the rule.
The Shanghai band Top Floor Circus (頂樓馬戲團) gives raucous performances mixing rock, folk, stage antics and heavy doses of social parody. They sing mainly in the Shanghainese dialect, and their fun-loving nature has in the past gotten them in trouble with Chinese authorities. Their 2009 song Shanghai Welcomes You satirized both the 2010 Shanghai Expo and the 2008 Beijing Olympic anthem, leaving the group banned from giving performances for a year. But the censure was just temporary as the group is well known throughout China, playing regularly China’s bigger indie festivals, like Modern Sky and MIDI. Their set Saturday at 7:30pm will be worth checking out.
Though there will be up to half a dozen acts performing at any one time, and the schedule is designed to make this look like a carnival of buskers, there are several acts worth seeking out. Macbeth, Hunya, Slack Tide, TuT, Thirteen Band, Leo37, OVDS are all good bands, and there will be a DJ stage by the Super ADD party crew. The local rock band 88 Balaz will spend the entire weekend dressed as Super Mario Brothers, even when they are not at the festival. There will also be a street market for weird clothes and artist booths.
■ Park Park Carnival is tomorrow and Sunday from 2 to 10pm at the Taipei Expo Park (台北花博公園). Admission is free. Get more info at www.parkpark.streetvoice.com.
WE SAVE STRAWBERRIES ALBUM RELEASE
We Save Strawberries is an indie pop band that along with others like Natural Q (自然卷) and Sodagreen (蘇打綠) helped define a new territory between indie rock and studio-produced pop music. Formed in the late ’90s, they started out loving Radiohead, triphop and other ’90s Britpop, but quickly took it in the direction of something much lighter. Their real emotional attitude is defined by the dreamy, sentimental vocals of their female lead singer Labi, who also plays acoustic guitar and harmonica. It is no accident that the band’s name invokes Taiwan’s “strawberry generation,” who were born since the 1970s and grew up in affluence with a taste for music and culture, but are seen as lacking toughness by their economically minded elders. The band has now turned 16, its members are in their 30s and they are putting out their third album, Dracula City (德古拉城市), which they atavistically claim was inspired by “youth.” The release concert is tomorrow night and will include guest appearances by accordion player Algy Ing and violinist Kaoru Asayama.
■ We Save Strawberries performs tomorrow at Legacy, 1, Sec 1, Bade Rd, Taipei City (台北市八德路一段1號). Tickets are $800 or $600 in advance through www.indievox.com.
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