To Örebro University

This article presents a discussion on how Chinese metal musicians situate the 'subcultural' of Chinese metal music in the 'hermit' concept in the Chinese context. Since it first appeared in mainland China in 1990, Chinese metal has been a subculture with a double marginality in relation to both Chinese society and the global metal scene. Accordingly, Chinese metal musicians have been trying to negotiate their marginal and subcultural identities through localized strategies, embodied notably as the appropriation of the concept of 'hermit'. By examining recent symbolic material produced by Chinese metal musicians, this article provides a brief overview of how they translate the 'subcultural' of their metal music participation in relation to elitism, covert and passive resistance, and authentic national and individual identities through the 'hermit' concept.

This thesis focuses on the meaning of Chinese music subcultures, includingChinese metal, rap, rock, and punk styles; and how is the meaning shaped by Chinese participants in the Chinese context, which is represented by the context of Beijing. 

This project is motivated by addressing the gaps that exist between dominant Anglo-American subcultural theories and explaining contemporary Chinese individuals’ practices. In terms of the communist ideology, historical trajectories, and drastic economic leaps in the recent Chinese context, Chinese individuals’ practices have demonstrated a diversity and hybridity that cannot be fitted into the dominant Anglo-American theoretical frameworks such as the CCCS or post-subcultural theory, and are incompatible with a framing that only emphasizes the political resistance aspects of music subcultures. Moreover, existing subcultural theories are deficient in explaining how music specifically affects individuals in their subcultural participation and everyday life, as a dynamic medium, as well as an embodied and culturally emergent process. In this light, by interviewing Chinese individual participants and employing a China-centered theoretical framework, this thesis explores how the meaning participants attach to music subcultures is generated in the interplay between the socio-cultural Chinese context, their individual experiences, and through the affective properties of the music they engage with. In conclusion, the meaning of Chinese music subcultures is shaped by three aspects: meaning in relation to the Chinese context, individual meaning and internal subcultural dynamics, and musical meaning.

In the interviews with Chinese punk participants, it is frequent to hear the narratives of punk’s magical and powerful force, one which helps them through hardship, enables them to stick to themselves, encourages them to fight for changes, and lifts them up when they have been knocked down by reality. Actually, since being imported to mainland China in the mid-1990s, punk subculture has not only endowed its Chinese participants with resilience, but also been demonstrating resilience within the fast-growing Chinese context.

In this presentation, Yiren hopes to expound the meanings of Chinese punk subculture, especially around the theme of resilience; and how these meanings are shaped by individual participants under the impact of the Chinese context. More specifically, the conclusions will be unfolded through threefold meanings in terms of individual, contextual and musical perspectives. For individual meanings, punk is practiced as an approach to authenticity. Chinese participants employ punk to express authentic individual thoughts, construct subjective identification, and reflect on the mainstream such as Chinese pop music, collectivism and patriarchy. For contextual meanings, Chinese participants use punk to resist Western stereotypes and adapt to Chinese cultural censorship. At last for musical meanings, punk empowers participants through a positive and protective power. Punk music provides a model for behaviour and spurs participants to action through the process of listening and performing. In these processes, punk music helps participants to withstand and survive struggles, activating a set of capacities of resilience.

By exploring the meanings of punk subculture from different perspectives in the Chinese context, this presentation tries to approach Chinese punk as a porous subculture, instead of employing a frequently-used Western theoretical framework that overemphasises Chinese punk’s political resistance and imposes an “oppression-resistance” agenda. Only in this way, local cultural phenomena can gain open and new meanings.

In the studies on Chinese popular music under Western dominance, some genres such as hip hop, punk, metal, and especially Chinese rock, are defined as subcultures or counter-cultures. The discussions on these genres are often embedded in dualist agendas such as authority vs. resistance, authentic vs. commercial, and mainstream vs. alternatives, etc. However, can these theoretical frameworks properly explain the phenomena in today’s Chinese context? What are the local participants’ interpretations on their experiences and practices?  

To explore these questions, this study chooses Beijing, the capital city of China, as a representative, and inquires how local participants construct individual and collective meanings through their subcultural participations. Also, this study tries to locate music subcultures in contemporary Chinese context of neoliberalism and postsocialism, and illustrates how participants negotiate their identifications and reflect on Chinese modernity. In this way, this study plans to provide empirical analyses on Chinese popular music, through perspectives of ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and sociology.  

When it comes to Chinese rock music, it is salient to see adjectives such as rebellious, subversive, anti-government and progressive in ethnomusicological research in a long time. What behind these adjectives, is a long-standing academic paradigm towards Chinese popular music studies from the 1990s. In short, there is a stereotypical and preconceived academic trend, leading to a simplistic, homogenous and biased understanding of Chinese popular music, politics, and society.

