Chinese immigrants played a well-documented role in the birth of reggae more than 50 years ago

Longshendao: China’s Biggest Hippies

In a city where cannabis is scarce and sunlight scarcer, it may seem strange that reggae music should flourish – but if Beijing has nothing else, it’s got talented musicians with a hunger for innovation. We can likely thank the latter for the birth of the Chinese mainland’s first-ever reggae band, Longshendao.

Though Chinese immigrants played a well-documented role in the birth of reggae more than 50 years ago, the genre didn’t catch on in the Chinese mainland until 2006, when a handful of seasoned Beijing rockers-turned-dreadheads launched Longshendao (龙神道), a name as cultural as it is hippified that means “the Tao of the dragon god.”

Though 2006 may seem like a late start for Chinese reggae, singer and bassist Guo Jian (XTX and Cold Blooded Animal) says the band actually started fiddling around with reggae in 1997. “We were all daily friends, and we all liked this kind of music, so we just naturally got together,” he says. Those friends form a veritable who’s who of 90s and early 00s Chinese rock: like Guo Jian, zither player Zhang Wei played with XTX and Cold Blooded Animal, as well as Buyi; keyboardist Fei Fei played with Zhang Chu, and drummer Gao Fei played with Secondhand Rose. Despite the band members’ high profiles, for nine years the music remained a private hobby. “At that time, there weren’t many people in China who liked reggae music,” Guo explains.

Though reggae has been slow to catch on (with the only other major contribution coming from XTX’s 2008 pseudo-reggae album “Just One Desire”), Longshendao were quick to earn respect from the music community. Though the scarcity of similar sounding bands has meant that they’re often relegated to broad showcases or Bob Marley Appreciation Nights, the band was recognized in 2011, when their debut record “Tai Chi Reggae” (《拥抱》) was awarded “Best Album” at the Midi Awards, an annual music awards ceremony hosted by the Midi School of Music.

The album, which is available for listen on the band’s Douban, features 12 classic reggae tunes featuring crooning vocals, mellow beach harmonies and 70s style funk and synth. The band interlaces this conventional aesthetic with their own cultural background, singing almost entirely in Chinese and even incorporating the traditional Chinese guzheng in their instrumentals. They deny, however, that they’re trying to create “reggae with Chinese characteristics”: “Rather our band feels that the guzheng is in no way different from the guitar,” they write on their Douban page. “The emphasis is not on where an instrument comes from, but that it belongs to a globally shared culture.”

Their lyrics, meanwhile, “contain references to the understanding of love and spiritual freedom and include aspects of Taoism.” These guys are, in other words, China’s biggest hippies. But they also happen to be a great, pioneering band, who remain a breath of fresh air among the doom, gloom and nationalism of so many of Beijing’s other bands.

By: Liz Tung (董怡)

Re Hutong laowai

Nice pic... It seems the two couldn't be more different.

Hutong laowai

The vile breed that is the hutong laowai get more exposure in China Daily.

New breed of psuedo-stylish foreigners are giving us laowai a bad name

Forget the wrecking ball. Beijing's historic hutong need saving not from the demolition crew but from the ever-increasing number of Western hipsters who believe they are living the latest vogue.

You know the type I mean: they step off a plane, sign up for tai chi, yoga and qi gong looking for enlightenment before jetting off to a Buddhist retreat in India to find their inner 7-year-old. Sadly, more are staying in China, contributing to a new subculture that's as alarming as it is profoundly disturbing.

Meet the "hutongsters", as I call them. They're China's version of London's yuppies in the 1980s. They're direct descendents of homo sapiens and a close cousin of trustafarians, a name given to rich kids who live off daddy's trust fund while smoking marijuana all day with little desire to work in the real world.

A true hutongster has normally spent a "summer" working for a small NGO saving wombats in Africa and now works in the media industry harboring delusions that their memoirs of being the first trendsetter to live in a hutong will be original.

For some reason they believe living in sub-standard, poorly built squalor, which was literally thrown together with bare hands quicker than you can say the words "building code", is somehow a more authentic China experience. Most of the current small alleyways that crisscross the city were built for China's grassroots and are mostly devoid of the basic sanitary essentials of a toilet or shower.

This new breed of bourgeois often develops an identity crisis thumbing their nose to Sanlitun and the "foreigners" who fill the bars, clubs and restaurants. The irony here is their refusal to leave their kitschy neighborhood has led to a huge growth of Western-style bars, boutique stores and fancy European eateries opening in the hutong, turning them into pseudo-Sanlituns.

I had the displeasure of meeting one of the said species up close during a smoking break after dinner the other night. A young man in his late 20s, dressed in ratty brown khakis and a faded T-shirt from some US university I care less to remember. He had a very distinctive Californian accent and immaculate, straight white teeth. His lip brow wrinkled as he mused about how much he hated Sanlitun and how he rarely left his hutong existence.

Just then, a clash of plates could be heard crashing to the floor of the restaurant, prompting the white American to bemoan: "Oh, it must be a foreigner." To which I inquired: "What does that make you?"

I'm pretty sure hutong residents back in the 1950s didn't dream of one day going to the French butcher, calling into Hutong Pizza for a pepperoni special before trekking to Great Leap Brewery for a pint of stout. Rather, the area's longtime residents are more likely appalled by their morning shower in the communal bathroom being interrupted as two Sanlitun rejects vomit from the excesses of the night before.

Even the cover of Time Out magazine in Beijing this week heralded its guide to "Hidden Hutongs" (sic). The inside headline said it all: "We've gone hutong crazy!" Indeed. I swear one of these days I'm going to walk down Fangjia Hutong and see Bob from Birmingham dressed like a dan from Peking Opera, face-painted white, fan in hand while singing in a high-pitched voice similar to a drowning cat.

Like all latest crazes it will soon be a passing fad. The hutongsters will disappear into the sunset with their guitars and bongo drums silhouetted onto the cobbled streets they once called home in search of the next faux "authentic" experience.

We should start a rumor that the next playground of the nouveau riche is with Beijing's so-called mouse tribe, who live deep beneath the city in disused air raid shelters. Now that's really underground, man.