Hedgehog

Hedgehog is probably China's most famous punk rock band. Since they got their start in 2005, they've recorded seven albums (mostly in English), toured the US, and been hailed as one of "The Beijing Bands You Should Already Know About" by City Weekend, so I guess I should already have known about them.

But I didn't, and in fact it wasn't until minutes before I left for their latest album release party -- at the recommendation of some friends -- that I even bothered to look them up. Luckily, they were awesome. I'm always more likely to enjoy a good band if I hear them live first, but these guys just really understood performance: the set was well tuned to the crowd, there was an appropriately earned stage dive by the guitarist, and the lulls between songs were filled with carefully orchestrated interludes, not to mention the fact that their drummer -- a tiny Chinese girl -- was incredibly active and exciting to watch.

More importantly, Beijing has an indie rock scene! Sure it's 20-30 years behind the times (the Chinese invented rock in the 80s and punk in the… well now I guess), but the pieces are all there -- the high-energy, head-banging, fight-the-system spirit is alive and well in the city's underground music venues. One of the opening bands (both were pretty terrible) actually played a song called "Big Brother is Watching You," which I thought was going to be a heavy-handed, anti-government, political piece when they announced it, only to find that the entire refrain was delivered with a winky sort of vibe that had "but we don't actually believe that" written all over it. Then again, maybe that's part of the game…

In any case, it was fun to be able to get out and experience some modern culture. Now that I've seen pretty much every ancient historical relic Beijing has to offer, I'm really looking to see and do more of what Chinese people my age actually do. Live music is something I'd been wanting to check out for a while, but it's really hard to figure out which bands are going to rock and which bands are going to be duds because a lot of them don't exist in the typical music-sharing locales like Myspace and Spotify. But if a group as well known as Hedgehog can't even attract two decent openers, the odds of picking a winner on another random night at Yugongyishan probably aren't great. Hopefully my friends and I will catch wind of another biggish name playing there before the summer's out.

再见

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