Beijing’s underground music scene has been DIY by default for most of its history. From the first rumblings of a rock scene in the late ‘80s until relatively recently, underground music in China’s capital has thrived in a gray area of benign neglect: So long as bands don’t touch red lines like politics, they’ve been able to carve a cultural niche well outside the mainstream.
Over the last few years, however, Beijing’s fertile underground scene has broken out to wider audiences thanks to successful reality shows like The Big Band, which launched in 2019. Competing in a battle-of-the-bands format, groups who’d slogged through the underground for years were suddenly getting streams in the tens of millions, lucrative international sponsorship deals, and arena bookings. In parallel, the handful of small indie labels that shaped the Beijing scene in the early 2000s have largely been bought up by bigger players and rolled into a cultural oligopoly. Where there were many, there are now basically two: Modern Sky, a label and festival juggernaut, and Taihe Music Group, a legacy brand that has absorbed smaller taste-making indies like Beijing’s Maybe Mars.
The net result over the last several years has been more money for a small subset of artists to capitalize upon, shrinking opportunities for everyone else, and the steady erosion of a patchwork DIY network of labels, venues, and bands as the underground music scene becomes increasingly commodified.
Spitting in the face of this trend is 小王 (Xiaowang), a proudly unsigned band that keeps the embers of Beijing DIY smoldering.
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Xiaowang’s singer, Yuetu, originally hails from Dehong, Yunnan province, a small prefecture near the China-Myanmar border. A member of the Lisu minority, she first got into music while studying architecture in Chengdu, the nearest megacity and cultural hub. She remembers being especially intrigued by the spare post-punk of Snapline, the noisy indie pop of Hedgehog, and the frantic stage energy of Queen Sea Big Shark, whose singer Fu Han planted a seed of possibility early in Yuetu’s show-going career. “That was the first time I saw a female singer on stage super being herself… It shocked me the first time I saw them playing Chengdu,” Yuetu recalls.
After graduating in 2014, music pulled Yuetu to Beijing, where all of these bands were based. She dove in, becoming a regular at a handful of underground music venues: Old What near the Forbidden City, beer-soaked rock dive Temple, punk haven School, and mid-sized stalwart Yugong Yishan, among others. But she soon realized she’d arrived at the beginning of the end of an era: Within five years, all of those venues but School would close. “When I came to Beijing, it was like buildings falling apart,” she reflects. “[Xiaowang] were born in that time.”
Xiaowang began informally, without a name or fixed lineup, in 2016. Yuetu “started from zero,” picking up the bass. By 2018, the band had a name and Yuetu had assumed the mantle of lead vocalist. They started out playing mid-week shows at Temple and School, quickly attracting a following for their combustible mix of punk, hardcore, and kawaii pop. Though totally self-taught, Yuetu was influenced by the simple, direct lyricism of hardcore and the blunt intimacy of Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, whose lyrics “made me feel like it can be simple and personal and also very strong, and it can even link with people like me, a country girl,” Yuetu says.
Xiaowang “grew up together” with Yuetu’s realization of her feminist identity. Though she received support from the venues and bands she looked up to, she also became increasingly frustrated by the misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia endemic to Beijing’s overwhelmingly male-dominated punk scene.
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As Yuetu became more vocal about gender equality, she experienced indifference at best, and verbal slander at worst; even from would-be allies like the old-guard punk bands, who, despite favoring left-wing concepts like anarchism, showed no interest in gender issues. After a series of incidents where the band was unfairly tagged as being anti-male, subjected to verbal abuse, and met with blank stares after attempting a dialogue about gender equity in the scene, Yuetu says, “I felt, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I should save my energy to create something. I don’t want to waste my energy going against something. My point is not against you. My point is to create something new.”
To this end, in 2020 members of Xiaowang and like-minded fellow travelers Wasted Laika and Sincerely Yours, Sergei opened a small bar called Blinding Elephant (盲区北京). Yuetu quit her job at an architecture studio to focus on the bar and the band full time, quickly attracting a crowd of regulars similarly hungry for a space where taboo topics like feminism and LGBT issues could be openly discussed. The Chinese name of the venue translates to “blind spot.” “It’s the scenery outside the field of vision,” Yuetu explains. “This is exactly the world we want to see.”
