Well, Jake's away and it's an eight day holiday for me too. I thought I'd share some surfing with you. It's a familiar recent genre: Mainstream English language journos on the emerging China music scene. It did throw up a good quote though.
Firstly, I noticed that a Google search of Shanghai rock scene throws up my blog as the first result. Yay. So then I changed to Beijing rock scene and surfed into this 2008 Guardian article:
It's ... errr ... true to the norms of the genre, but I was interested in one particular observation. Lately there has been a lot of blog discussion and local Douban discussion on ad agencys and corporate sponsorship and the related issues.
Dan Shapiro has been throwing up both sides of the coin at his blog lately.
Here's the paragraph from Petridis that interested me:
If you really want to splash out, you can hire a table and play dice using a Chivas Regal-branded cup. In fact, it's hard to find anything in the club that isn't Chivas Regal-branded, evidence of Chinese youth's attitude to corporate sponsorship. Almost everywhere else in the world, it's seen as (at best) a necessary evil, a pollutant of artistic integrity; here it is actively welcomed, and not just by superclubs.Exactly. At best, evil and a pollutant of integrity. He is wrong in attributing it to the Chinese youth at large though. But what worries me is it's general acceptance here among the foreign contingent who are supposedly more aware of this. Of course, as I've pointed out before, a lot of 'ex-pat' writers and players on the scene here willfully and happily work in PR, Advertising and probably think there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, they are being paid to actively promote it.
Also, did you catch this review in the same paper that mentions Boys Climbing Ropes?
Anyway, got time on your hands this week? Comments are free and available without registering. What do you think about that article?