The scene is rocking

Four music festivals and a marathon concert made this year's May Day holiday the busiest ever for Beijing's pop and rock fans. Each of the events - Midi Festival, Strawberry Festival, China Music Valley Festival, Chaoyang International Pop Festival and the Rock Records 30th Anniversary Concert - featured dozens of acts and drew thousands of people.

At the same time, music festivals were held in many other Chinese cities, including Chengdu, Chongqing and Nanjing.

"It would have been unthinkable 30 years ago that we could enjoy music festivals like in Western countries," says Zhang Fan, 44, founder and director of the Midi Music Festival, one of the first outdoor music festivals in China.

Zhang remembers the early 1980s, when there were no live shows, no records, no radio or TV programs.

When he performed at a students' singing competition at his high school in 1984, he drove the audience crazy with songs he learned from a copied cassette, including Taiwan pop songs and the Beatles. He won first prize.

Chinese pop music was only budding at that time, after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), during which music consisted almost entirely of revolutionary songs.

There was a debate in the early 1980s about whether pop music should be allowed into Chinese society, because many thought pop music would corrupt people.

The first half of the 1980s was a time of transition for Chinese music, from ideological, formalized singing to free styles focusing on personal emotions, says Li Wan, a music critic who has published several books on Chinese pop music.

"The result was a kind of 'eclectic' style, something between the high-pitched revolutionary songs and pop songs," he says. "The feelings of disorientation and pain, something so common in real life, were still regarded as unhealthy."

Pop songs soon won over the hearts and minds of many. As professional songwriting and production hadn't come into being, China's pop music experienced what Li calls a "covering era".

Because of the mainland's closed market, a batch of singers became extremely popular by covering songs from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Western countries. It was common for a cassette of such covers to sell millions of copies. Zhang Qiang, a singer from Beijing, released 11 albums of covers in 1986 alone, and her 27 albums were estimated to have sold more than 20 million copies.

"Zhang Qiang's success had much to do with that particular time, when people had a growing need for entertainment while there was little available, and singers from Taiwan and Hong Kong were not yet allowed to enter the mainland," Li says.

Chinese rock music was also born around that time, marked by Cui Jian's first official performance in 1986 at the Workers' Gymnasium. He would be labeled as China's "godfather of rock", and together with bands such as Tang Dynasty, Black Panther and Cobra, become the backbone of the first generation of Chinese rockers.

But as pop music gained recognition in the 1980s, rock failed to do so. It was hard to get approval for rock concerts from governments, which were cautious about the destructive potential of such music and the crowds that it attracts.

Rock musicians had to adapt strategies to get permission to perform. For example, many applied in the name of welfare performance and substituted "rock music" with "modern music".

During the late 1980s, Zhang Fan would go on occasion to Maxim's de Paris or the Diplomatic Residence Compound, the only venues in Beijing where small rock shows would be staged.

The situation improved in the 1990s, when bars provided an option for musicians, and record companies began to sign rock musicians and see commercial value in them. Soon the second generation of rock stars, including Zhang Chu and Zheng Jun, were playing in stadiums.

Since pop and rock music were born late in China, its development on the Internet was almost synchronous with the West. For the first time, the Chinese are able to follow international music trends, but at the same time, the free downloading has made the record industry bankrupt.

Most record labels that were active in the 1990s have disappeared from the market, including Magic Stone, Red Star and Pulay. Instead, DIY has become more and more popular as artists produce and distribute works themselves.

But the decline of the record industry has created more opportunities for live music.

When Zhang Fan started the Midi Festival in 2000, he was heading the Beijing Midi School of Music and trying to organize a party inside the school to present works by the students, who had no other opportunity to perform.

However, it soon attracted bands and audiences from outside the school, and by the third year opened to the public. By the fifth year, the festival moved to a park and began to sell tickets.

"We are like a guerilla force, but we have been growing," Zhang Fan says. "Now that the government departments have realized that a music festival is not something dangerous, things have become much easier."

This year the Midi Festival even got 500,000 yuan ($77,000) from the Culture and Creative Industry Fund of the Beijing government. With support of other local governments, the festival has expanded to three other cities: Shanghai, Rizhao in Shandong province and Zhenjiang in Jiangsu province.

"We started as an event of underground bands, but now with commercial interests and even the government's support, there are no more underground band nowadays," Zhang Fan says.

According to Li, since 2000 Chinese pop and rock music has entered the "entertainment era".

TV reality shows have forced the music industry to focus on instant commercial interests rather than high-quality works, Li points out, but he believes now is a gestation period for Chinese music.

"Since the 1980s, China has experienced explosive developments in pop and rock music. Now is a time of fusion, and Chinese music will be open for more possibilities," he says.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page52)