Fifteen Years of Rock and Roll With a Band Called Top Floor Circus | 100 People With Ideas
They wrote songs in Shanghainese, stripped naked on stage, and opposed punk in the manner of punk itself — in short, the more disreputable the better. But now it's time to sigh about getting old.
They wrote songs in Shanghainese, stripped naked on stage, and opposed punk in the manner of punk itself — in short, the more disreputable the better. But now it's time to sigh about getting old.
"Is Boss Lu going to strip today—" someone in the audience shouted.
"Lu Chen hasn't stripped in ages." A guy in the front row turned around and complained to his friend, half serious, half joking.
Ever since Top Floor Circus (hereafter "TFC") remade itself into a twee band, lead singer Lu Chen has almost never taken his clothes off on stage again.
They did plenty of that sort of thing in the early years. The band formed in 2001 in a shikumen lane in Shanghai, and outrageous stage antics — playing in pajamas, handing out awards from a toilet bowl, going fully nude — quickly won TFC a foothold in China's rock scene.
As a dialect band, their lyrics drew just as much attention: on one side a strong Shanghai consciousness and a strong Shanghai character, on the other a parodist's urge to subvert the city's petit-bourgeois style.
They wrote a song called Shanghai Welcomes You (《上海欢迎你》), for instance:
"The prettiest girls in the country walk Huaihai Road / Shanghai welcomes you / Welcome, come and shop / Just remember to bring your RMB / Shanghai welcomes you / What's so great about the Olympics…"
They also wrote one called Shanghai Doesn't Welcome You (《上海不欢迎你》):
"Shanghai doesn't welcome outsiders / it doesn't welcome Shanghainese either / Shanghai welcomes only one kind of person / the kind with cash / Shanghai doesn't welcome you / unless you're here to shop… The World Expo is really something / rich people from all over the world come here to get hard… Better City, Better Life / as long as you've got the cash…"
This was also a band that tired of the old and chased the new to the point of absurdity. In 15 years since their debut they'd played punk that involved dropping their trousers on stage, and also experimental music, folk, and rustic country ballads; a few years ago, in a decidedly un-twee way, they went twee — modeled, it's said, on Sodagreen and Cheer Chen — with tracks like Old Twee (《老清新》), I'm Going to the Spa, You Go Die (《我去 spa 你去死吧》), and A Free Ad Jingle for Haodada Fried Chicken Cutlets (《义务为豪大大鸡排所作个广告歌》).
In Lu Chen's words: "Men are just like that (they tire of the old and want the new). I can't speak for the whole band, but that's how I am — I don't like things I've already used, I like things I haven't tried."
In 2006, TFC made an album, Timmy Revisits No. 93 Lingling Road (《蒂米重访零陵路 93 号》), made up entirely of songs in Shanghainese. A second and a third followed, and singing in Shanghainese gradually became TFC's most recognizable trait — the one thing they haven't discarded over the years.
As an amateur band, its members have come and gone over 15 years; 13 people have passed through it. "Amateur" means most of them don't make their living from music.
Two of the band's three founders are still in it. Lead singer Lu Chen is a civil servant at customs. Bassist Mei Er used to work at a TV station and now directs for an internet video company, which has the advantage of not requiring him to clock in — his time is freer. But as he says, that was an ordinary career move, essentially unrelated to playing in a band. Music is a hobby.
It isn't hard to imagine how excited music critics and the media would get about a customs officer who goes on stage dressed as Astro Boy in nothing but a pair of boxer swim trunks and red soccer socks, picking his nose, spitting and farting.
As for the audience, they loved him to death, for reasons unclear.
It Was Too Painful — Every Show Was at an Art Museum
The last time I saw Mei Er was at a TED conference a few years ago. Wearing his usual baseball cap, he was about to share a piece of TFC's music in a lecture hall at a Shanghai university, and before playing it he asked the audience, half-conspiratorially: None of the school leaders are here today, are they? Can the leaders even understand Shanghainese?
The worry wasn't misplaced. TFC's early shows, in Mei Er's words, were the state of a psychiatric patient from beginning to end. "Looking back at the past, looking back at myself, it's all a blur."
That day he played Instant Noodles (《方便面》), a song about eating a bowl of instant noodles, passing it, and eating it again; it also touches on female college students doing compensated dating. When they performed it at a university once, a female student grabbed a handful of chalk stubs and threw them at the band.
That wasn't quite what Mei Er had expected. "People ask why I started a band. When you're young you talk big, of course — you say it's for your ideals, to save humanity, that sort of thing. But late at night, if you ask yourself honestly, it's definitely to chase girls." When they found they couldn't get girls that way, their sense of responsibility told them there was nothing for it but to make something that would change the world — "something like Bob Dylan."
To change the world, the first step was to change rock music. A normal band is guitar plus bass plus drums; some TFC songs use only a guitar, some only a drum, some are all bass.
A way of playing that resembled nobody else's caught the critics' eye at once. "Critics love novelty, and that's how we came to be liked by every critic there was." But they soon felt something was wrong. "It was too pretentious. Every show, the people standing down front were those critics, arms folded, cigarettes in their mouths, watching you with blank faces." That wasn't what they wanted, bassist Mei Er said.
