Twenty Years in the Rock Scene, All of It Spent Pushing the Music Toward the Mainstream

Before he edited music magazines and staged live shows, Li Hongjie had a band of his own. But as he sees it, "China has no shortage of people who can sing. What it lacks are talent scouts — the professionals who work behind the scenes."

In high school Li Hongjie had a band called Biantao, later renamed Left Ear.

A punk band, playing the kind of music that vents what young people feel in the most direct way possible. He also gave himself an English name, Cheizak: "Che" from the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, "Zak" from Zack de la Rocha, the singer of Rage Against the Machine — a band Li Hongjie loved.

Back then his idols were Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins, and what he wanted was to play onstage. He held on to that through college. What came next, he says, was "like something fate arranged." He has spent more than 20 years in the rock scene, and no one thinks of him as a rock musician anymore.

1

In March, Li Hongjie flew to Los Angeles. In Austin, Texas — 2,000 kilometers from the City of Angels — musicians, journalists and startups were arriving in force for a festival called South by Southwest. Nine years earlier, Twitter had broken out there.

Li Hongjie had come to talk with its production team about working together. He wanted to put music, technology and art on the same ground, and that August he planned to stage the MTA Tianmo Music Festival, inspired largely by South by Southwest.

The trip came together in a hurry. The day before he left, on March 8, a festival called Electric Lady had just closed in Beijing — China's first all-women music festival, where 21 female acts played to an audience of several hundred. It was put together by Wild Horse Live, the livestreaming platform Li Hongjie founded.

"Live music is a hard business to get into," he says. Luckily he had more than a decade of practice behind him.

Li Hongjie staged his first show in 2002, when Popular Songs (《通俗歌曲》), the magazine he worked for, launched a concert series called Rock Your Life, covering rock, electronic, metal and more. In his own words, "Back then I had no clear idea of what a show should be. The shows had personality, but they weren't careful enough."

In 2007 he went into live production for real. That year he built a stage for the Midi Festival devoted entirely to hip-hop, and two more for the first Modern Sky Festival: the Rock Girl stage and the Hip-Hop Reggae stage.

Two years later, he and the team at Music Space (《音乐时空》) produced the first Zhangbei Grassland Music Festival. Music Space was the successor to the Chinese edition of Rolling Stone; from the October 2006 issue on, the magazine published in partnership with Rolling Stone's Chinese edition. They also brought in the Zhangbei local government, which supplied the site.

Zhangbei is a different animal from the Strawberry Music Festival and Midi. Midi has the Midi School behind it and is treated as a utopia for fans; Strawberry has Modern Sky, one of the country's most important labels. Each year both run multiple editions in multiple cities, draw far bigger crowds than Zhangbei, and are easy to reach.

Zhangbei sits on the Inner Mongolian plateau in western Hebei, and getting there is not easy. Festivalgoers routinely sit in traffic, and lodging basically means a tent.

Yet some fans like Zhangbei better than either Strawberry or Midi. "The location really does limit it," says a fan who goes by Harpy, "but that's why Zhangbei can play until dawn. Midi and Strawberry are nearly empty by nine or ten. The grassland at night, the stars, and rock music — that's what I think a festival should look like." Zhangbei is also the biggest single festival in the country by attendance and scale: the 2013 edition drew 350,000 people, against the 250,000 Strawberry and Midi usually pull.

Li Hongjie loves Woodstock; he watched Woodstock VCDs as a kid. Once he was making live shows himself and dealing with musicians directly, he found a particular pleasure in "making something out of nothing."

2

Qian Weirong, a former writer for the Chinese edition of Rolling Stone, first picked up Popular Songs in his middle-school library. The magazine, he says, shaped "some of my taste and judgment in music."

Li Hongjie was the magazine's executive editor then, and he packed it with music news, Western culture and serious songwriting (Popular Songs usually came with a free CD).

His own education in rock started with television. Beyond and Orient Express made him love the sound of an electric guitar. From there he worked his way to the Magic Stone Three, Guns N' Roses and Bon Jovi. At the time, China as a whole had only a hazy sense of what was happening in the rest of the world. Dakou discs and dakou tapes — notched "plastic trash" — had only just arrived, and the men who sold them fed the young quietly, like underground missionaries. Li Hongjie was one of the fed.

In 1996 he got into college: Hebei University of Science and Technology, in Shijiazhuang. He kept up with the friends he had played with in high school, the band stayed together and played often, sometimes sharing a bill with Miserable Faith and Twisted Machine, names that mean a great deal today. In 1999 they played a show in Hefei, his first time performing out of town.

Then 1999 changed everything. That year Popular Songs covered a Left Ear show, and Li Hongjie's connection to China's most important rock magazine began. He graduated in 2000 and was duly "assigned" to the magazine as an editor.

