After months of will-they-won’t-they speculation the US indie rockers the
Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs played the Modern Sky Festival on October 2 to 4, during the five-day National Day holiday. The hour long wait between the preceding Joy Division-admiring RETROS and the headliners of the inaugural
Modern Sky Festival suggested some space between the on-stage requirements of the visitors and the preceding local bands, who played their 30 minute sets almost concurrently in the hours preceding the New Yorkers arrival on the main stage around 9.10pm.
A rain-induced exodus prior to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs set suggests local fans aren’t yet hardened to rock festival conditions. The downpour had driven about half the crowd to the sea of taxis depending on the festival crowd for business on a slow National Day holiday week night.
Their appearance on stage quenched a bizarre succession of build-up tunes: Phil Collins and R Kelly seemed a bizarre choice by a label with the Indie credibility of Modern Sky. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were up for it though. Band vocalist Karen O had learned a few Chinese words and belted off plenty of “xie xie” (thanks).
The enthusiasm of the mostly-student crowd (the Haidian Park) suggests the gig was, in words frequently used by local cadres, a “complete success.” It certainly drew a significant local audience for the O and bandmates Nick Sinner and Brian Chase, who paid no heed to the rain in belting out trademark-nonsensical lyrics to tunes like Is Is, Down Boy and Show Your Bones.
The New York trio came, conquered - and enjoyed themselves. After the show the band told of eating Peking duck, and admiration for local bands and organizers, on their MySpace site. The Yeahs appeared on a mostly-Chinese line up of Modern Sky bands: New Pants, Hedgehog and newcomers My Little Airport. However even though there’s more foreign bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs coming – propelled perhaps by the pre Olympic excitement – there hasn’t been a dramatic growth in the number of decent Chinese bands. Beijing festival line ups this summer have often looked remarkably similar.
The Modern Sky festival was however this year’s most affordable. Lower ticket prices – RMB60 a day compared to RMB150 per day at September’s Beijing Pop Festival – and the location, in Haidian Park in the city’s main university belt, ensured a good turnout. Locals made up 70 percent of the crowd. There were none of the ticket touts of the Beijing Pop Festival at more salubrious Chaoyang Park, which had lots of freeloaders selling their VIP tickets for RMB200 at the gate. Bag ladies collecting plastic bottles and the scents of lamb skewers and marijuana lent the festival credibility.
But who paid for it all? Probably the marketing departments of Levi’s, MySpace and Motorola, all of whom paid to install marketing stalls on the festival site. Social website MySpace was also on-site, with a sizeable booth next to the Levi’s stall. Modern Sky tagged Levi’s and Motorola as “partners” in promotional material. In some ways the Indie label, headquartered in a converted 1950s apartment block in a unglamorous pocket of Beijing’s northern Haidian district, upstaged the Beijing Pop Festival, headquartered in more salubrious digs in the heart of the business district.
A local corporate presence was that of Sculpting In Time, a chain of coffee stores set up by Taiwanese film graduate Jimmy Zhuang and his wife. The brand, whose outlets are larger and cosier than Starbucks’ in China, had a large stall selling tea and coffee, though the profligance of plastic-coated paper cups calls into question their environmental credentials stated on their advertisement in the festival programme. Others with stalls included glossy local rock magazine In Music and Painkiller, a Beijing heavy metal magazine. Disposable camera maker Lomography was another corporate presence, with a big, red-liveried booth manned by the Lomography Society of China.
No figures or arrangements for getting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs here have been disclosed – one imagines the Grammy-nominated New Yorkers don’t come cheap - but Modern Sky have gotten a lot of criticism for engaging in vanity lao wai (local slang for foreigner) projects, engaging foreign bands for gigs and recordings in China which have no sustainable impact on the development of the local scene. The money, says critics like Berwin Song in That’s Beijing magazine, would be better spent finding and releasing quality local artists.
Sculpting in Time was inundated with customers as the rain spilled down on the last night of the festival. A lot of the corporate sponsors looked pretty glum however in the least glam looking VIP tent, too far away from the main stage to see anything and too scared of the rain to join the other punters.
The choice of food vendors on the festival site – no camping allowed - was nothing if not colourful. What really stood out was the image of a smiling Middle Eastern looking man, complete with red-white keffiyeh head dress, plastered over Arabic script above one of the food stalls. It all looked very exotic and drew an expectant crowd. The vendors, bearded Uyghurs from the western province of Xinjiang, sold the same lamb skewers common on many Beijing street food stalls. True, no one does them like the Uyghurs, but what a smart way to draw a crowd.
Sales were brisk too in the plastic sheeted village constructed on a car park near the park’s southern entrance. Huddled beneath a giant replica space rocket, the vendors sold the usual mix of t-shirts and CDs on offer at most Chinese rock bars. Yet the range of shirts and the quality of the designs – from kitschy Cultural Revolution-era motifs to go green environmental slogans and nifty takes on Kurt Cobain and local stars AK-47 - there’s plenty of hints that China’s t-shirt makers are now as creative as they are prodigious.
None of the foreign artists whose images and logos appear will be getting royalties off sales – but the price and uniqueness of these shirts – average RMB50 - make them compelling buys for foreign fans. Out of the piles of second hand and shop-cut CDs on offer I plucked Lipstick Traces, a two-CD set of Manic Street Preachers B-sides, for RMB40. A good bargain, a good night. More credit to Modern Sky then.
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