I wanted to know what’s the deal with BJ Thug Life, and so recently I went to a metal show in Beijing with thirty-thousand Chinese stuffed down my pants. By which I mean the currency, not the people. Why I was carrying this brick of cash next to my penis is my own business, but what happened that night is everyone’s business.
Now, I want to be clear about something right from the start. I know nothing about metal. Everything I know about metal, I learned from Wikipedia or overheard in the bars of Oregon. And really, the only reason why I was there that night is because my brother wanted to see some metal, and BJ Thug Life is all I could find.
We were at Yugong Yishan. One of those really swanky really dingy joints, housed inside one of Beijing’s many historic walls. With the classic Chinese lion statue by the door and just a few feet from the gate of the mammoth and presumably ancient estate housed behind that wall. And the room was full of what appeared to be the Chinese version of nerdy seriously overweight ipad-obsessed auteurs, scrawny undergrads, and beefy jocks. (I did catch sight of one or two other actual honest-to-god foreigners. The one near us seemed to be genuinely-ironically getting down with the locals over some serious shredding in downtown Beijing, and the other one I only caught sight of for a moment in a long line of banging heads. He looked malnourished and prone to violence, a scrawny good old boy getting his kicks the only way he knows how, but I’m sure he was a very nice man.) And that sock full of cash was weighing down my crotch. And neither of us had any idea what BJ Thug Life really was or where this brotherhood of hoodlums could be found.
At the time I couldn’t have known of metal’s 25-year history on the mainland. As I said, I know nothing of metal. But all the same, what kid could have grown up in the suburbs of America, without at some point coming face to face with the renfair-costumed classical-music-inspired metal of the West? And often face to knee with one of its many fans, worshipers, adherents, acolytes, druid-kin, what have you? And their many Beevis and Butthead snickering heads?
However. That having been said. Allow me to share some of my recent schooling with you.
Tang Dynasty is the original metal band in Beijing. And like much of western Metal, their music also was hearkening back to an earlier time—although in their case it was an earlier time in Chinese history as opposed to something Medieval or Roman or what have you—and was more prog rock and art rock and more staid than the dramatic productions of its European and American compatriots. No eery freemason-like skull obsession here, but there was the lyrical poetry and musical arrangements reminiscent of ancient Chinese civilization, and specifically having to do with the Tang Dynasty. Hence the name.
Other important Chinese Metal acts include: Overload [the first Chinese Speed Metal and Thrash Metal band], Yaksa [the first Chinese Nu Metal band, with two notable albums, Freedom 《自由》 and Fa Fa Fa 《发发发》], and the folk metal Tengger Cavalry, which combines traditional Mongolian music with black metal. They consider their genre to be North Asian nomadic folk metal.
The headlining act of this evening’s show, Scar Constitution, has described itself as deathcore, which is a combination of death Metal and metalcore—which is itself is an amalgam of heavy metal and hardcore punk—and almost everyone was sporting a BJ Thug Life t-shirt from the show’s merch counter in the back—and the camaraderie between performers and audience was on par with small town book clubs and high school theatricals, wherein everyone’s just so happy everyone else exists. Not to mention that BJ Thug Life posters were everywhere. With kerchief-sporting skulls (okay, some freemason-like skull worship) and two semiotomatics crossed behind this aforementioned skull—and below it, in a baroque script, “BJ Thug Life”. My brother Jules thought maybe it was just the name of the event.
I think I should go back to the hotel room and change my underpants, I said then, and he just looked at me. I did not move, while the sound tech continued to tweak his soundboard just a few feet to our right as he eyed the performers with a knowing scowl.
