Shanghai Surprise Pt. 6

FLYBOYS IN THE SOY MILK

There is, of course, a flipside to all this commercialism and according to the locals I hung out with, the cost has been in Shanghai's culture. Even the most loyal Shanghai-nese find the city to be culturally vacuous for the most part. According to Gary, everything here revolves around surface image and not depth. For him, for example, that means when he spins out, he has to bring along a lot of mainstream, commercial hits because people won't dance to anything else. In contrast, Gary says that the Beijing musical community is far more open-minded when it comes to what they're willing to try out. It's telling that Beijing, for example, has an important and long-standing punk scene which is absolutely absent in Shanghai - in fact, the only local music scene that really seems to be catching on his hip-hop and mostly everyone I met in Shanghai were still exasperated with how difficult it's been to nurture the local scene. Hip-hop has become big for its style - fashion for example - but they feel like the substance is missing.

I'll be writing far more on this topic but did want to share one anecdote. Wang Fan, the rapper I mentioned before, is called BlaKK Bubble. Here's a breakdown of that name... First of all, the "KK" in "BlaKK" stands for Kriss Kross who were one of Wang's favorite groups of all time. Second, he coined the Chinese term for "hip hop" by renaming it "hei powpow". From a phonetic point of view, "hip hop" is hard to properly pronounce so Wang adapted it to "hei powpow" instead and that phrase literally translates into "black bubble". If you go around Shanghai and ask various vendors for their rap CDs, just ask for "hei powpow" and they'll know what you're talking about. So essentially, Wang's MC name means "hip-hop". Holla!


HOT IN HERE or HOW I LEARNED TO DJ WITHOUT UNDERWEAR

By random coincidence, before I even knew that my parents were moving here, I was contacted by Dana Burton, a Detroit-raised transplant to Shanghai who, like many ex-pats, originally came here to teach English (in 1999) and like it so much he stayed on. Dana, who rhymes under the name MC Showtyme, runs a management/promotions company by the same name and is one of the few folks actively pushing to create a hip-hop scene here in Shanghai.

It's been slow-going. For those who think hip-hop has saturated every corner of the planet, Shanghai reflects the fact that even in the most forward-looking of cities, hip-hop may not be as omnipresent as it is elsewhere in the world. When Dana first started to sponsor events a few years back, they literally got about 10 people to come out - including the planners. In that time, they've managed to grow that into several hundred folks, many of them ex-pats, who come out to weekly and bi-weekly events that are hip-hop oriented. Compared to the larger Shanghai population though, the numbers are still miniscule. It's cliche to say this about China in general, but the potential is there, just yet untapped.

Dana hosts a bi-monthly gig called Tha Murdah Show and when I ask him what the chances of DJing in Shanghai were, he was nice enough to put me into the rotation at Tha Murdah Show. I was a little nervous prepping for the gig - after all, I wasn't sure what kind of music would go over with the crowd - but it turned out fine, not that different from a gig I'd do in San Francisco since in both cities, I have annoying white people coming up to me asking, "do you have any Nelly?"

So - the no-underwear deal. It's cold in Shanghai, like around freezing cold most nights and the days are only in the balmy 40s on a GOOD day. Under those circumstances, thermals make good sense and I've spent much of my time here clad in them to stave off the chilly air.

As good an idea it is to wear them outside, it isn't such a great thing when you have to spend a lot of time indoors, especially in a place like a club where it can heat up very quickly because of all those bodies. I arrive at the venue where I'm spinning, a club called The Stage, and within half an hour, I'm dying in my thermals. It's making everything uncomfortably warm and it's not helping that I'm also developing a heat rash from wearing these damn things so long. Knowing that I have at least three hours ahead of me, I make the fateful decision to go commando.

It's not that easy though because the only place to change is the bathroom. Complicating this endeavour is the fact that the restroom here at The Stage is one of those with Chinese hole-in-the-ground toilets. Now, I don't have a real problem with these kind of toilets - I mean, hey, when in Rome right? - though I can't really pull off the Asian squat that makes it easier to take care of your business. The trick though here is that I have to take off my pants and thermals, all the while keeping my feet in my shoes. Even more complicated is that I have to do this without dangling my pant legs into the aforementioned hole-in-the-ground and it becomes a rather harrowing balancing act as I hope in and out of my pants. Luckily, I manage to shed my thermals without soiling any article of clothing and I'm back at the DJ booth minutes later, private with the knowledge that I'm spinning sans drawers.

Best of all, I didn't have to play Nelly the whole evening.


NEW YEAR'S EVE - J-HOP STYLE

New Year's Eve might be a great excuse for big parties in many cities across the world but it only makes for a minor splash in China. Since the traditional Chinese calender is on the lunar cycle, they don't celebrate their New Year until later - Feb. 1st this year. (Apparently, THAT is one helluva party, enough so that people try to leave town to avoid it). Still, there are some parties going on and my man Gary was invited to spin at a party up by the Foreign Language University at a Japanese-owned club. The deal is this: the DJ rotation is V-Nutz, Fortune (who is from Shanghai) and Shige (who is from Japan) but they will be preceded by a live band made up of local Japanese students at the University.

We walk into the club around 10pm to see an eight-piece band playing a very good rendition of Aha's "Take On Me" and suddenly I feel like I'm back in Los Angeles during junior high. The crowd, who is about 90% Japanese, loves it, screaming during the chorus as the leader singer - sporting sunglasses and spiky coif. This is followed by Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely".
Nice.

Brief Aside: Let me just say now that looking around Shanghai, I've found most of the youth (i.e. people my age and younger) to be fairly conventional. Women especially seem more fashion conscious compared to the neighborhoods I haunt in the Bay, but nothing too zany (though there is a preponderance of Hello Kitty earmuffs around town). Now...Japanese youth are on some other sh*t and a lot of the folks I saw tonight make East Villagers look like Brooks Brothers by comparison.

Case in point: the DJs take over around 10:45 or so, but their set is interrupted after 11pm by a series of dance performances. The first is by a pair of male dancers with big dreadlocks who do a nice little popping and locking routine. A later group is made up of three b-boys (normal hair) dressed in matching T-shirts that say "Type-O-Legs"...I still can't figure out what that means.

The highlight though has to be the five Japanese women who come out for the second routine. They're dressed in these matching beige outfits that I can only describe as urban tribal (or is that tribal urban?). Two of them are rocking dreads, one of whose hair is about thrice as big as her head and the others have braided their hair into corn rows. They lie down in a pattern like spokes from a wheel, their heads facing out and the music starts. Gary nudges me and says that he mixed all the music for the performers tonight (it's good sh*t too). The music starts to build - very Afro-percussive and it tickles the back of my head, like I've heard it before but can't quite place it. Then it hits: it's Ozomatli's "Como Ves" and I remember that Gary's a big Ozo fan.

So basically, I'm listening to a multi-ethnic, leftist funk/Latin/hip-hop/rock band being used as part of a dance routine for a quintet of Japanese students sporting black hair styles in the middle of Shanghai on New Year's Eve. Oddly, none of this seems particularly strange to me which is a clear sign that I've been dealing in cultural hybridity for a long, long time now and nothing really surprises me anymore.

The end...for now. Wait for Shanghai 2004, coming at you soon...


Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6