Cosmopolitan Poses and Haunting Questions

Much has changed, I realised, when I attended the Modern Sky music festival in October 2008 in Haidian Park in West Beijing. The crowds that were allowed to gather in a public park, the wide array of music genres ranging from death metal to urban folk, the lyrics now often sung in English, the trendy youth from the 80s generation, all turned the festival into a profoundly cosmopolitan experience. An experience simultaneously saturated with articulations of Chineseness, judging from the Chinese flags people carried with them or painted on their faces. For three days, old stars from the early 1990s like He Yong and Zhang Chu shared the stage with more recent bands like Carsick Cars and Re-establishing the Rights of Statues – whose English band names also attest to the cosmopolitanism of the scene. More than fifteen years since the album's release, audiences could still remember Zhang Chu's lyrics word by word – turning the evening of his performance into a collective ritualised experience. While walking from the main stage, where The New Pants had just performed their last song, entitled Bye Bye Disco, to the small stage, I ran into Shen Lihui, organiser of the festival, owner of the Modern Sky label and leading vocalist of the Beijing ‘Britpop’ band Sober. He plays a pivotal role in the cultural scene of Beijing, and can be seen as the embodiment of the economical, cultural and political changes which have taken place in China since the mid 1990s. In establishing Modern Sky in 1997, he made use of the increased liberties in the Chinese media market (Zhao 2008), and has since then been able to operate at the outer limits of the permissible, playing the political and economic game skilfully