Because even though I know nothing of metal, I have been to many shows, in Boston, New York, Oregon, and rural China, and I know what a soundboard is. I also, after listening to the drunken ramblings of a man who claimed to be well-versed in the ways of metal, have learned certain things regarding this dark musical art. Specifically, I have learned that metal has become riddled with subgenres, but then again even your average everyday mid-western housewife could very probably have told you that. She may even give you a little lecturing about metal’s many uses as a means of torture in Iraq. (After hearing their music was being used as a means of torture, the band Metallica asked the US government to stop using its music in this fashion. Despite lyrics such as “Die by my hand / I creep across the land”, it turns out the members of Metallica are in fact opposed to violence. However, the Christian metal band, Demon Hunter, had no qualms about their music being used, while the Industrial metal band, Skinny Puppy, sent the US Government an invoice after learning their music had been used at Guantanamo Bay.) But truly what are the many faces of metal?
According to Wikipedia, besides the general term, heavy metal, perhaps the next most common form of metal is thrash metal. Known for its aggressiveness and speed, thrash metal was originally made popular by the big four: Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax. It’s more aggressive than speed metal and came about largely in reaction to glam metal. Then there’s black metal, originally known as satanic metal, which has evolved into a kind of pagan metal that is popular in Northern Europe and Northwestern America. (More on this in a moment.) From black metal and thrash metal evolved death metal. And then the subgenres begin to proliferate like shred-happy dust bunnies: doom metal, nu metal, industrial metal, groove metal, viking metal, war metal, adventure metal, epic doom, funeral doom, drone metal, and so on. Not to mention the fusion genres, which include: death-doom, black-doom, sludge metal, stoner metal, blackened death metal, crossover thrash, deathgrind, goregrind, mathcore, and melodic metalcore. I’m sure I’m missing more than a few.
But like I said before, my own experience of metal has been rather limited. It consists of one doom metal show (or it might have been sludge metal) I left because it was too boring—as in one note plucked, followed eventually by another note—and this heavy, deep, and incomprehensible voice trying so hard to sound like the voice of Death while at the same exact time suffering from some serious constipation. Beside that, I went to one black metal show, after which I swore I would never go to another metal show ever again.
It was held in an arthouse movie theater in Oregon that had once been a funeral home. (The men’s room was located where the furnace once had been and it still had a lovely courtyard with a statue of the Virgin Mary in it. All in all, pretty horror show in its effect and very metal.) That evening had involved men dressed as druids playing tibetan bells while crawling around on all fours and handing out band-cured wild meat as the same exact riff was played over and over again from midnight till dawn. All of which did not exactly endear me to black metal or its larger metal god ancestry and what cthonic terror its meant to inspire.
Then it’s two years later, and I am on tour and in Olympia, WA, and hanging out in this house strewn in animal skulls adorned in intricate flower decorations and painted a dark brown and we are listening to this amazing track. It was recorded by one of the performers from that night in the funeral parlor cum arthouse, and it utilized a recording of frogs on a pond that he had then looped to create an eerie effect, and while smoking on the roof of that cottage, he introduced me to the French band, Gae Bolg, which has been an inspiration to me ever since, and he went on a tyrade about people burning churches and how much he’s not into that, how black metal may have started as anti-Christian and Satanic, but it has evolved into a pagan ritual-based metal that involves new and evolving kinds of worship.
Of course, the performance element has always been a big part of metal—from the light shows of the eighties, to bands like the aforementioned Skinny Puppies performing garish displays on stage with knives and dressed to look like Apocalypse-Now-era Martin Sheen has gone all John Kramer aka Jigsaw Killer—but what metal has become is one of the key underground and experimental musical forces at work, in the Pacific Northwest and throughout the world. Metal and hardcore often go hand-in-hand. Travel throughout Southeast Asia, and everywhere the music scene revolves around these two genres.
Thankfully, clown punk has yet to find a wider audience beyond the Pacific.
I was pretty wary for the entire twenty minutes it took the first band to soundcheck. But then came my favorite moment of the entire night. The members of Scar Constitution performed their first song, sans singer, and with all band members—except of course the drums—with backs turned to the audience. That moment moved me in ways the rest of the night would not. It was like Ratatat had come alive in the Far East.