This was TFC's first attempt at change. They took the Duchamp route — the man who moved a urinal into an art museum and used anti-art to tell artists to get lost. Out of that came their second album, The Basest Petty-Bourgeois Taste (《最低级的小市民趣味》), which mocked art and artists for all it was worth.
Unfortunately, the artists liked them even more.
"It was too painful — every show was at an art museum." What Mei Er liked was rowdier, hotter-blooded music: a crowd headbanging, forming circles, slamming into one another with the music, the atmosphere of a pogo (jumping in place).
Unfortunately, this was also when they saw a GG Allin performance. The most famous thing that guy ever did was to defecate on stage, smear it over himself, and charge into the audience to beat people up.
"Our reaction at the time was, oh, God has arrived." They were floored: "This is punk!" TFC went on to copy what GG Allin did down to the details, except for the defecating, which they couldn't manage — nothing would come out on stage.
Mei Er shared a clip of one of their shows, the very one in which the lead singer stripped naked and tried to defecate. Someone in the audience called the police afterward, but China's police were a disappointment: "They were too slow. By the time they showed up we'd already finished the set."
Just then Lu Chen's lewd voice came up in the video, and Mei Er stopped talking, as if listening to Lu Chen belting out "punks are all sissies." He said nothing for a few seconds, his eyes vague.
They played punk, and they cursed punk too. What they wanted then was to break everything.
On the band's tenth anniversary they called themselves "laoluan," and what they meant was that they really had gotten old.
Their run at punk turned TFC into rock stars. "As a bassist, I could finally get girls — imagine how successful we were?" Mei Er said, laughing at himself. "But we were already getting a bit bored of doing that stuff."
Looking back on that stretch, Lu Chen labeled it flatly: attention-seeking. "At the time we just wanted people to see us, wanted to be famous, wanted the spotlight. Of course, that's still true now."
But he doesn't take his clothes off anymore?
"Uh, right, because it wouldn't get us any attention now. Nobody would care."
Over the next three years TFC hit a wall. "All kinds of rehearsing, all kinds of thinking, but nothing came out." Having broken everything, TFC had no idea how to subvert itself again.
In 2010, TFC made their fourth record, Thirteen Classic Shanghai Pop-Rock Hits (《上海经典流行摇滚金曲十三首》). The title alone tells you they were after something extremely tacky, tacky beyond belief. That was the new way out they had found.
It was also the second album they made entirely in Shanghainese, and the practice stuck from then on.
"Shanghainese is petty and tacky, and it fits our temperament exactly," Mei Er explained. "Shanghainese didn't used to be like that, but now you'll find there are only two kinds of Shanghainese-language programs on TV: mediation shows and food shows. So we felt Shanghainese could stand for that tacky quality."
Born and raised in Shanghai, they have complicated feelings about the city.
"It's like a girl — sometimes you love her a lot, sometimes you're a little sick of her," is how Lu Chen described it. "The love is definitely bone-deep. The resentment is more like wishing she'd live up to what she could be. I hope Shanghai can get a bit warmer, a bit more fun, a bit more interesting."
He wrote that love and that disappointment into songs like I Love Migrant Girls (《我爱外来妹》) and Shenhua, Oh Shenhua (《申花啊，申花》).
Shanghai Childhood (《上海童年》) is their most-played song; its music video has been watched more than 150,000 times on Tudou.
Music video for Shanghai Childhood
Mei Er says it's the best song they've ever written. It is about the childhood of an entire generation, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The many old photographs used in the video were collected from users on Douban.
By then a full ten years had passed since the band formed. From nonsensical experimental music to punk shows meant to smash everything, TFC had finally come back to calm.
For TFC, change became a habit. "But every change brings the same complaint — a lot of fans say you've gotten old, you've changed, you're traitors." Mei Er's face gave nothing away. "Think back to the 1980s: there was a fan who couldn't accept John Lennon's transformation and shot him dead right outside his own front door." (Note: the reasons behind John Lennon's shooting remain disputed.)
"Probably because guns are illegal in China, we're still alive," he said at his own expense.
They keep discarding their old style, their old selves, their old fans, and new fans keep arriving. Mei Er thinks this discarding is "a good thing."
For the tenth anniversary they made a line of merchandise, and a T-shirt printed with "laoluan" sold especially well. Some people probably didn't even know that the small line of text on the back, "Top Floor Circus," was the name of a band, and wore the shirt anyway.
In Shanghainese, "laoluan" means roughly what Beijingers mean by "niubi" (badass); there's a bit of local pride in it.
When TFC call themselves laoluan, they don't mean badass. They mean they really feel old.
These days they have started singing slow songs. Mei Er has a child in second grade who doesn't like slow songs. "He likes lively songs; noisy songs strike him as great. He doesn't understand the slow ones, thinks there's nothing to them."
The rock market is getting better, and they have a manager now.
On Douban, TFC's label is listed as Mule Records. It isn't a company, though — it's a name.
