Big Band (乐队的夏天) and the history of Chinese rock'n'roll

[feihong]

Lately, I've been binge-watching the second season of Big Band (乐队的夏天). This is a battle of the bands reality show featuring a mix of established and up-and-coming rock bands. In my expert opinion (as an avid watcher of Chinese music reality shows), this is the best-in-class of this sub-genre of reality TV. If you are into music and Chinese then you should just go check it out now. You can either watch it in the iQiyi app or through the English-language site https://iq.com (link to episode one). The series isn't available on YouTube.

 

Recent evolution of music reality television

Chinese music competition shows have been a thing for as long as I've been alive, but the current era of music reality television probably started with the Voice of China. VoC was a massive success from the very beginning, and I believe it played an important part in raising awareness of music genres other than mass-produced pop and propaganda songs. Producers affiliated with VoC also started shows that emphasized original music rather than simply singing covers of popular pop songs. This has now come full circle, as the latest season of VoC now features many acts who perform their own music rather than sing covers (in past seasons, original music was only allowed in later rounds).

 

Within the last couple of years, the battle of the bands sub-genre has exploded. I think the first really successful shows of this type were probably iQiyi's Big Band and Youku's Let's Band (一起乐队吧), both of which premiered in the summer of 2019. Even though less than a year has passed, Let's Band has inspired at least two clones (我们的乐队 and 明日之子乐团季). In the Let's Band formula, competitors have a much greater amount of creative control than in previous music reality shows: besides creating music and singing, they also have to recruit band members and play their own instruments.

 

Why Big Band is different

Big Band is the first hyper-successful battle of bands show and the first to get a second season. However, its format hasn't yet been cloned and there is one striking difference from most mainland reality shows: the first season of Big Band is the least patriotic mass-market mainland reality show I have seen in recent years (maybe ever?). You can pretty much expect any mainland reality show nowadays to throw some propaganda at you, so the dearth of it in Big Band is frankly jarring. For example, in other shows, someone's going to stand up and sing a song about the Chinese Dream (VoC was notorious for this, and you could usually count on the big patriotic number being the worst song of the season). I think this, in itself, is a kind of political statement in this day and age, especially when so many celebrities in the Chinese entertainment industry go to great lengths to praise and support the CCP, even if they aren't PROC nationals.

 

Another big difference is that the rosters of the bands in Big Band are fixed from the very beginning. There's no recruiting aspect, each band has an established identity and its own body of work. As such, they perform more original music on the show, although obviously most of it is prepared well before they go on the show. There are at least two phases where the competitors need to create new covers for existing songs, but they're allowed so much flexibility that they can (and sometimes do) essentially rewrite the song they cover.

 

The last difference of Big Band from its brethren is that the competition aspect (which includes rehearsal segments, performing in front of a live audience, commentary, and scoring) takes up only half of its running time. The other two aspects are music education segments and mini-documentaries. The music education segments are short animated pieces that cover a particular musical instrument, a common chord, a music genre, etc. They are very well-produced and showing them to a classroom of children would be totally justified as they truly are informative. Mini-documentaries cover the history of a particular band, and, as some of these bands have been around for 20+ years, you also get snapshots of the history of Chinese rock'n'roll. They usually show archival footage, and in voice over band members will wax nostalgic about their lives back then and also mention other old bands that haven't been on the show. Sometimes the film crew will show bands visiting the places where they started out and talking to people they knew back then.

 

Conclusion

As you can probably tell, I think this show is awesome. To be honest, I'm not that into much of the music, but the show is about so much more that (see random list of highlights below). It's sort of a love letter to music, music culture, and music history. If you haven't caught on yet, the vast majority of the show consists of talking--I bet actual music performance accounts for like one-tenth of the stupendously long running times (this is a web show, so there is no set running time, and some episodes go over the 2-hour mark). There are many other Chinese shows that go deep into some aspect of Chinese culture or are very talk-centric, but even if they're well-made, I don't think they're very accessible to foreign audiences. On the other hand, I think someone with strong listening ability but relatively little knowledge of Chinese culture could actually appreciate Big Band. There are also official English subtitles, although I can't attest to their quality since I always turn them off.

 

Random highlights of the show

• Host Ma Dong's willingness to be the butt of many, many jokes, culminating in the song 马东是个大坏蛋 being created and performed on the show.
• Ma Dong is an expert interviewer, as demonstrated by the mini-interviews that he conducts after each performance.
• The celebrity panel of Big Band is pretty great. It consists mostly of older celebrities who participated in or have first-hand knowledge of pre-2000s Chinese rock. Their commentary and stories lend a lot of flavor to the show.
• The one-joke cartoon interludes are amazing. You can often get the joke even if you can't read fast enough to understand all the text.
• Many of the songs are sung in colorfully broken English. If you can read fast enough, the Chinese translations are sometimes interesting.
• There's a weird female representation problem going on in mainland reality TV, especially in competition shows. I wouldn't say that there are a ton of women in this show, but at least there are some.
• Some of my favorite moments from the show are when band members fight each other during rehearsals. One of the highlights for me of season 2 was when the triplet sisters of 福禄寿 were fighting while rehearsing for their performance of 少年 (episode 7, part 2 at 51:25).
• There's a spin-off talk show that runs concurrently with Big Band called 乐队我做东, where host Ma Dong talks with bands that appear on the show while eating hot pot. Frankly, it looks great but it seems like you need a premium subscription on iQiyi to watch it.

[Demonic_Duck]

My girlfriend has been watching this and sometimes sends me music recommendations from it (we're both pretty into Chinese rock music). I haven't been watching it up until now as I'm not a fan of the competition show format as a whole, but maybe I should give it a chance.

[xinoxanu]

Great insight!

 

Haven't watched this one yet but I too am a sucker for Chinese singing competitions such as The Voice and 歌手. The quality of Chinese singers is astounding, specially when we consider how most of them are total unknown amateurs... Literally: in 4 years that I've been watching them I haven't heard a single contestant that wasn't top notch, something I can't say for western versions of the same format.

 

I must confess that 汪峰 is also one of the reasons I started watching them (the other was my ex's mother, the super fan that introduced me to Chinese TV), such a talented artist and a very charismatic judge. 

 

Some of my favourite clips of all time:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rySflCPy4w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75E5z_uDHdQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti5fdLn-ZTg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0AblU7UKgs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQSlAKvWpn4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_7jugRQ00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z82kpOCHEPs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb8jxKrAzzI

[feihong]

16 minutes ago, Demonic_Duck said:

I haven't been watching it up until now as I'm not a fan of the competition show format as a whole, but maybe I should give it a chance.

I somehow forgot to mention that the production values in this show are great, and a lot of attention is given to the visual part of the performance. Pick a song from the show that you like and look up the video for it, you might be surprised at how much the gestures of the musicians, the lighting, and the cinematography add to the performance.

[feihong]

1 hour ago, xinoxanu said:

Haven't watched this one yet but I too am a sucker for Chinese singing competitions such as The Voice and 歌手. The quality of Chinese singers is astounding, specially when we consider how most of them are total unknown amateurs... Literally: in 4 years that I've been watching them I haven't heard a single contestant that wasn't top notch, something I can't say for western versions of the same format.

The Voice of China is like the finals of the tournament bracket that makes up the Chinese music competition landscape. In reality, many of the contestants who go on the Voice are actually reality show or social media veterans, with some even being champions of other competition shows. You don't get to see the amateurs because they were eliminated much farther down the bracket.

 

I believe that the quality of musicianship doesn't really correlate to how entertaining a music reality show is. There are a tons of these shows in China, and in most of them, the contestants are talented but the hosts, judges, and production are totally meh. For a good counterexample of a show that is entertaining but doesn't have the best talent, there's Jungle Voice (聲林之王), a not very well known Taiwanese show that seems like a clone of The Voice but adds a few twists (which have since been shamelessly copied by The Voice). The best thing about Jungle Voice is that the host is a bit of a comedian and is given a lot of freedom to improvise. Also the judges give much more detailed critiques than I've seen on other shows. Jungle Voice premiered in 2018 and there are some hints of it in Big Band, but there are so many music reality shows now that I can't say for sure if it was a direct influence.