Of course, after that, the lead singer took the stage and the screaming began. And the sign of the devil was constantly on display—both en masse in the audience, and at one point—a woman who I’m guessing was the girlfriend of the current band’s lead singer—got up on stage and angled herself against a wall as she repeatedly showcased the sign of the devil while simultaneously banging her head along to the music—head banging, sign of the devil, back to head banging, back to sign of devil—like this is a nervous tick she’s show-casing for the mental health community observing from the mosh pit below. There was one very straight-ahead dude in front of me who was constantly throwing up the sign for love while he rocked his head in a more gentle corporate fashion and had the most wide-open grin on his face. It was a grin that says this is the most exciting thing he’s done in a long time and he wishes he wasn’t even doing this exciting thing.
In a country that seems very unconcerned with the quest for authenticity, and in fact is often quite pleased with blatant fakes and knock-offs—I am thinking of the “petrified forest” I once went to where pieces of stone tree had been cemented together to give the illusion that this was a true “forest”, and specifically I am thinking of the differences between my reaction and those of my Chinese traveling companions—in this country where the line between fake and real is crossed daily and by much of the population, where fake diplomas, credentials, and falsified this and fabricated that, are such a common state of affairs—from the state media to the everyday workaday world—here was a group of people who were themselves questing for true and authentic metal, in the same manner as American tourists have been questing for the authentic local experience ever since we achieved superpower status.
As I believe I said before, this show was as much punk as metal, and even though we didn’t know that at the time, we knew. When the lead singer of Scar Constitution came on the stage we knew. This was that special brand of goofiness and unchecked rage that is what punk is all about. Of course metal can be pretty goofy as well. The whole Satan worship thing can really come off as pretty cheesy and silly. Like Jack Black worshipping Deo in the Pick of Destiny kind of cheesy. Which. Did I mention that the Chinese have no word or concept for cheesy? I have failed to explain this term on numerous occasions.
(Minor note. The pop music of China is riddled with cheese. Everyone everywhere is shouting out the hits with the emotional effervescence of pornstar-level hallmark hackery. Most notably this can be seen on the popular show, I am a Singer, in which seven pop stars battle to be the reigning king/queen by singing a song a week that is judged by an audience of everyday Xings and Wangs. the only singer I have come across that is truly a rock legend, who should be known worldwide, is the singer Wang Feng. He’s like a Chinese Bruce Springsteen, with a number of really wonderful songs. Most notably, Flying Higher 《飞得更高》 and Blossoming Life《怒放的生命》. Part of what makes him so wonderful is that he completely avoids the sea of cheese that surrounds him on all sides. The only other singer I can think of who has truly and completely escaped the cheese is the very weird Gong Lin Na, with her remarkable Mentally Disturbed 《忐忑》)
The song that stood out for me with Scar Constitution was Xin Lan (心蓝). The title of this song is literally Heart Blue, and the lead singer, in between flashing his winning smile at the audience, shouting his thanks and nodding vigorously, even as the sweat was flying off his gleaming forehead from all of his very harpy-like screaming, took it down a notch with Xin Lan. They were still screaming in this version of this their crowd favorite, but the tragedy of being a young thug in this seemingly so user-friendly totalitarian state really came through in this heartfelt metal ballad, even when you could barely make out what he’s saying. I had finally found what I’d been looking for.
I had been looking for the past nine years or so—ever since my return to China after my first trip there in ’92—muttering in the corner over how my precious China was becoming so American, but in the last year something changed. I came to believe, as I have no doubt our current administration also believes, that if China has any hope, it is precisely in this increasing “Americanness” of its urban population that the hope lies. The logic being that these new “Americanized” Chinese citizens will eventually demand the freedoms that America has, for themselves. Apparently this is also why Xi Jinping and his cronies in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party believe they are fighting for their life in the face of what they see as America’s very real and very possibly regime-toppling displays of soft power everywhere all the time, through Hollywood, shows such as Big Bang Theory, and metal. And also why you occasionally see editorial pieces descrying the secret undermining influence of American culture, like the recent and very popular, Nine Knockout Blows in America’s Cold War Against China, an article by Zhou Xiaoping in which he brought to light 9 “Knockout Blows” by which America is destroying Chinese culture via the Internet. “As an Internet user living on my country’s online territory, how could I not sense, how could I not know, when another country’s culture has invaded my country’s online territory?” Mr. Zhou wrote in an email about this essay recently. His article was widely distributed by state media.
