Multiplicity

The problem with juxtaposing the hard with the soft, West and East, North and South, authentic and fake, local and global, and Han Chinese to the ethnic minority, is that one freezes multiple realities and modernities into a rigid binary framework (Lau 2003). The scenes described in the previous chapter are all involved in tactics of localisation, at times critiquing Chinese culture, at other moments celebrating it. The hardness of the sounds seems to relate to the eagerness to localise. These tactics are played out in a cultural field whose aesthetics are inherently cosmopolitan (Regev 2007a, 2007b), which necessarily renders them incomplete and impure. The eagerness to localise comes with a continuous ‘gesturing elsewhere,’ (Baulch 2008), a gesturing towards a global discourse of rock music. In an attempt to complicate the picture of sonic globalisation even further, and before moving to the scenes that are more rigorously excluded from Beijing rock culture, this chapter explores the scenes challenging a clear-cut scenic approach by merging different genres and by being highly self-reflexive. Being less forcefully implicated in the rock mythology, these hyphenated scenes push the limits of a binary approach and cheerfully refute neat generic divisions.

Folk-rock

Positions – Folk music is often considered an important part of China's cultural heritage, and as such is studied by ethnomusicologists (see Schimmelpenninck 1997). The genre has made its way into rock culture, but rather than being an expression of rural traditions, the sounds that carry the labels folk (mingge or mingyao), folk-rock (mingge yaogun), or urban folk (chengshi mingge) are first and foremost ‘individual’ expressions of urban sentiments. Whereas other scene names are either a direct or a homophonic translation from the English, folk is the only scene whose name has a long and complicated history in China as well. Minorities use it to articulate their local identity, the Han Chinese use it to reify their long tradition, the CCP uses it to propagate a national unity that builds on the multicultural idea of ethnic diversity, and now the rock culture has appropriated it.