Rock and Rebellion in Shanghai

Let me tell you a story about Lily, an eighth grade student at a strict, non-denominational private school who got in trouble and got sent home early because she was simply on the wrong path, young lady. Tired and frustrated, Lily returned to her room determined to stick it to both her nighttime wardens and the stale daytime sentry who patrolled her school. With great gusto, Lily accented the plaid skirt she is forced to wear every day with slick black strips of duct tape, and, concluding that she had accomplished her goal with great flair and even greater bravery, she called it a night.

If Lily’s story sounds familiar, even cheesy, well, it should: her narrative is so familiar that even the least jaded among us are wont to feel a bit of schadenfreude when they pass the Lilys of their towns sporting side-swept bangs and Dashboard Confessional hoodies. In America, at least, the concept of rebellion as inevitable is not experienced by most as a phenomenon, but rather as a cliché. This practice of outwardly expressing anger is viewed as common for the simple reason that it is a feeling that has been established as universal: a right of passage for the under-20 set (cf. any movie about high-schoolers ever) and an iconized behavior of the cool (cf. “Rebel Without a Cause” or any show on the CW) that in the lower end of the cool spectrum is more often than not poorly mimed (cf. Lily, who has recently decided that she will only respond to her new name Veona, by the way). Needless to say, if you were to hear a song with a line like, “You’re never gonna stop all the teenage leather and booze,” you wouldn’t need to know that it’s from a song called “Teenage Riot,” by a band called Sonic Youth.

It seems to follow that we—that is me, you, and everyone we know—are keyed into this cultural endemism in large part because people—a lot of people—bothered to make art about it.

For three months this summer I lived and worked at a television station in China, and to say the least, things are different over there. Having spent the vast majority of my three months in Shanghai, I’m cautious to make a generalization that blankets the entire country, but I think it’s safe to say that youth rebellion as a social inevitability doesn’t have as much weight in China as it does here in the West. Jin Mei may love Chen Qi just as much as Joanie once loved Chachi on “Happy Days,” but Shanghai’s teenage population had a noticeable shortage of Arthur Fonzarellis.

And even if “Happy Days” is a terrible example of rebellious art, it is indicative of how Westerners take issues of conflict and rebellion in their art for granted. On top of a storied disinclination toward disestablishmentarianism, today’s China is a country in which social protests go unreported and family members routinely and quietly disappear. The longer I was there, the more the Fonz started to look like Sid Vicious.

So how do the kids get their kicks on the mainland? Well, most of them listen to a style of music dominated by Jay Chou. With Korea-pop influenced songs such as “Romantic Cell Phone”—a title that makes only a little more sense in Chinese—Chou has sold millions of records. He’s about as far from a rebel without a cause as you can get. Chinese music critics hail his masterful work (he allegedly doesn’t really write the lyrics) as revolutionary for his (perceived) unique ability to masterfully (they say) blend Eastern and Western musical styles. Party officials in the People’s Republic have a crush on him, too, consistently showering him with praise and commendations for his positive (party-line) music and his exemplary personal life—a life in which, he told China’s Shenyang Today newspaper, “filial piety is the most important thing.” Doris Day was to the McCarthy era what Jay Chou is to Communist China.

Cut to mid-July. I found myself at a small club just west of the city’s center. Its entrance was not where advertised—intentionally: the police had shut down and reopened the club many times over the years. In that small room with three walls were some of the strangest people I saw during my entire time overseas. There were teens who hadn’t bathed in a while, on purpose, and lanky girls slugging back cans of beer with neither fear of judgment nor pretension.

After hearing the headlining band Carsick Cars’ first song I liked what I heard—and found myself in complete disbelief. Atonal music in China that wasn’t Beijing opera? Really? I was soon paying just as much attention to the band as I was to the crowd: the rock and roll ragamuffins before me had begun to beat each other up. They pushed and shoved and fell down and sometimes didn’t get back up for a while. One of them was a female co-worker, so embarrassed that she was at the concert (and drunk) that she did not make eye contact with me the next few days at work. One of their final songs was a crowd favorite, “Zhong Nan Hai.” At the time I thought the song was about the complex of buildings that are effectively the headquarters of the Communist Party of China. I thought that I had perhaps stumbled upon a band singing true songs of (gasp!) protest—at least until the lead singer Zhang Shuowang broke into the chorus.

It is not hyperbole to say that I have never seen so many cigarettes in the air at one time in my entire life. Fans began hurling them by the handful at the band as they sang, as if to the beat. Days later, my embarrassed coworker un-embarrassed herself and informed me that Zhong Nan Hai is a popular brand of cigarettes and that everyone in the band smokes them, which is why everyone throws them on stage. Coming from a place where cigarettes are $8 a pack, I was suspicious.

I eventually picked up Carsick Cars’ debut album, cheekily titled “Carsick Cars (Enjoy Our Panda Music).” As I read the liner notes for, “Zhong Nan Hai,” I realized how so many people could think this was simply a song about smoking. The lyrics are, more or less, “If you smoke, just smoke Zhong Nan Hai / Life takes off with Zhong Nan Hai.”

Though they never could admit it for fear of government persecution, their song has a veiled political message. They are—very delicately, of course—connecting one controlling, harmful and popular force (tobacco) to another (their government).

Angst and rebellion may not be central to the culture, but after a summer living in the People’s Republic of China, I have decided that they are feelings that are naturally experienced by all people—Lily, Veona, Jin Mei, Chen Qi, Joanie, and Chachi alike. This is not so in art—particularly in popular art. It’s a common notion, at least here, that music is reactive and progressive: it takes a Benny Goodman to beget a Chuck Berry to beget The Rolling Stones. The cloudbank to honesty that is Jay Chou bothered me, but it pained me even more that the experiences of people who did not find love through a cell phone were not reflected by art in their language. Dashboard Confessional, evidently, does not make albums in Mandarin.

What was even more troubling was that even some of the fans of the Carsick Cars—among the most progressive Chinese—were still smoking the metaphorical Zhong Nan Hai and not picking up on the subtext. It took one night in a club with three walls for the stupid American in me to remember that dissent in art begins at the bottom, and that it can take a long time to rise to the top.

—Staff Writer Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.