Modern Sky Festival and its Crowd

Amid the effusion of praise that I have lavished on China's rock scene, I must admit that the Modern Sky Festival fell well short of my expectations.

Granted, my observation was not truly representative, since I was to attend only one of three days of the festival (I reserved tomorrow for hiking and for the rest of the week, I would be in HK), which featured dozens of artists performing at different time slots over those days. Nevertheless, I found my patience running out as I went from stage to stage, only to find artists who severely lacked the kind of punch and energy which one would typically expect from a rock festival, and a lukewarm audience whose apathy seemed to feed right back to the subconsciousness of the artists.

To be sure, there were exceptions to the case. At the stage for new bands, an enthusiastic audience clamored for more after No Name completed their set with a Sum 41-like, whirlwind locomotion infused with well-known Chinese elements. Enthusiastic audience members would also climb over each other and wave their limbs in an absolutely gorgeous, blue-sky day in Haidian Park. At the electric/techno stage, a few ebullient souls showed off their acrobatic dance moves neither caution nor compulsion. There was also the flag-waving, body-thumping, beer-splashing crowd in front of the main stage, a scene reminiscent of Woodstock. Those aside, however, I couldn't help but recognize a wall of expressionless folks, who looked either too tired, too stoned, or just plain too indifferent to physically react to the music. Not even the head nod...not even the lap tap...are we all becoming the disengaged philosopher whose relationship with live music is strictly analytical? Most of the time I just felt that people were just standing there in front of the stage, as if waiting to board an imaginary subway train.

Perhaps it was just me, but while it seems that the organizers did a great job by putting slightly different music on different stages to cater to each and everyone at any given time, the heavy metal on one stage seemed to drown out, for example, Sandee Chen's melancholic, twitter-like ballade on another. Was there not enough insulation mechanism to at least compartmentalize the sound a little better? Of course, nobody would be serious enough to demand concert hall acoustics at a rock festival, but when it got to the point where the sound from another stage became a distraction, the feeling of liveliness and spontaneity instantly became a nuisance.

Would I go back? Sure...only to prove myself wrong. The crowd was perhaps merely recovering of a full day of partying on National Day, but I am sure music fans, and a lot of them, could do better not merely by showing up physically but by being more engaged in circulating (and amplifying) energy to and from the artists --something which I find to be the unique hallmark of live rock music. But I would give the benefit of the doubt, until next time.

Jacky Cheung World Tour '07

It seems ironic that I would go to a canto-pop concert in Beijing, and even more ironic, as my mom would put it, that I would go to a canto-pop concert at all. It is true that my interest in canto-pop has been lukewarm over the years, and that my only real claim to (any) connection with canto-pop was a stint as a member of a drumming consortium that once backed up The Winners (are they really canto-pop?) and a gig as a percussionist at a Hacken Lee concert. Otherwise, you won't see any canto-pop CDs on my rack or see me humming to a canto-pop track.

That said, I wouldn't say I was not fascinated by canto-pop's rise as a major force in Greater China's music scene. Jacky Cheung's music, for starters, transcends any geopolitical barrier by making the hit list at every metropolitan area where Chinese congregates: there used to be a saying that in some communities in and near Vancouver and Toronto, one would hear Jacky Cheung on radio more often than Madonna+Backstreet Boys+Bruce Springsteen+Westlife+(fill in with your favorite non-Asian artists) combined. Beijing folks can sing Jacky's Cantonese songs even though they have little idea whether they are hitting the right 白话 pronunciation, while folks in Hong Kong can lip sync to any of Jacky's Mandarin songs before Mandarin was even considered an indispensable linguistic asset in what was then an English-speaking British colony.

But Jacky today was not the Jacky who won the singing contest that made him famous 23 years ago. His voice is still brilliant by most standards. Yet, it also seems to show its age, as it no longer carries the level of high-octane punch that was the hallmark of his old voice. I also counted at least two occasions where some of his high notes cracked, only to be mercifully drowned out by an dutiful band behind him. As perhaps canto-pop's most consistently successful superhero, he nevertheless represents a star fading into a more contemplative, reflective phase of his career. That said, the concert was supremely organized (other than transportation to and from Feng Tai Stadium, of which, alas, there was none), the stage well-designed, the acoustics quite adequate, and the dancing numbers quite well choreographed. Jacky is the kind of performer that requires neither exquisite dance arrangements nor scantily-clad models/dancers gyrating around him --both of which seem to be the norm today for any Asian male star trying to make it in the Asian music scene. Instead, it seems to me that Jacky naturally, and only relies on emotional appeal and a face of human ingenuity (whether feigned or real) to connect to his audience, and I must say he was very good at those last night.

Perhaps to no importance to most, during the concert I did yell out "got maid?" as an ironic vituperation of his off-stage antics as a sub-par employer, although I doubt anyone who heard that -- he most certainly could not, given the level of noise in the stadium and the position of my nose-bleed seat -- had any inkling of what I meant.