Young fans, some sporting spiky mohawks, slam-danced and stage-dived as the music blasted into the night. One wore a metal-studded jacket with what looked like vintage Sex Pistols buttons.
Several hundred people packed Nine Club early this year for the “Unite Punk Music Festival” in Hangzhou, a technology hub in southeastern China also known for its scenic West Lake.
The mostly young crowd shouted out the lyrics and raised clenched fists under blinking red lights. Some had pierced lips. Others looked like clean-cut college students.
Photo: AP
Then the body slamming began. About a dozen people in front of the stage slammed into each other as if possessed by the thumping beat. There was chaos, but no fights.
Punk rock burst onto the scene globally in the 1970s with groups such as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. It took longer to reach China, but witnessed explosive growth there in the late 1990s, when influential bands such as SMZB, Brain Failure and Queen Sea Big Shark inspired hip young people to sport mohawks and leather jackets.
It is no longer as trendy as it once was. Many younger people today view punk as their parents’ music and gravitate toward hip-hop and rap, said Liu Fei (劉非), the owner of School Bar in Beijing.
Photo: AP
Others frequent underground raves with pounding techno beats.
However, some are forming new punk bands, and China has skateboard, new school and hardcore punks, Liu said before a recent punk night at his bar for fans of a Beijing soccer team.
The fan club has a fight song written by a Chinese punk rocker who died in 2015.
Photo: AP
“The atmosphere is not as enthusiastic as before, but it is still there,” said one of the performers, Wang Lixing, from the band Labor Glory (勞動光榮).
The lyrics are less rebellious than in the past, said Liu, who remembers the hopping scene in China during a punk revival in the early 2000s.
Today, the songs are more about the “sang” (喪, “mourning”) culture of depression, pessimism and apathy that some young people feel in modern society.
“They need channels to relieve pressure and release negativity to help themselves adjust,” said Zedd, a mechanical engineering student by day who plays guitar by night for the band System Chaos and prefers to be identified by his stage name.
The entertainment industry in China is tightly censored, with regulations over lyrics and portrayals of subcultures and images deemed unsuitable.
“It may be more difficult to do punk rock in China,” Liu said. “But in different environments, it has its own way of survival.”
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS