4698 Livehouse

19 04 2010

So, you might wonder what does one do on a rainy, foggy night in a place like Changsha. Aside from the clubs that recycle the same lowest of the low house and R&B tracks from the States and Europe, there’s actually quite a lot here to take advantage of. This is a city, as cliché as it sounds, that never sleeps. When I finally decide to call it at 4 in the morning, there is a fish and meat market open and crawling with farmers and shopkeepers with all the boisterous calling of a midmorning. It helps that the sky never really darkens here either. There is always a reddish-gray blanket of clouds and pollution that holds on to most of the light from the cities gaudy, brightly-lit buildings. Roadside food and drinking goes on well into the morning, and there are often few things that beat a hunk of deep-fried and blackened stinky tofu (臭豆腐) or flash-fried egg noodles (鸡蛋炒粉). But I’m here to talk about the one safe haven of limited musical expression I have thus far found here.

4698 Livehouse is tucked away in the nook of a sordid and crumbling residential building, with a tiny sign that leads you up a flight of steps to an elevator that hardly runs.

Regardless, this is one of the only venues in central China that actually sees fairly well-known groups both from the mainland, and as far away as Europe and the States. The beer is the cheapest in the city and the bartender speaks excellent English, which is one of the reasons it has become something of an expat hang-out even on nights without shows. It is a breath of fresh air in a city where that is really a rare thing to come by.

Reflector (More or less a less-annoying Chinese Green Day)

Yakza - 'The First' Chinese Metal Band

A folk musician whose lead singer is his overweight cocker spaniel... i guess if it's good enough for youtube...

A mosh-pit in China is more like an over-zealous game of ring-around-the-rosie, where a few people fall down, but most of them are just at home and happy pushing against a mass of people.

It doesn’t matter that I would never fork over even the negligible cover (3 – 6 dollars) to see most of these bands if I were at home in the States. The fact that these bands exist and they are doing what they are doing in China for a strictly Chinese audience is something of a statement. It doesn’t matter that there sound is fairly derivative, a mixture of outside influences and popular culture that are arriving in China in a jumbled mass. Give it a few years and, once they sort it out, it will be undeniable that Chinese bands will have developed confidence in a sound that is uniquely there own. One band that performed at an Orange Island show incorporates a stage-full of traditional instruments—erhu (a two stringed instrument shaped like a narrow bamboo violin wrapped in snakeskin), pipa (a more ornate and complex guitar-like instrument) among many others—blending Chinese folk songs with metal guitars. Give it time, that’s all I say. All the greatest bands have taken as their starting ground the uniformity and restless repetition of the modern material lifestyle. What better place and time than here and now.