Popular Songs was one of the most important music magazines in the country, and in the rock scene it mattered more than any other. It circulated everywhere — you could buy it in remote county towns — and it sat in the libraries and reading rooms of many primary and secondary schools. The business side was never easy. At the worst point Li Hongjie was the only one left and "had to do everything": the interviews, the calls to bands, the research, the writing. None of it was simple work. Even so, the magazine covered Chinese bands more thoroughly than any other paper or magazine.

In 2002, his third year there, Li Hongjie started writing The Rock Bible (《摇滚圣经》). The book came in two parts. The first walked through the genres of rock, the history and sound of each. The second collected several hundred bands and artists, Chinese and foreign, recommended albums, scored them and reviewed them.

The book's reach was enormous. Fans still offer 300 yuan for a used first edition. At the time, radio DJs sometimes used The Rock Bible to pick what to play, and anyone who ever bought dakou discs will remember that the dealers priced their CDs off its scores.

"I just wanted to write an idiot's guide, so that people who didn't listen to rock, or who listened but had no idea what to listen to, could look at it and know what to go hunt down," Li Hongjie says. "Read it and you'd have a decent grasp of rock's genres and styles. Listen to every record in it and you could call yourself an intermediate fan." A year later, in 2003, he wrote The Jazz Bible (《爵士圣经》) with much the same idea.

3

The first foreword in that 2002 edition of The Rock Bible was written by the musician Yan Jun, under the title "Bringing the World Over Here" (《把世界搬过来》). One line reads: "Information is a crucial building block of this world. We exist in this world and so does rock music, and if there is any connection between us and rock — consumption, say, or being moved — then information will shape what we consume and what we feel: either we become its slaves, or we become free through it."

Li Hongjie wants to help with the freedom part.

He used to do it with magazines and books. Now he hopes a livestreaming platform can let the people who aren't in the room see the show anyway. Last year he and Wang Feng launched Wild Horse Live, an app that streams rock concerts. One piece of Wild Horse Live's own research found:

For every 100 people in a venue, there are reliably ten times as many who wanted to come and didn't.

Abroad, Li Hongjie found, sites like this had existed for years, and there were more of them every year. Evntlive, the streaming-video startup Yahoo bought in 2013, broadcast concerts to web users; Stageit, an American platform launched in 2011, helps artists set up web-exclusive live sets, sell tickets and share shows on Facebook; Turntable.fm began as a music site and later pivoted to streaming concerts on the Stageit model; and ConcertWindow streams rock shows on both desktop and mobile.

For now Wild Horse Live looks like LeTV Music on a phone, with a more rock-and-roll interface. How popular it is remains hard to say, but one number is plain enough: Wild Horse Live has barely 1,500 followers on Weibo, while LeTV Music has 190,000. Last year Wild Horse Live streamed 172 shows; LeTV Music streamed 367.

Li Hongjie believes in it anyway, and he hired what he considers "the best livestreaming team in China" — Bi Tao's video crew. Bi Tao had spent years shooting for big brands, so the craft was there, and he happened to be a rock fan: since the 1990s he had hung around the Happy Paradise bar in Beijing's Wudaokou, reportedly at nearly every show it ever hosted.

Wild Horse Live's streams do have one real distinction: they offer several camera angles. Most streams simply put up a few cameras and let a director cut between them. On Wild Horse Live the viewer picks the angle — backstage, the singer, the drummer, the crowd — which puts you a little closer to the room.

4

The most unusual thing here, though, may be how much rock you can watch. A genre that has never gone mainstream in China, and that lives or dies onstage, accounts for nearly every show Wild Horse streams. Given how the app is doing in the market, and funding that still comes to less than 10 million yuan, it looks like two veteran rockers trying to clear rock's name.

Li Hongjie doesn't see it that way. He thinks rock will slowly become mainstream culture in China, the way it did in the United States.

"People who love rock are moving into every industry, and the mainstream is changing from the inside," he says. "Rock magazines used to go unread. Now a single piece from an account devoted to one branch of rock gets tens or hundreds of thousands of readers. The Chinese music market is slowly growing up."

If that is true, the distance covered is real. Li Hongjie found rock more than 20 years ago; "back then," bands lived in Shucun, Dongbeiwang and Huoying, and eating was a problem. "Now more people listen to rock, there are more shows and more festivals, and everyone's life has gotten better." One set of figures puts 90% of an independent musician's income in live performance.

As for Li Hongjie, he never became a musician. But "China has no shortage of people who can sing," he says. "What it lacks are talent scouts — the professionals who work behind the scenes." He said it over the phone, from South by Southwest.

Cover image: meng800, Visual China Group