But just then the brick in my shorts was slipping out of its perch in the “V” of my briefs and I had one hand jammed in my pocket in my effort to keep it in place—remarkable as it may sound, I actually do have some experience with socks full of money slipping out of my underwear and getting caught in the hem of my pants, specifically while crossing the border into Hong Kong several years before this story takes place. It has become something of a habit of mine to carry large amounts of money in my underwear while travelling in and around China.
So here I am, with my mind on my crotch in an anxious fashion as usual and standing in a room of converts to metal and all that it represents. And these converts are all thrashing their heads to the shredding guitar with arms raised in double Satan salutes and moshing in a whirlwind in the center of the room. And my ears are being torn apart one piece at a time. Then blessed silence as Scar Constitution finished their set and the next band began to set up.
But first, I want to point out one last thing about Scar Constitution.
Some years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a Japanese band, called Maximum the Hormone, which is a total genre-bender, going from rap, to pop, to metal, then back to rap—which is apparently nu metal—and not to be confused with the equally bizarre (also Japanese) Babymetal, in which cute Japanese girls scream about, for example, Gimme Chocolate, over thrashing guitars. But I digress.
What I was about to say is that Chinese music, similarly knows no genre boundaries. There is an ancient saying that China is like a tripod-kettle that cannot stand if it’s missing even one leg—meaning the legs of Taoism, Confucionism, and Buddhism—and in China there has often been this blending of ideologies, making it very normal and natural to have “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, meaning a state that is politically communist but economically capitalist, which is really just a fascist state with a capitalist economy. But it is also very normal and natural for artists to slip from one genre to another as I said before, and when listening to Scar Constitution’s recorded songs, all of this is very clear, especially with Blue Heart 《心蓝》.
Honestly, the rest of the night was downhill from there. The lead singers of the next two bands—whose names I’m not sure of; there were many more names of bands than there were actual bands—something like Fengtian or Army of Jade Kirin or Liquid Oxygen—the vibe with these bands was more forced and more obnoxiously in your face. The second band was led by a muscular guy in a denim vest and baseball cap turned backwards, which gave it a real chode metal feel. And the lead singer of the band after that was more austere and also bald. Neither of them was memorable.
The only other memorable moment was at the end of the night when a bunch of heavyset rappers got up on stage and started throwing down over some serious shredding. Turns out the illusive BJ Thug Life is a rap-metal fusion that just came out for a couple songs after all the designer headphones had all been given out and the crowd had begun their exodus. At least one of the men in the picture that began this essay was there, but I was already off to the bathroom to readujust my sock of bills by the urinal in the corner one last time before heading out. I only ended up catching two short songs before the night was being shut down and we were all moseying on outside where many of the acts we’d seen onstage earlier were bumming smokes and playing the parts of the living legends they believed themselves to be.
Of course I’ll never forget my younger brother diving into the mosh pit and going round and round the whirlpool of banging bodies, eventually getting roped into a line of banging heads, and when it was all said and done, standing around with some kid who wanted to talk about America, but didn’t have the words to say it. Standing there watching the two of them smiling and nodding heads back and forth in mutual appreciation.
“This is like a real-life war,” Zhou Xiaoping has said. “I doubt that when Americans were fighting the Civil War, ordinary citizens on both sides didn’t know or couldn’t sense what kind of weapons or tactics were being used by the other side.” In short, the fate of Chinese civilization hangs in the balance, and bands like Scar Constitution are doing their part to tear it down. How metal is that.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
