[Music]
mohawks
and teens dressed all in black punk is
not a common sight in china
but if you do find a scene chances are
you're in rouhani
punk found its way to china with the
formation of a band called smzb
in 1996. uh
they were joined by another student they
met at the beijing midi school of music
the band's name comes from the initials
for shin ming chipping
which means bread of life together the
three young men
began writing and performing songs they
released an album called 50 000
in 2001 and it featured songs like this
that song ended up on a local radio
station
[Music]
they were new and but inexp kick-started
an underground punk scene in oohan more
bands formed
and together they lived and breathed
punk music
but it was still a small scene
[Laughter]
and just like that wuhan became the
birthplace of chinese punk
when fans came to the city they would go
to a venue called vox
this was where all the underground
concerts were held
this is nathanael amar he does research
on modern china
specifically china's punk scene what
happened in fact is that
in the mid 90s you had
a sufficiently large number of people
in rohan interested in the same music
because when you want to create a new
kind of music you need
that you need people that are interested
in that kind of music
and places but why wuhan instead of
other big cities like beijing
or shanghai in wohan it's more
complicated
because you had a lot of working-class
kids
and also people coming from the
countryside it has a strong working
class
uh of course because of its industry and
all that
and also a strong um also history of
descent
uhan was the site of an uprising in 1911
that led to the sinha revolution which
overthrew
china's last emperor and established a
republic
then at the height of the cultural
revolution in the 1960s
the people of wuhan challenged leader
mao zedong's policies
in an armed conflict later called the
uhan incident
so i think it also had a small impact on
the minds of the youth
yeah and they also um use this history
of the shanghai revolution for example
is used by the punks
the hunt punks themselves in their
lyrics
what is the crowd like what are the
people who go for these concerts like
oh it's it can be very different
people i saw a lot of of course
so people that are already in the pan
community they were students in
they had nothing to do with punk music
but they discovered
smzb and the the punk scene through this
concert
at vox and uh it moved them profoundly
my
deepest memory of smjb performing was in
gohan
because you can see that smcd is
part of the city and part of the city
history
it was at vox at the time and uh you had
it it was full house like everybody was
there
everybody was super excited
[Music]
foreign
[Applause]
[Music]
foreign
[Music]
you