Instead of considering the fluidity, complexity and diversity, many Western studies understand Chinese rock through a dual privilege approach: Chinese rock versus Western rock, and Chinese rock versus Chinese pop. In detail, the first privilege surrounds the mythology of Chinese rock which means a highly romantic reading of Chinese rock as a counterculture, in order to suit a Western stereotypical image of repressive China and a nostalgia of authentic Western rock ideals. Based on this, the second privilege emphasizes that Chinese rock has a particular cultural value and social significance, while Chinese pop is the opposite -  commercialized, lacking of creativity – as a potential inferior form compared to Chinese rock.

Indeed, China has its special culture, ideology and context, and the tension between rebellious expression and political environment was the main theme in the 1980s and 90s. However, how has this biased trend lasted for 30 years and is still persuasive and prevailing in today’s research? To answer this question, this presentation plans to dissect the stereotypes, misrepresentations, and underlying roots behind a trend of dominant Western academic discourse. By analyzing Chinese modernity, and legacies of Orientalism and colonialism, this presentation provides a reflective approach to study Chinese popular music in a continuous context consisting of Confucian China and Communist China, properly connect ethnomusicological study of Chinese popular music to a broad and dynamic methodology.

With the trend of globalization and opening-up of China in the late 1980s, metal music emerged in China in the late 90s and then became a genre around 2000. As a music genre spread from the West, metal music has been constantly evolving in the process of both localization and globalization in the Chinese context, trying to position itself as “Chinese metal”.

Based on this background, this research employs some cases such as album covers, stage performance, MV, lyrics, logos and dress of several Chinese metal bands mainly from Northern China, to explore how these musicians and their praxis position themselves in the Chinese context by discourse analysis. To analyze these cases as representatives of Chinese metal music, this research discovers Chinese metal’s self-positioning – inheritance, elitism, marginality, etc. – are closely related to Chinese historical heritage and sociocultural system, as well as subtly extending and connecting to the global metal spectacle and Western orthodox.

Generally, this research discusses Chinese metal’s self-position by combining local and global intervention, and explains how and why Chinese metal position itself. On this basis, this research hopes to fill in the ethnographic study of Chinese metal, and provides clues to the theoretical and empirical development of global metal scene.

This presentation is about my doctoral project – a comparative study of music subcultures in Beijing and Stockholm. This year is my second year, so I wish to present the introduction, methodologies, overall framework and some ideas about my project in this conference. The purpose of this project is to figure out how “music subculture” is defined and practiced by participants in two different cities (countries), and explore the subcultural contrasts and similarities in terms of distinct social contexts. For this question, this study plans to firstly use media discourse analysis to quantitatively conclude the definition of “music subculture” from the perspective of mass media in Sweden and China. Then drawing upon this analysis, the mainstream discourse of the conceptions, genres, and activities related to music subculture will be generalized, which can therefore represent the definition from the public and mainstream of both two countries to some extent. Meanwhile, I will also use phenomenological interviewing and participant observation to engage in the local subcultural communities and activities and obtain the first-hand materials from the participants. Consequently by doing these fieldwork, this study hopes to investigate how music subcultures are made, for whom and mean what in two distinct cities, enriching subcultural theory and popular music study to include multiple set of meaning about music subculture. 

Next year is the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening up. From 1979 to 2019, due to China’s unique political and economic environment, China’s music subcultures and the mainstream have shown diverse and changing relationships.

From the unified red musical tradition in the early time, then the Dakou[i] generation, and the time of Chinese rock and folk music, to today’s great commercial success and influence of music subcultures, Chinese music subcultures and the mainstream have always maintained consultation, dialogue and conflict between censorship, patriotism and free will. By analyzing the relationship between music subcultures and the mainstream in the Chinese context in the past 40 years, this paper aims to explore both conflicts and dialogue in the realm of music subcultures and attempts to lay out the main contours of China’s current music subcultural scene, and the role and impact of the mainstream in this scene.

 [i] Dakou CDs are dumped by the West, meant to be recycled, but instead are smuggled into China. They are cut to prevent them from being sold. However, since a CD player reads CDs from the centre to the margin, only the last part is lost. Dakou CDs enabled musicians and audiences in China to listen to music that was either censored or deemed too marginal by China’s music distributors. 

With the trend of globalization and opening-up of China in the late 1980s, black metal emerged in China in the late 90s and then became a genre around 2000. As a music genre spread from the West, black metal is constantly evolving to adjust the gaze of authenticity and localization in the Chinese context. Also, drawing upon the conflict and fusion of the global spectacle and local discourse, the unique Chinese narratives are gradually formed in the Chinese black metal scene today. On this basis, this presentation plans to interpret the embodiments of Chinese identity in Chinese black metal praxis, and discuss its approaches, narratives, characteristics and so on through discourse analysis. By disclosing the themes of nature, supernatural, nation, and local image that Chinese black metal is borrowing, this presentation discloses the relationship between Chinese black metal and Chinese culture, society, tradition and authority, then explore their interplays and corresponding embodiments in the praxis. Finally, this study hopes to fill in the ethnographic study of Chinese black metal, and provides clues to the theoretical and empirical development of the global black metal scene.