"In 2001, when we put out our first record, EP, we thought everyone else had a company — Pocket Music, Modern Sky — so we'd set up our own shell company too!" A mule ranks a notch below a horse, so they called it Mule Records.
TFC is still an independent band, but for the past couple of years they have had a manager.
"We met him in 2013 and just asked him to handle things. There are more music festivals now, and doing it ourselves got exhausting." At their busiest, TFC once played four shows in a single week, flying between Beijing, Tianjin, Kunming and Chengdu.
Mei Er and manager Zhang Mohan often hang out, which mostly means eating together. Besides TFC, Zhang looks after four or five other bands, including Bread of Life, Island Mood and Mushroom Group. "TFC isn't like most bands — it's very casual. They don't do this for a living, so they play when they feel like it and don't when they don't. I think that's the best state to be in."
Most of TFC's material comes out of street life. Walking down Taikang Road in Shanghai one night, Lu Chen ran into a drunk full of grand talk, went home and wrote Be a Man (《是男人》):
"If you're a man / down it in one / If you're a man / order ten more bottles / If you're a man / don't talk about going home…"
— from the lyrics to the delivery, exactly the kind of nonsense that spills out at a drinking table.
"Playing rock in China, you can't let yourself get too tangled up, can't let yourself get too tired. The market has gotten better, but not that much better." What manager Zhang Mohan means by better shows up in income that has multiplied several times over. "I think they deserve it. Rock music has been in China for so many years; everyone put in the effort, put in the work, and only now is anyone starting to make money. I already think that's late. Way too late."
By Zhang's account, the band's income comes mainly from two things: live shows and royalties.
"The environment is much better now, more standardized, and the law is clearer, so most musicians have some way to protect their rights," Mei Er said. In the early years, music platforms simply took what they wanted and used it.
In 2010, Li Zhi and Zhou Yunpeng, along with a dozen or so other independent folk musicians, issued a joint statement against Xiami's model of "charge first, sort out copyright later." It made quite a stir. "After that, platforms began to respect underground musicians' copyright more and more — Xiami, NetEase Cloud Music, they all started talking to us and paying us royalties. Nobody would have expected that before."
Just a few days ago, though, Zhang Mohan was on Weibo cursing @BaiduMusician as "Thugs! Bandits!" over a copyright problem: the new album by Island Mood, another band he manages, had turned up on Baidu Music without authorization, free to stream and download.
One user reposted it with a comment: "It's not that these companies have no copyright awareness — they take whatever they can get. If nobody comes after them, they've won; if someone does, they take it down. Either way they've got money and power, and they throw their weight around."
Asked about the rock market of the past couple of years, Mei Er and Lu Chen reacted the same way: "More festivals, more money. Good."
In 2000, music festivals were still new in China. About four years ago, Chinese festivals began growing like weeds — more than a hundred a year, one after another: Strawberry, Modern Sky, Midi, West Lake, Changyang, Qipanshan, Beishan… By incomplete count, more than a dozen sizable festivals took place across the country during last year's May Day holiday alone, five of them in the Beijing area; the two Strawberry Music Festivals in Shanghai and Beijing together drew more than 250,000 people.
In the past, rock was like a banned book that everyone wanted to read. Yang Haisong, lead singer of the Beijing band P.K.14, told The New York Times: "At first the government saw us as a danger. What they see in us now is a big market."
Even so, it is still too hard for an independent musician to make a decent living from music. Among the people playing music in Shanghai, very few do it full time. Most, like Lu Chen and Mei Er, have a steady day job.
"Part of it may be that Shanghainese are more conservative — you'll notice Shanghainese rarely want to work in another city, they'd rather stay in Shanghai." One TFC lyric runs: "I am a Shanghainese / and when I die I want to die in my beautiful Shanghai."
"The other part is that Beijing is the center of rock, so a band from elsewhere has to work harder to stand out among so many — Beijing already has so many bands, thousands of them, far too many."
At this year's Donghai Music Festival, besides Lu Chen and Mei Er, TFC brought a guitar, a trumpet and drums — five people in all — and played ten songs. After the set I asked Lu Chen, "Are you staying to watch Dou Wei?"
He couldn't have been firmer. "I absolutely have to watch Dou Wei." The first CD Lu Chen ever set out to buy was Dou Wei's Black Dream (《黑梦》). Two hours later, Dou Wei would take the stage they had just played.
An hour before the show, the beach in front of the Qingshan Stage was already packed. I pushed forward through the crowd until I couldn't move any further. By the time the whole set ended, I hadn't seen Dou Wei's face or heard him sing a single line.
He stood the whole time in a dim corner of the stage holding an instrument — playing guitar, hitting drums, working against samples of his own voice, laying out his heavily religious world of music chapter by chapter.
The crowd began to stir. Some treated him as a deity and teared up when he bowed; some started cursing and shouting for Dou Wei to get off; and many more, with no idea what was going on, shouted "niubi" every time the slide behind him changed.
After the show, Mei Er posted to his Moments: a photo taken from very, very far from the stage, nothing in it but a dazzling patch of blue light, captioned Dou Yinniang.
Yes, he is different from them. But then, they are different from him too.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.