Red Song King Hao Di (Good Brother) sings "Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China" (traditional recording), "The Words of Chairman Mao are Memorized by Heart” (info and lyrics), "Lake Water". [more inside]
posted by griphus on Sep 24, 2011 - 25 comments

Songs by Lady Gaga, Beyonce and Katy Perry are among those newly banned by China's culture ministry. Chinese Internet sites must remove them by 15 September in the interests of "national cultural security". Last May China banned a Mongolian protest song and arrested the student who made it, while Tibetan singer Tashi Dhondup was sentanced to one year and seven months’ imprisonment for producing a music album with “subversive songs”. Funnily enough, they also banned 'Guns'n'Roses' long awaited Chinese Democracy. No word yet on China Crisis.
posted by joannemullen on Aug 24, 2011 - 35 comments

Star-crossed lovers are of course a trope as old as storytelling itself, but Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, the Butterfly Lovers of Chinese mythology may be new to many. Also encompassing tropes such as Sweet Polly Oliver, the legend tells of the tragic love between two students in the Jin dynasty, one a girl disguised as a boy so she could attend school. [more inside]
posted by kmz on Jan 24, 2011 - 5 comments

"Pianist Liu Wei sits quietly to compose himself before plunging into the music. Then he takes off a sock. The 23-year-old, whose arms were amputated after a childhood accident, plays the piano with his toes."
posted by gman on Aug 27, 2010 - 16 comments

Beat It, as performed by the (Chinese) Red Army Orchestra . Or maybe you would prefer 4 Minutes, or a little bit of context.
posted by haltingproblemsolved on Aug 15, 2010 - 11 comments

The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. You may know them from such projects as How to build a fake Google Street View car, public domain donor stickers, internet famous class, the first rap video to end with a download source code link, or their numerous firefox add-ons (such as China Channel, Tourettes Machine, or Back to the future). FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including Graffiti Analysis, Laser Tag, Fat Tag Deluxe and EyeWriter [previously] to be GML (Graffiti Markup Language) compliant. Fuck Google. Fuck Twitter. FuckFlickr. Fuck SXSW. Fuck 3D. FAT Lab is Kanye shades for the open source movement.
posted by finite on Mar 13, 2010 - 8 comments

As is well known by now, the opening spectacle of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing featured a young girl's performance of Ode to the Motherland which was later revealed to be a lip-synch. The talented original singer Yang Peiyi was considered not "cute" enough. As is perhaps not so well known, however, the resultant flap resulted in the creation of a strict anti-lip-synch law in China, and now two Chinese pop stars face a $12,000 lip-synching fine. Some Chinese rockers have eagerly supported the creation of the ban on lip-synch, and, interestingly, the practice of lip-synching in Chinese musical entertainment had been under discussion in Chinese government circles since at least 2005.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Jan 23, 2010 - 40 comments

Beijing's underground: "Five years ago, none of my students at Tsinghua or Beida had any interest in what we would call countercultural stuff," says Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Beida's -- that is, Peking University's -- Guanghua School of Management who owns D-22 and the Maybe Mars label. Today Mr. Pettis estimates that a quarter of his students have been to rock clubs and maybe 5% to 10% "are really knowledgeable and sophisticated."
posted by kliuless on Jul 26, 2009 - 27 comments

"The Musical Cliché Figure Signifying The Far East", a.k.a. The Oriental Riff
posted by Joe Beese on Jun 7, 2009 - 39 comments

Erhu: Water of Rivers (江河水) [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on Dec 29, 2008 - 7 comments

Pronounced "chin" ("stringed instrument") or "goo chin" ("old stringed instrument"), the qin / guqin throughout its long history has been the musical instrument most prized by China's literati. They categorized it as one of their "four arts", collected it as an art object, praised its beautiful music, and built around it a complex ideology (compare its image in popular culture). No other instrument was described and illustrated in such detail, so often depicted in paintings, or so regularly mentioned in poetry. And its tablature documents the world's oldest detailed written instrumental music tradition, allowing both historically informed performance (requiring silk strings) of the many early melodies, and practical exploration of the relationship between Chinese music theory and music practice. The guqin silk string zither work of John Thompson. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Dec 14, 2008 - 7 comments

"‘Bad boy’ Cui Jian, [pronounced Sway Jen] China’s first long-haired rock icon, has pulled off another musical coup by becoming the first artist to adapt hip-hop to the mainland. His hoarse voice has long signified anger, confusion and pain, especially during the 1989 student revolt when his hit single, “Nothing to my Name”, became a veritable anthem. Despite the government’s attempts to silence his voice by routinely banning his concerts, Cui Jian carries on with the rapper’s staccato precision." EAST vs WEST – Hyper and Cui Jian collaboration, a Hyper remix of an original Cui Jian piece - with great Chinese papercut visuals. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Nov 10, 2008 - 19 comments

The future of classical music lies in China. Chinese enthusiasm for Western classical music is deep, says New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, but traditional Chinese music is older and more classical than anything in the West.
posted by plexi on Jul 22, 2008 - 30 comments

Apa Tani bleeding tubes filmed by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and Paro, Bhutan in 1936 from Frederick Williamson, are just two of the extraordinary offerings from the Digital Himalaya Project.
posted by tellurian on Apr 3, 2008 - 8 comments

Björk, in Shanghai, on Tibet: Declare Independence! [YouTube] [more inside]
posted by finite on Mar 6, 2008 - 80 comments

One of the songs on the Golden Record included on the two Voyager spacecraft was Flowing Water performed by Guan Pinghu on the guqin. The guqin, Confucius' favorite instrument, has been played in China for at least 3000 years. There's a lot of guqin videos out there but the two players I listen to the most are jts1702a and Charlie Huang (who is the main contributer to Wikipedia's excellent guqin article).
posted by Kattullus on Feb 10, 2008 - 16 comments

John Adams. NIXON IN CHINA. Excerpts: News has a kind of mystery. Act 1 Scene 3. Act 2 Scene 2a. I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung. Chairman Dances.
posted by wittgenstein on Jan 4, 2008 - 16 comments

Fueled by Rice - Five recent grads from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's Unviersity recently set off from Beijing to bike across Asia and Europe. The goal of their bike trip is to spread international good will on the local level and advocate reducing carbon emissions and living slower-paced, more enjoyable lives. Along the way they will bike through rural areas and play music in villages. As they travel, the group is posting photos, a blog, and will attempt to get a podcast up and running. They've even got the site up in Chinese, though the site seems to be blocked for most folks in China.
posted by pithy comment on Sep 17, 2007 - 11 comments

With My Special Partner, I can drink my way back to the 7th Millenium BCE for ancient music, and the fish’ll tell me how to get home.
posted by dfowler on Apr 13, 2005 - 13 comments

"Indeed, so rare and precious are the fruits of [the music industry's] labor that it, unique among the world's enterprises, deserves to have the rules of decent civil behavior suspended." Illegal (even by Taiwan's laws) search-and-seizure of university students' computers. 14 students will be made an example of and 'prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law'... for mp3s. In East Asia, where apparently the record companies have no one better to pick on than college students. *cough*
posted by darukaru on Apr 16, 2001 - 8 comments