[feihong]

27 minutes ago, xinoxanu said:

I must confess that 汪峰 is also one of the reasons I started watching them (the other was my ex's mother, the super fan that introduced me to Chinese TV), such a talented artist and a very charismatic judge.

I'll agree with you that Wang Feng is always great TV. But for me, he has this crazy anti-charisma that always makes me root against him (apparently, many Chinese fans also love to hate him). You would probably like 一起乐队吧, on which Wang Feng served as mentor and judge.

[xinoxanu]

Mmm... it's true that in recent editions they have brought it in more popular/well-known singers compared to 2015-2017 and earlier, but they are still amateurs without formal training. The increase in budget is also noticeable from then on, considering how Jessie J was made the poster girl for 歌手's 2018 edition.

 

And about Wang Feng: well, yeah, he's a womanizer and a cheat, so most people dislike him for that reason alone... but then again, if you can split the artist from the person then he's rather enjoyable!

[feihong]

Wang Feng tries to pull off the vibe of a know-it-all music professor, but is often insufferably arrogant and makes outlandish claims about how amazing his team is. When his team fails to get a good score, he blames the audience and critics for their bad taste, which comes off as being a sore loser. Don't get me wrong, Wang Feng is delightful to watch and improves any show he's in because he's such a good villain. The occasional schadenfreude you get from watching him fail is magnificent. I don't know that much about his personal life, so he could just be an exceptional performance artist.

[Diesel Dave]

I'm a concert promoter by trade, and while I haven't been bowled over by Chinese rock, I am interested in the Chinese music market. I'm not a fan of The Voice and its kin. I'm pretty suspicious of any band that needs auto-tune and/or a full-blown pyrotechnic rig to make an impact. Nonetheless, you've piqued my interest in this show. 

 

When I lived in Taibei in the late eighties, the Chinese appetite for Western music was very narrow. Only the most bland pop hits made any inroads on the Chinese charts. No rap, no hard rock, no soul, no jazz. But that was a long time ago.

 

Now, if you assumed that America's Got Talent or The Voice (US) was a real representation of American listening tastes you'd be largely mistaken. While pop is, by definition, popular here, you've got plenty of people who adore Norweigian metal, East African jazz, Qawali, psychedelic R & B, and classic bebop. Is the same true of China?

[feihong]

14 hours ago, Diesel Dave said:

While pop is, by definition, popular here, you've got plenty of people who adore Norweigian metal, East African jazz, Qawali, psychedelic R & B, and classic bebop. Is the same true of China?

Yes, I think the music tastes of Chinese fans are all over the map now. The internet makes it much easier for Chinese music fans to discover new types of music, and live music events cater to less mainstream musical tastes. Chinese music streaming services make it easy even for indie bands in the west to reach out to Chinese audiences.

[Diesel Dave]

Such an exiting time for China, I can hardly wait for the chance to see and hear it for myself!

[feihong]

Just watched the final episode. It's crazy long, probably 3+ hours, was broken up into 3 separate videos.

 

And, speak of the devil, guess who shows up as a guest on the celebrity panel? Wang Feng! To be fair, this isn't a shocking development. At least two of his songs were covered during the first season of the show, and Wang Feng has even covered the songs of 马赛克, one of the finalist bands. He's not participating in the competition, so he's gracious and congratulatory throughout. Actually, at the very end, there's a very nice easter egg for Wang Feng fans (end-of-the-episode easter egg is a common feature of this show).

 

Since this was the final episode, there were no more band documentaries to show, so instead they showed some footage from each band's sound check (I didn't particularly find this interesting). The performances themselves were just OK, as each band had already used its 杀手锏 (trump card), so for the most part you weren't hearing their best work.

 

Overall, I liked the second season a bit more than the first season. Perhaps because of the pandemic, they were able to get what I feel were more famous bands. There were quite a few bands whose work I've heard before, and it was nice to learn a little about the people behind the music.

 

Some highlights of season 2

Spoiler

• 无条人 was eliminated 3 times yet still managed to come back due to online voting to play in the final. It probably didn't hurt that they provided one of the most recognizable songs in the popular Chinese cartoon Scissor Seven (available on Netflix). Member 仁科 generated some of the most resilient memes of the season.
• Most of the rehearsal segments involving triplet sister act 福禄寿 were delightful. They were the previously unknown band that really got my attention this year. They even got an endorsement from Wang Feng!
• The improvised rap that resulted in the unofficial motto of the season, 与民同乐.
• There were a number of memorable bromances, but the most entertaining was the one between the band leader of Re-TROS and the bassist from Mandarin.
• The impromptu eyeliner tutorial from the leader of 木马.
• 大张伟 is one of the most famous hosts on Chinese television, but he's almost perfect as a panelist on this show, given his background as a punk rocker. He lands some really solid jokes in his stint here.
• I guess the embedded commercials were good? Host 马东 has a way of winkingly delivering them so that they all sound like bad jokes.

 

[amytheorangutan]

This is interesting. I’m watching the first episode because my teacher wants to talk about it in tomorrow’s italki lesson, normally not a fan of reality type shows but I recognised a couple of bands there.

[feihong]

I found a Youtube playlist containing the episodes of the eat-and-talk show spin-off of this show called 乐队我做东: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtez87pV7s3-SRvYSN42hDTVreX99gjKL. Watched the first episode of the second season and actually liked it more than I thought I would. As I said, hosts 马东 and 藏鸿飞 invite some guests over and chat over a big feast. The guests on the first ep are the members of 刺猬 and the lead singer of 面孔乐队 (all contestants from the first season). They watch the performances from the first round of the second season and then comment on the bands, a lot of whom they're familiar with. A lot of Chinese rock history nuggets are tossed out, so pretty educational as well.

 

On this show, they talk faster than they do on 乐队的夏天, and they do not hold back with the Beijing accent at all. At times, I struggled to follow along when I wasn't directly looking at the screen. Surprisingly, the little joke cartoons show up in this show too. It's definitely worth a watch for fans of the show or Chinese rock.

[xinoxanu]

Not sure if we can consider《爱我还是他》by David Tao "rock music", but this cover by 李荣浩 on 中国好声音 has an amazing guitar solo.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xanYQbxMY7A (solo is from min 1:30)

 

Is there something 李荣浩 can't do? 

[Luis 李毅]

I started watching this show during the lockdown, but I actually didn’t finish it. Right now I’m starting from episode 11, and I must say it’s the best Chinese music competition show I’ve ever watched. The quality of every band is huge, and it’s so entertaining watching those moments of talk and kind of interview. The only thing I didn’t like that much is that every female vocalist was disqualified by the end of the competition. I think there’s a clear bias we can unfortunately see in every rock scene around the globe, and it’s not different for China. Anyway, I’m still glad that I discovered so many good groups, and Queen Big Sea Shark has become one of my favourite bands all along.

[abcdefg]

On 10/4/2020 at 12:07 PM, feihong said:

I think this, in itself, is a kind of political statement in this day and age, especially when so many celebrities in the Chinese entertainment industry go to great lengths to praise and support the CCP, even if they aren't PROC nationals.

 

Interesting observation about the lack of propaganda. Do you think this show just has been temporarily "flying under the radar" or has it somehow been exempted from the usual requirements? 

 

Edit: Oh, I see now that this thread is a couple years old. These observations might not still be true today. 

[feihong]

On 7/7/2022 at 10:11 AM, abcdefg said:

Interesting observation about the lack of propaganda. Do you think this show just has been temporarily "flying under the radar" or has it somehow been exempted from the usual requirements? 

No, I don't think this show flew under the radar. 2020 might have been the last year where a big budget reality show could get away with not kowtowing to the CCP. Note that there was no third season of the show, and producer Ma Dong went on to make 一年一度喜剧大赛 the following year, which was interesting but in a completely different genre (sketch comedy competition). In 2021, there was a similar battle of the bands show on iQiyi called 草莓星球来的人, but I couldn't get through the show at all. Despite featuring some good bands, the show got bogged down by its yawn-inducing, incomprehensible, and bureaucratic competition rules (like a weird metaphor for the cultural scene in China itself). It may have killed the battle of the bands genre for the foreseeable future. I haven't caught wind of a similar show in 2022 yet, but the year is far from over.