One of our favorite bands gets tonight's Outro spotlight. We haven't had the chance to see them since lead singer Helen Feng left in 2010, but they're still around. And zany. Check this.
Hello Beijing Cream readers. My name is Josh and I work at this other website called Smart Beijing, where I write tl;dr music articles on a weekly basis. The Tao is outsourcing these Friday Musical Outros to my comrade Morgan, but he's doing some other shit right now. So you're stuck with me.
Here's a taste of this Saturday's show by Shanghai's Friend or Foe. This video was shot by homegrown, straightforwardly-named blog/burgeoning media empire Live Beijing Music.
This was the song that Cui Jian performed in Tiananmen Square 15 days before the military crackdown of June 1989. As he told Time in 1999: "I sang A Piece of Red Cloth, a tune about alienation. I covered my eyes with a red cloth to symbolize my feelings. The students were heroes. They needed me, and I needed them."
Liao Yiwu was a fledging poet without a formal education, a hot-tempered philanderer prone to fights, a dreamer who actively despised politics -- until the early hours of June 4, 1989, when, from the living room of his home in the river town of Fuling, he listened with Canadian Michael Day to shortwave radio reports of Chinese troops opening fire on students around Tiananmen Square. "The bloody crackdown in Beijing was a turning point in history and also in my own life," he writes in his prison memoir For a Song and a Hundred Songs...
If you haven't already, watch The Gate of Heavenly Peace, directed by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, with writing by Geremie Barmé and John Crowley. The three-hour documentary was released in 1995 to rave reviews -- "the atmosphere of the Beijing Spring is conveyed beautifully in all its pathos, drama, hope, craziness, poetry, and violence," wrote Ian Buruma; "a hard-headed critical analysis of a youthful protest movement that failed," wrote The New York Times -- and remains the best film ever made about the June Fourth Incident, neither gorifying the student leaders nor incriminating the Communist Party, but explaining how a peaceful democracy movement could possibly have resulted in martial law and Chinese troops opening fire on their own citizens.
If you haven't seen it already, check out Matt Sheehan and Matt Allen's "We Livin in Xi'an," sung to the tune of tonight's outro. We'll meet again soon.
Happy Friday night, Internet goons - here's a little something for you to watch and listen to while you're lacing up your shit-kickers for a night on the town. This week, I'm using this space to plug a friend and colleague's project because, hey, it's credible on its own. My conscience is clear. This isn't Pepsi Cola or H&M or some shit.
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