MCLC: Ai Weiwei's Divine Comedy (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Jeroen Groenewegen <rinses at gmail.com>
Subject: Ai Weiwei's Divine Comedy (1)
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"Saint Ai, The Musician: The Divine Comedy, Reviewed" deliberately
overstates its case in order to get attention. What I do take issue with
are his derision of China's independent music labels ("mismanaged,
short-sighted, and engage in virtually zero international outreach") and
musicians ("even those in this country’s punk rock scene are guilty of
utilizing formulaic flag-waving lyrical bullshit because they’re unwilling
to wrap their liberty-spiked heads around anything specific"). Worse than
these things simply being not true, they suggest that the standards of
good music are having success in the West and being political outspoken in
the most crude way. "Maybe Ai can help with that," writes Pete DeMola. I
hope not.

The bands that DeMola "consider[s] to be the country’s most durable and
influential", namely Duck Fight Goose, Hedgehog, Carsick Cars, and PK-14,
further testify to his Anglocentrism, literally in about half of the songs
of these bands. These are great bands (I especially like PK14), at the
same time there's more to rock in the PRC than Maybe Mars (incidentally,
that DeMola knows these bands is a sign of this label's international
outreach). Hanggai is an example of a Beijing-based band with prolonged
international success, but maybe that doesn't count because they are
Mongolian-themed and not New Wave but World Music...?

Then about Zuoxiao Zuzhou. I wouldn't call him "a well-respected founding
father who helped popularize avant-garde rock music in the early-1990s".
As far as I know Zuoxiao became successful around 2008 because of a
relatively more mainstream sound (I like his 2009 album Big Deal  《大事》　
best), but also because of his outspokenness on microblogs and by
association with Ai Weiwei.

Zuoxiao Zuzhou and Ai Weiwei started working together when they both lived
in the East Village in Beijing in the mid-1990s. Zuoxiao used Ai's artwork
as cover art of his first solo album in 2001 (Zuoxiao Zuzhou atDi'anmen 《左
小
祖咒在地安门》 ). Zuoxiao was with Ai when he was injured by the police in
Chengdu and composed all the music for the documentaries that Ai Weiwei
made. Divine Comedy seems to be a natural next step in their
collaboration. 

As far as I can judge on the basis of the one song that I've heard, the
album also fits Zuoxiao's musical development, which, as I have argued
elsewhere (http://norient.com/academic/groenewegen2011/), moves from
sincere avant-garde through somewhat detached 'musical commentary' towards
the clownesque. Zuoxiao's recent talk at Berkeley is a good example of how
Zuoxiao Zuzhou is sometimes deliberately superficial, silly and 无厘头 and
sometimes critical by suggesting depth behind his parody  (http://www
<http://www/>.youtube.com/watch?v=naJ4ZZbxZ2c). The video also shows some
of the challenges this poses to well-meaning translators and event
organizers, who in their attempt to invest the institution with prestige
and decency water down Zuoxiao's "pissing against the idealist wind"
somewhat.   

Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau