Wutiaoren, the Folk Band Known for Documentary Songs: "We Don't Reject This Society — We've Been Merging Into It All Along"

Singing in dialect and documenting society made Wutiaoren's name. But in songwriting, design and live shows, the band keeps trying to shake off every constraint.

At 8:30 p.m. on September 21, the scheduled start time for the Shanghai stop of Wutiaoren's "A Zhen Falls for A Qiang" tour, the screen above the Modernsky Lab stage began playing the opening video right on cue.

To Buena Vista Social Club's "Bruca Manigua," a few photos of people dancing disco flashed past. About a minute in, the words "A Zhen Falls for A Qiang" and "Wutiaoren" came up on the screen. The audience cheered, and Mao Tao walked onstage with Ren Ke, a disposable cup of beer in his left hand.

The first song of the night was "Trading Hong Kong Dollars." In the 1960s and '70s, a great many people from the band's hometown of Haifeng, in Guangdong, smuggled themselves into Hong Kong; many of them came back in the 1980s to invest at home. The song draws on an odd trade that sprang up in the late 1980s in Hailufeng — the region named for Haifeng and neighboring Lufeng: the Hong Kong dollar dealers, who bought the currency cheap and sold it dear. Wutiaoren sang it in the Haifeng dialect, with the lyrics projected on the screen behind them.

Wutiaoren tour opening video

Since their first album in 2009, Wutiaoren have used music to record how cities change and how people on society's margins live. When Southern Weekly named County Chronicle its Music of the Year in 2009, it wrote: "On their debut album County Chronicle, Wutiaoren spread out an unadulterated, rustic China. Against a backdrop of music turning ever more into entertainment, it is nothing less than a musical landscape painting of a 'flourishing China'; the originality packed into it shows the ultimate purpose of music — to sing of the land beneath our feet and the people on it."

Recording the transformation of cities and society, and the small lives inside it, runs through everything Wutiaoren do, from aging bachelors in county towns to bar hostesses in the city. Because the songs work the way news reports do, some people call their music "news folk." When they wrote "First Love," in fact, the band lifted the narration of a news story straight into the lyrics. Wutiaoren's words can look simple, even crude, but set against their earthy subject matter the bluntness ends up feeling right.

Neither Wutiaoren nor the designers who work with them mind being called tacky, or "low."

"You can be tacky to the bone, but you can't be vulgar," Ren Ke said.

Because so much of the catalog is in dialect, projected lyrics and the visuals that go with them have become an important way for more people to follow the music. Hu Zhenchao — "Huzi," or Beard — a designer from the same hometown, has worked with the band since it formed, designing tour posters and the cover of Guangdong Girl. He handled the projections on this tour too.

When Wutiaoren played "Pretty and Beautiful, Handsome and Debonair," lines like "Beautiful, she's so pretty / shining like a star" went up in the sort of overblown type used in the pop-up ads on porn sites. To Hu Zhenchao, putting erotic material next to a hormonal song made a fun combination.

"That kind of visual is what a lot of designers avoid — all those fonts, all those garish colors. But Wutiaoren gave me the feeling that I could do it, because the song has that same feeling. They gave me the sense that I could try something that bold. Other musicians probably wouldn't dare go that low," he said.

The arrangements match the street-level lyrics. One Zhihu user described the music this way: whether it's the voice or the guitar, the drums, the organ or any other instrument, everything sounds so real and so full of detail, as if the band were right in front of you — very much like a live performance, which of course has to do with how they record — and what they sing about is thoroughly down to earth, mostly ordinary things from everyday life. Music like this tends to feel comfortable and clear to listen to.

Despite the name — Wutiaoren means "five people" — the band's core is just two of them, Mao Tao and Ren Ke. Mao Tao, 37, and Ren Ke, 32, both come from Haifeng County in Guangdong Province. Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop ran through their childhoods; Ren Ke's family ran a karaoke parlor, and by his own account he grew up in it. Neither had formal musical training, and the biggest influence on their songwriting came from the years they spent selling dakou discs in Guangzhou — Western CDs and cassettes dumped abroad and resold cheap on the street. Through dakou discs they found legends like David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa, and drew inspiration from Cuban, Gypsy and Arabic music.

"Back when we first started listening to music, everything was cassettes, so you'd flip through the lyric sheets, read them over and over, and listen very carefully, very closely. And you'd listen from start to finish. Back then, especially in the dakou days, hunger is the word I'd use for it — hunger," Mao Tao said.

Haifeng's mark on the band goes beyond language. There is a saying about Hailufeng: "Thunder god in the sky, Hailufeng on the ground," a description of how fierce the local temperament is. In the Haifeng-dialect song "A Bingyao," the band puts a run of curses in the mouth of the old bachelor A Bingyao; "Cao Cao, Don't Be Afraid" tells the story of a village brawl.

Reviewing the band's first two albums, County Chronicle and Some Scenery, the music critic Zhang Xiaozhou wrote that they "successfully instigated an uprising of dialect and broke folk music's set formulas — developing, in the Haifeng dialect, a rhythm and a way of pronouncing words all its own, a southern 'barbarian' drawl somewhere between rural folk opera and a street argument, and greatly expanding the subject matter and the narrative methods of contemporary Chinese new folk." Zhang is also artistic director at Modern Sky, the label Wutiaoren signed with in 2015.

Since 2008, Wutiaoren have played a Lunar New Year hometown show called "Back to Haifeng." The early ones were casual — a neighborhood committee hall could serve as the venue. As the band grew better known, "Back to Haifeng" turned from a gathering of friends into a festival-scale party for young people. In 2015 they held it in a parking lot and drew seven or eight hundred people. Guangdong fans, who understand the dialect, always react more strongly: they sing along at full volume, and when the band chooses not to sing a curse word, the crowd shouts it for them.

The 2016 New Year concert was going to borrow a bar with an empty lot right outside, but the cultural affairs bureau refused to approve it. For 2017 the band set its sights on a school theater, and the concert was called off again because the venue couldn't be used commercially.

Xie Lüeku, a designer from Huizhou and a fan of the band, heard that "Back to Haifeng" couldn't happen and got in touch with Modern Sky, hoping that he and his friends could pay out of their own pockets to bring Wutiaoren to Huizhou. To their surprise, it came together. The band rode into Huizhou on a bus nicknamed the Haifeng. So the New Year show returned in 2018, and "Back to Haifeng" became "Coming to Goose Town."

Xie Lüeku introduced another fan, Zhihang, to the band. Zhihang shot the video at "Coming to Goose Town." He described the show as a gathering of people who already knew each other. Onstage, Mao Tao bit his guitar, pure punk. Zhihang could even see the spit fly as the band worked itself up. "A spotlight hit them and there were these glistening droplets sparkling in front of them," he said.

Both men went on to do a fair amount of design work with Wutiaoren. Xie Lüeku made the "A Zhen Falls for A Qiang" tour poster from disco-flavored photographs Ren Ke gave him; Zhihang made the opening video that ran before the shows.

Freedom and trust are what the designers all mention about working with the band. Zhihang put his own idea into the video: a young girl dances and gradually turns into a middle-aged woman, and the middle-aged woman dances until she disappears — a way of saying that fashions and time always pass. He cut it, handed it over, and the band liked it and sent him more footage, so he made the video a little longer. That was the whole of the back-and-forth.

Wutiaoren keep an open hand with design. Hu Zhenchao did the cover of Guangdong Girl. Fantasy Lisa Hair Salon was made with artists who had graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, because the band felt their coarse, unpolished style fit the character of the music. Even the type on this tour's poster was commissioned from a calligrapher.

"Put it this way: when we make music, I want it to be as good as it can be. With design, we want to do it well too — keep changing it, keep making it fit the music we're making now," Ren Ke said.

After they moved from the county town of Haifeng to Guangzhou, the range of their work changed too. One Zhihu user called the city on Guangdong Girl a "youth meat grinder," noting that the album sweeps away the novelty of going from a county town to a city that the previous record had shown: "the capitalism, consumerism and state will the city stands for compress a generation, without mercy, into labor and flesh."

To Wutiaoren, the pull of a place is simply a natural condition, nothing special. "We're just living," Mao Tao said. "It's the same in Shanghai." If they lived in Shanghai, he added, the writing would take in some local elements too.

For the Shanghai show, Wutiaoren brought on Lu Chen, once the lead singer of Top Floor Circus, as a guest. Before it broke up, Top Floor Circus was likewise seen as a band that stood for a city's style, and the two acts are often mentioned in the same breath. They met in 2010, when Top Floor Circus played through heavy rain at the Snow Mountain Music Festival in Lijiang, Yunnan, and Mao Tao and Ren Ke pogoed in the crowd below. The two bands have guested at each other's shows ever since. Wutiaoren recorded both Some Scenery and Guangdong Girl in Shanghai, at a studio Top Floor Circus put them on to.

Artsy young people are an important part of Wutiaoren's audience, which produces an interesting split: the people in their songs and the people listening to them are two different crowds. "Mr. Just 500 Yuan," an online handle, was a classmate of Mao Tao's older brother, and it was through him that Mao Tao and Ren Ke met at the "Haifeng Original Music Concert." The much-quoted line "Wutiaoren's folk songs are like a Hou Hsiao-hsien film set to music" was also copy he came up with early on. In an interview two years ago, "Mr. Just 500 Yuan" said: "The truth is that people like us are still a very small niche. In Haifeng you can see it in the nightlife: an ordinary young person's life is late-night snacks and karaoke, school doesn't count for much, and sooner or later you follow an older cousin into selling phones or selling clothes. That's the mentality."

By the band's own observation, though, more and more people outside the artsy crowd have started listening. Ren Ke offered an example from the Suzhou stop of the tour: as the whole room shouted for an encore, one man near the front kept calling for "First Love." Mao Tao said fine, he'd get his wish. When the song started, the man was moved to tears. Afterward Mao Tao shook his hand.

Talking with him later, Ren Ke learned he was from Yunnan, only 18, and worked as a real-estate agent in Shanghai. The Shanghai date clashed with his job, so he had gone to Suzhou early to catch the band there. He told Ren Ke he liked the songs because they said things other people wouldn't dare say, and that he had introduced Wutiaoren to people back in his village.

"From the way this guy talked I could tell he isn't the type who goes to livehouses — not the artsy youth we all picture," Ren Ke said. "When A Mao told him we were about to play 'First Love,' he was so happy he turned around to the bar and yelled, 'Bring the drinks!' Who could make sense of that in a livehouse? You only see that in an ordinary bar."

"Something must have got to him — the melody or the lyrics," Mao Tao said. "Maybe some of the news in the lyrics got to him too."

Asked why the audience has grown, Wutiaoren pointed to the increase in Mandarin songs. Half the songs on 2015's Guangdong Girl are indeed in Mandarin, and of the 12 tracks on 2016's Fantasy Lisa Hair Salon, only three are in dialect. But as they see it, choosing Mandarin was not a way to win more fans; Mandarin simply suited what they wanted to say.

The move from dialect to Mandarin can also be read as the band trying to shake off the "dialect" label. After some people said Fantasy Lisa Hair Salon wasn't as good as the earlier dialect songs, and that Wutiaoren hadn't mastered writing in Mandarin, Ren Ke answered with an essay called "On the Martial Art of Writing in Dialect," arguing that the moment a creator finds he has mastered some ability, he should throw it away: "Making art is a gamble. If you already know there are monsters in the jungle and you know where the treasure is, there's no fun left in it."

We talked with Wutiaoren about more; here's a closer look at the band

Q: What people say most about your music is that it has the feel of a news record — documenting how cities change and how people's lives change. Was that part of what you set out to do?

Ren Ke: Honestly, we've forgotten by now what we set out to do. Musically, we love music. It starts with loving music, and then you write songs. Writing songs, you're bound to touch on some subject or other — love songs, whatever. But the way we think about music has to be distinctive, the same as the way we make it. From selling dakou records we heard a lot of different music, and some of it has a lot of character — not like pop songs or other formulaic music, where the lyrics, the solos, the singing all have certain conventions built in. When we write, we try to be different. With lyrics we want to break new ground too. So whether it's a love song or any other kind, we do it another way. Take the news thing you just mentioned: several of our songs are adapted straight from news stories. To put it at its most extreme, on a song like "First Love," big stretches of the lyrics may come directly from a news report, written exactly as it was — a line like "a truck crashed into an overpass," we just took the whole sentence. Or "a young man buried his head in his hands and wept." That's a lyric, right, but that's how it was written in the article. Sometimes we take it that directly. Of course, first we have to feel the story is worth writing about. Maybe it moved us, however that happened. It isn't style for its own sake. There's so much news in China and in the world, all kinds of strange things, and plenty of it is stranger than the "First Love" story. That one moved us a lot — maybe because of the first-love part, or maybe because it's close to people around us.

Q: The language has changed, but you've always looked at people at the bottom, at the margins. "First Love" is about a man who makes money and goes back to find his first love, and the recent Fantasy Lisa Hair Salon has the same feel, from the cover to the songs. Do ordinary, small people move you in a particular way?

Ren Ke: I think I once read an interview with Jia Zhangke. Someone asked him why he films people on the margins, since so much of his material is about people at the bottom and hardly ever the upper class. I think he said something — I forget the exact words — along the lines of: the rich are all more or less alike, but the poor come in a thousand kinds; people at the bottom have all sorts of ways of living. A bit like the saying that there's only one way to succeed and a thousand ways to fail. It's related to that. And also, these are the majority — they're right there beside you.

He went to India once; there was a film festival, and a rich man invited them over. The man invited them home, and his home was extremely grand, a whole tower belonging to his family, and inside the tower they even kept cows, raised so his children could drink fresh milk. Jia Zhangke either didn't go in, or walked around for a moment and left right away. What he meant was that rich people are all more or less the same (but poor people live in all kinds of different ways).

Q: Have you ever had direct contact with the people who gave you the material?

Mao Tao: Besides the news events I mentioned, friends sometimes bring us inspiration, ideas. Once a friend of ours was chasing a girl — chasing her to the ends of the earth, going and standing under her building and shouting his head off. We turned that into a song too, "A Hu," where he just keeps shouting from downstairs: Will you come away with me? Will you come away with me? I'm only waiting for you to say the word. We made it into a song like that. That's inspiration too.

Q: How would each of you describe the other?

Ren Ke: I think there's something very wild in him. When we're writing a song together, what he's after isn't really whether it makes sense — it's more himself, a gut judgment. Some of those instinctive calls aren't necessarily right, but the raw material that comes out of them is very cool.

(Q: Can you give an example?)

Take "A Bingyao." If you understand Haifeng dialect, there's a passage in it that, put into Mandarin, would be extremely obscene and violent. Even in Haifeng, saying that out loud would count as crude. But in that song he curses like that four times in a row. Singing it live, cursing at the audience four times running — imagine doing that in plain Mandarin, straight at the crowd. Handle it badly and people will think you're out of your mind. But inside the music he makes it work, including the way he tears his voice apart singing it. That works too.

Mao Tao: Ren Ke has his own way of working. How to put it — sometimes the lyrics he comes up with have a very romantic side and a very brutal side at once, and having them happen at the same moment feels split, but it also makes complete sense. He's also extremely, extremely good with melody; it's a real strength. In arranging especially, he can handle the melodic material beautifully. In rehearsal he can produce something on the spot, very fast — a lovely melody just appears — and we often end up keeping it and later opening it out into something else. The second interesting thing about him is that he thinks a lot about how to arrange a piece, and about writing the words and music, and he revises constantly, going over the lyrics again and again. Let me give you an example: "Drunkard Zhugebo." I remember it clearly. At first we thought the arrangement was already too good, and he wanted to wreck it a bit. Back to what we were saying about things making sense — once he had messed with it, it actually broke out of the mold, and a high point appeared.

Q: How do you define the social engagement of your music? Do you mean to get further involved in society, or do you think that documenting society through music is already a form of taking part?

Ren Ke: The second one. To start with, we don't actually reject this society — we've been merging into it all along. As you said, making this kind of music is already a way of engaging with society. I hope all young people engage with society. We're young people too.

Q: What kind of engagement do you mean?

Ren Ke: Every kind — the point is that I don't reject it. Take our life in this city: my colleagues, my boss, my family are all here. How would you reject it? The only formal way to reject it would be to go and live in the mountains. And honestly, I love this society. On a bigger scale, I love the whole planet. We're engaged... writing songs is a direct form of engagement too — we influence other people. And through music other people influence us.

Q: Apart from music, what other art forms are you into — poetry, performance art, that sort of thing?

Ren Ke: I don't read much poetry. We used to live next to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, so we knew a lot of people, many of them making contemporary art, some of them well known now, like Hu Xiangqian, who does performance art. The cover of Fantasy Lisa Hair Salon was made with five artists who had graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts years earlier. They had started an independent magazine called Feng Huo.

Q: Which elements of their art interest you most?

Ren Ke: When we were designing Fantasy Lisa Hair Salon, we had a very good collaboration with "Huzi," Hu Zhenchao. So why did we later hand Fantasy Lisa Hair Salon to the Feng Huo people? Because I'd seen some of their exhibitions, and I'd been in touch with that group — we knew each other. A lot of what they make has a coarse quality, a very Guangdong quality. You could also call it grounded, street-level. I thought those elements — I talked it over with A Mao at the time — suited the character of this record. They had never designed a record before, so asking them was a gamble, though of course Hu Zhenchao helped us a lot as well.

Q: How much do you talk with other Chinese bands privately?

Mao Tao: Relatively little, in fact. When we do talk, it's mostly not about how we work but about ideas and things going on. Once, in Shaoxing, "Drink Like a General" came out of a conversation like that. The musician Huanqing told a story that night — that's where the general "drinking with flair" in the lyrics comes from — and afterward Ren Ke worked the story up into a song.

Wutiaoren, Shanghai tour stop: "The Assembly" + "Flowers Bloom on the Shore"

Cover image and the photographs in this feature are courtesy of photographers Sun Mengjin and Teng Chen.