Global Hit

China’s “Battle of the Bands” Contest

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Pepsi Co. and Shanghai TV have invited “underground” bands from across China to compete in an American Idol-style TV show. It’s China’s “Battle of the Bands,” and the finals are fast approaching. The winners will get some cash, some new equipment, and recording contract…with Pepsi Co.’s own music label. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad checks out some of the finalists in Shanghai.

• More information on China’s “Battle of the Bands”
• China Music Radar’s take on the contest
• Jay Caplan’s blog
• Video from the competition

The venue for “Battle of the Bands” is an old factory district on the outskirts of Shanghai. Inside a cavernous shell where workers once toiled – bands of the young and tragically hip are embracing everything their parents missed, and then some. There are tattoos and body piercing, mini-skirts and thigh-high boots, boy bands with bleached blond hair – and even some real musical talent.

This is “Sweet Journey,” a band from the central Chinese city of Xian. It has a drummer from Inner Mongolia, a guitarist who looks like a Chinese version of Roy Orbison, and a waiflike singer who sounds like she’s channeling Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries.

This band is one of the ten finalists in a televised competition that started six months ago. The former head of MTV for North Asia, Harry Hui, was part of a team at Pepsi that came up with the idea:

HARRY HUI: “We do a lot of research about young people around the country. We found that there were 20,000 bands, underground bands, that were in China, that very few people knew about. 5:30: And we dug a little deeper and we started to notice that there were a lot of live concerts going on in China. And then we started to talk to some folks in the guitar business, and they told us that China sells about a million guitars a year…’ So finally, we came to the conclusion that perhaps it was time for a big national platform, for young people to really get together and show their creative side in the form of a band.”

The winner of the Pepsi-sponsored contest gets a recording contract with a label created by Pepsi – which might sound pretty commercial and self-serving, and some critics of the contest have dismissed it as such. But at least it’s one way a local rock band can break onto the national scene and make some money touring. Jay Caplan is an independent music blogger, who’s been following the “Battle of the Bands.”:

CAPLAN: “There’s no way for bands to tour right now. Record sales aren’t even a real source of revenue, so having Indie labels behind you really does very little as a source of distribution and publicity. So whichever band wins, they’ll probably be one of the first rock bands to have a broad-based national audience in China.”

Caplan says these aren’t necessarily the best bands in China. But others, like the band Focus 5, are serious musicians – even if they say they’re willing to do what it takes to appeal to the masses.

The lead singer, Ye Xing Xuan, a lean guy with shaggy dyed red hair and black oblong glasses – has studied opera. He says it’s helped him in this competition.

Focus 5 is in the lead going into the last couple of weeks of the Battle of the Bands, but Sweet Journey is hard ON their heels. When I met them the day before the competition, they were in all in black and slumped on the couch. But they shed some of the attitude when they started talking about their music.

The drummer, Zheng Le, says the band got together because they liked the same music – Pink Floyd, Oasis, Radiohead. They started playing for fun, and soon began making a living at it. Zheng Le says for this competition “We’ve added a few mainstream elements so we can win – and then once we’ve hooked our audience, we’ll go back to doing what we really like.”

The competition itself is full of Pepsi promos, bubbly announcers, and a talking whale – the symbol of the local Zhejiang satellite station that’s sponsoring the competition. But the Battle of the Bands is also drawn some legends of Chinese rock’s short history.

At the top of that list is Cui Jian, who’s known as the “grandfather of Chinese rock” – even though he’s just 48. This past weekend, he ripped into his tune “Rock ‘n’ Roll on The New Long March.”

Songs like this made Cui Jian famous in the 1980s -one of his anthems was even taken up by the pro-democracy Tiananmen student demonstrators in 1989. That got him banned from giving public performances for most of the 1990s. That he was here, on a Pepsi-sponsored stage, on national television – could be seen as ironic. But it may say something about how he’s encouraged a new generation of serious musicians. Harry Hui says China’s popular music scene could use more of them, to break through what he calls China’s predominant “karaoke culture”:

HARRY HUI: “Song writing, and song writers, will say to you that the biggest hits they can write are the songs you can easily sing in karaoke. That means they tend to write simpler, melodic, easier to sing songs. Because when you sing a famous karaoke song, you feel like a star yourself, you love that song, you love that artist. But – I can’t imagine anyone trying to do Coldplay karaoke, or trying to do Elevation by U2.”

But Harry Hui says he’s impressed with the originality of the bands he’s seen here – and he says the aim of the competition was to find a new sound Pepsi can promote.

Which may be why he was smiling broadly last weekend in the judge’s booth, when he heard Sweet Journey’s Yuan Meng belt out this original song, and why he smiled again when this band won the latest round of competition. It didn’t seem to matter that most of the studio audience had wandered away by the time the band was handed its victory, and a glittering red, white and blue guitar. The cameras could compensate for that.

For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad, Shanghai.