Blinding Elephant has survived and evolved despite opening near the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to successive and severely restrictive waves of lockdowns in Beijing, and also experiencing constant pushback from neighbors in its original location in Beijing’s gentrifying inner-city hutong. It now has a small stage and a dedicated base, glued together by a resilient DIY ethos.
Both bar and band have experienced economic challenges. As some of the bands Yuetu moved to Beijing for, like Hedgehog, became arena-touring stars on the back of The Big Band, opportunities for newer bands like Xiaowang dried up. China’s strict travel restrictions during the pandemic dovetailed with the peak of the reality show’s success, creating soaring demand for local festivals and local bands—but only those who’d achieved name recognition through the program. One prominent festival promoter in Beijing estimates that 30 or so bands have reaped the benefits of the mainstreaming of previously underground genres, with the vast majority of festival budgets going to their fees, and the other 10% split between all other costs, including openers. Third- and fourth-tier cities hoping to cash in on the trend have rushed to host large-scale music festivals bankrolled by real estate developers, creating more big-money opportunities for an elite tier of bands—most of whom have been around for decades—and forcing the smaller bars and venues that incubated these bands to shutter.
Initially critical of the groups who decided to appear on The Big Band, Yuetu also acknowledges that prior to its existence, many of the musicians were living in Beijing as starving artists. “My question changed to, ‘Why does this environment make everyone want to do that? What’s wrong with the system?’”
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She knows it’s a quixotic quest, but Yuetu is fiercely dedicated to keeping DIY alive in Beijing. Xiaowang has been approached by some of the labels Yuetu admired as a student in Chengdu, but has refused to sign as these labels have since been hoovered up into larger conglomerates and have adopted an assembly line approach to their output at the expense of nurturing young talent.
Last year, Xiaowang self-released their debut album, KACHAKACHA, following a crowdfunding effort that raised ¥70,000 RMB (about $10,000 USD). Recorded at a remote Daoist temple turned venue/studio, KACHAKACHA, just reissued by Damnably for international ears, is a time capsule of Xiaowang’s explosive incipient phase. Uptempo tracks like the first two, “SonicBaby” and “Stasii (史塔西),” capture something of the band’s raucous live energy and Yuetu’s visceral growl, while other standouts like “Steal (偷心牛仔棒棒糖)” showcase the band’s softer, cuter side.
Maintaining independence is an uphill slog, but Yuetu is encouraged by a loose network of artists and labels around China who share her DIY impulse and are tackling similar social topics. These include Qiii Snacks, DIY indie pop stalwarts in Guangzhou; Xi’an’s Fake Orgasm and their fearless frontwoman VV; and all-women street punk band Dummy Toys from Qingdao on the Eastern coast. In her adopted home of Beijing, Yuetu has established a community with young, woman-led bands that formed around the same time as Xiaowang, such as Pizza Face and Acid Accident.
Yuetu also looks back to some forerunners for continued inspiration, such as long-running Beijing trio SUBS, another punk band with a strong female lead in singer Kang Mao and a staunch DIY-or-die ethic. “One reason I like her is because she’s already been playing in the music scene for so many years, but she’s still doing things,” Yuetu says of Kang Mao. “Especially as she gets older, I feel how great what she did—or what she’s doing—is. She gives me a lot of energy.”
KACHAKACHA was well received in China, and is poised to earn Xiaowang a host of new fans as it does the international rounds. The band plans to record a follow-up this year or next, and tour internationally now that the Covid-era travel restrictions to and from China have expired. Beyond that, Yuetu avows, they want to keep their dreams small and hyper-focused so they can continue to do everything themselves. “Our biggest hope about the band is that we don’t spend too much [money] in the end,” she laughs. “That’s what we want. The aim is not big, so we can finish it. We have a little dream, so it’s a possibility we can finish.”
