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Chinese rocks
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At first glance, the opening band at the Central Square Elks Lodge last Saturday evening, January 24, looked unremarkable — a bass player with a dyed-blond mohawk and a studded-leather jacket with Clash patches, a singer/guitarist with hair dyed a cheetah-fur pattern, a lead guitarist with purple hair and a goatee, a drummer in a shirt that said, "Drink Beer and Fight." They played undistinctive primitive three-chord street-punk with a charming, naive sloppiness that made one think ’70s CBGB’s. It was a short and mostly unremarkable set, and the 30 or so folks who’d turned up early for a show headlined by Lost City Angels and Confront applauded politely. The band were Brain Failure, from China. And although you wouldn’t know it to hear them, they are the most senior punk band in the world’s last Communist superpower. Mainland China did not produce an indigenous rock-and-roll performer until 1985, just four years before the student uprising at Tiananmen Square, where folk-pop and prog-rock bands regaled the protesters until the tanks rolled in. Punk rock was still five years off, and mohawked hardcore didn’t gain a foothold until the founding of the legendary (but short-lived) Beijing punk club Scream in 1997. The spirit of the club survives today as a homonymous label that is at the forefront of the Chinese rock-and-roll underground. The Chinese cultural and musical temperament is still light-years from punk; the idea of American-style protest is almost unthinkable, as the vast majority of Chinese rockers retain their countrymen’s intense, all-pervasive nationalism, the passion for which might best be compared to the American love of liberty. What little Chinese punk there is survives barely amid the filth and pollution of dull, grey, bureaucratic Beijing, where concrete gridlock rolls away in waves from the massive Russian-style Communist palaces at Tiananmen, adjacent to the ancient, frostily preserved dynastic Disneyland of the Forbidden City. The members of Brain Failure are in their 20s. Formed in 1996, the original lineup were regulars at Scream. At the Elks, they played a half-dozen songs with lyrics in English (not uncommon for Chinese rock). Frontman Xiao Rong’s English was passable enough that one could discern that their song "Let’s Have Fun Tonight" was about having fun tonight, that "Coming to the USA" was about coming to the USA, and that another song, whose title remained a mystery, was a protest against the Chinese mafia, who "talk loud in restaurants." "It’s called ‘Lesson to My Back,’ " Xiao said, frowning. "No, uh, ‘Lesson to Behind’?" He shook his head. Some things, it seemed, just don’t translate. "That doesn’t make any sense," he chuckled. "You will think, ‘Lesson to Behind,’ what the fuck are they talking about?"
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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