Swagger Like Dou

imagine an Eazy E look a like on a rant about the merits of filial piety. With a chinese flute.


I was introduced to the music of Chinese rock legend Dou Wei, in the back room of MIX nightclub, singing karaoke, at a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's wedding after party. Most of the other pop songs did very little to increase the head-nod factor, but when this came on, I could barely keep from bouncing in my seat. Crazyman and Jahway belted lyrics out with the same appreciation that every New Yorker uses to sing the lyrics to Juicy.

Never. Missing. A. Beat.

Sounded somewhat like Sublime to me. Jahway introduced him as old-school chinese hip hop.

"I'll bite", I thought.

Dou Wei himself has had an interested career. A rock and roll musician, married a beautiful pop singer, had an ugly divorce, and is currently serving time for the arson of a newspaper company who smeared him post-break-up.

Now-wait-a-rice-pickin-minute. "I thought you were studying HIP HOP?"

Culturally speaking, Rock and Roll music is the door in which hip hop entered into the mainland. Before Mr. Deng Xiaoping and the Open-door policy (改革开放) most music in China was, you guessed it, tra-ditional. Pre 1979 Chinese speakers bumped nationalistic songs claiming the glory of communism, or older musical relics from the dynastic past. With musical influences from the west and all over the world finally able to penetrate into China, Rock and Roll music took hold--and out of the Rock movement sprang Hip Hop. The community itself was composed of the same people, or rather the kid brothers of older rockers.

Whereas in the states nowadays, these communities, rock and hip-hop, exist almost in isolation; as distant cousins of grandfather blues and uncle funk, with bragging rights to their respective heirlooms, here in Beijing, the communites overlap in a perpetual family reunion. So while we Americans look back to old days of Bootsie Collins, James Brown and the Last Poets, Hip Hop heads in China harken back to Cui Jian, He Yang, and Dou Wei, who are, to paraphrase Donnie and Marie Osmond, "a little bit rock n'roll". Not only do you find people who listen to both types of music in great quantity, but attend concerts, but even musicians who dabble in an array of styles through out their career.

For example, my man Xie, the current guitarist for the Beijing Live Hip Hop Experience, for example, was once part of a band dubbed Chinese MC Brothers, and has played with Cui Jian, the godfather of chinese rock. Take a trip to any number of Chinese "Rock" music festivals, and your bound to see electronic music, reggae, hip hop, metal, punk--and tee shirt stands to boot.

In what we westerners would consider a homogenous population, those rigid musical distinctions don't exist; a musical master status just isn't necessary. In its place is the fluid understanding that music culture can be just that--an expression of the complexity of modernity and community.