He is scrawny, just like Dylan. Wearing faded blue jeans, a red headband and a black loose fitting t-shirt, he's a slip of a man with a mop of black hair, bony elbows, and plain sneakers. This sunny afternoon he'd drawn a crowd of 3,000 expatriate Chinese living all over the northeast United States to Central Park for this concert, a Woodstock afternoon.
When the Chinese singer stepped onto the stage and strapped on his guitar, the audience jumped to their feet, many punched the air with their fists, and they roared as one: "CUI JIAN! CUI JIAN! CUI JIAN!"
After a few songs, the 38-year-old rock'n'roller named Cui Jian (pronounced "sway jen") starts swaying his hips, hopping up and down as if on a pogo stick, Mick Jagger-like, and windmilling his guitar like a Chinese Pete Townsend. The Chinese-language lyrics of his songs talk about teenage heartbreak, loneliness, sublimated desire - in compact, jagged, oddly affecting lyrics that linger and linger, like Dylan's.
Looks Like Beijing
"He is expressing the emotions of a generation of Chinese people," says Han Ning, an artist from Beijing who has lived in New York for two years.
All the Chinese in the audience -- the graduate students in chemistry, engineering, and literature; the street artists and masseurs; the successful architects and doctors; the restaurant workers -- are smiling and singing along in Mandarin.
Cui Jian is the rock'n'roller they grew up with in China, just as a generation of baby boomers in the U.S. grew up with, say, Paul Simon or Richie Havens or Bob Dylan, and might nostalgically go to a concert in Central Park to relive those memories. In this case, though, it's likely the emotions are doubly charged - now expatriates living in the United States and starved for the feeling of home, the audience connects directly with the lanky crooner. They're drawing memories, joy, and strength from him.
"This looks like Beijing, I can't believe it's New York," Cui Jian cries out from the stage.
This was last August 8, about two months after NATO forces bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and the U.S. embassy in Beijing was pelted with bottles in retaliation encouraged by authorities. But there is no sign of anti-American sentiment here. The electric guitar growls and the Chinese in Central Park, many of them up and jittering in their seats, are all at once rocking, nostalgic, and wondering about the future.
Baseball and Concerts
In a time when America's relations with China are fraught with tension, Cui calls on his Chinese audience in America to help. In Central Park he dedicates his hit "Chu Zou" ("Leaving Home") to the overseas Chinese students in the audience.
"When you are finished studying, I hope you will go back and help build up your motherland," he shouts. Half the audience cheers and raises their hands.
Cui has toured the States before, and he wants his fans to know what's really going on in America. He hears that Chinese students spend too much time in the library and says he thinks education is good, but he wishes they would go to more concerts and baseball games.
The last time many of these Chinese were together in so large a group was on Tiananmen Square in 1989. There, Cui Jian had played a single concert in support of the fragile Democracy movement. That show had spawned a theme song for Cui Jian's generation -- a song called "Yi Wu Suo You!" ("Nothing to my Name!") So when a fan in the audience stands up between songs and yells out "Yi Wu Suo You!," Cui Jian complies:
How long have I been asking you
When will you come with me?
But you always laugh at me
For I have nothing to my name.
I want to give you my hope
I want to help make you free
But you always laugh at me
For I have nothing to my name.
Oh... when will you come with me?
Oh... when will you come with me?
It's not a political song, not angry or polemical. It's just a sweet love song heavy with heartbreak, leavened with a bluesy vigor and a cradling of the microphone like a lover's neck, that the kids of Beijing loved to hear and to sing, again and again. The Dylan of China is hitting his stride now; the audience is remembering what they want now.
Not that Cui Jian is not political, not at all. That too is a part of being a rock star in China, then and now. In China, especially during Cui Jian's generation in the 1970's and 1980's, the smothering hypocrisy of political programs and sloganeering of the Cultural Revolution were all bound up with the fierce inner struggles of youth - frustrations that need a poetic outlet, that he provides. In one of his signature songs, "A Piece of Red Cloth," he speaks of all those nonsensical political slogans, the whips off his red headband and ties it around his eyes as he sings, blinded and seeing red, nearly to the end of the song, when he removes it again in a hopeful gesture.
A Billion Plus
Offstage, he isn't shy about giving his political opinion, or to sound off on the state of rock'n'roll in the post-Tiananmen era. "We were kind of individual," he says.
"Nowadays, it's too commercial. If you can't make money in China people will think you are stupid, even if you have spirit, even if you have energy."
He and his band were lucky, he says, because they grew up in a time of transition between the mass political culture and the new mass capitalist culture.
If the Chinese music industry were as developed as America's there's little doubt that Cui Jian would be the most popular rock star in the world. The number of his fans among the billion-plus Chinese in mainland China, where big city fans from 20 to 40 years old listen to him on bootlegged cassettes, is enormous.
But at Summer Stage, he is introduced by New York City Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, who, embarrassingly, doesn't know much about him at all. He introduces Cui as "the leader of the Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement."
At a press conference the next day Cui is quick to clarify, saying that his presence at the demonstrations in Beijing in 1989 was not much appreciated by the government or the students.
"CJ" to Friends
The Chinese audience at Central Park and at the Bowery Ballroom, where Cui played two more sold-out shows last August, shouts along with him in Mandarin, word for word when he sings his 1994 hit "Hongqi Xia de Dan" ("Balls Under the Red Flag"):
"Opportunity knocks, but who knows what they're supposed to do?
The Red Flag still waves without a fixed course
The Revolution still goes on, but the old geezers are the strong ones
Money blows in the wind, we have no ideals"
Cui is compared to Bob Dylan, but he's closer to the late Russian protest singer Vladimir Vysotsky in his open defiance of the political system in which he lives. Listen to a Cui Jian record and you'll hear a cross between his classic rock beginnings, with a Springsteen-influenced driving guitar and a baritone sax, and his latest style of spitfire modern rap. But his music, which has always incorporated traditional instruments, such as the zither and the Chinese flute, is sung all in Mandarin, and overpowers its influences, and becomes its own. Cui is modest about the comparisons and the praise.
"I feel an honor because they are my heroes," Cui says in halting English of Springsteen and Dylan, his thinning rocker's mop half covering his eyes. Cui, "CJ" to his friends, lives in Beijing and insists that Chinese and American realities are still very different, but says he feels that music transcends the differences. Over his 15-year career Cui has listened to lots of Western music, and lately, he says he has been listening to the new record by hard-core rappers Public Enemy.
The Talking Heads
"I never know who or what they're angry for, but their music gets me angry for myself," he says. "They point out some of the problems in their life and I think the first way to solve the problems is to find out what they are. That energy they have is a really good feeling."
His band members are an eclectic lot. Eddie Luc Lalasoa, from Madagascar, plays lead guitar; Liu Yuan, the bespectacled wielder of the band's signature mean bass sax, is an accomplished jazz musician in his own right. Bei Bei, the drummer, is now known for his rapping style as much as his talents as a percussionist.
Cui Jian himself is the child of Korean-Chinese parents, his father an administrator at a government agency that aided minorities. A talented youngster, Cui Jian learned to play the trumpet, landed a job with the Beijing Philharmonic, and thus escaped a ten-year trip to the countryside for "reeducation" as a farmworker. His evolution into rock star started when, after listening to records of the Rolling Stones, the Talking Heads, and the Police, he started playing like them in his spare time - and one thing led to another.
He is asked to comment on the recent Chinese crackdown on Falun Gong, the spiritual exercise movement led by Queens resident and recent Chinese immigrant, Li Hongzhi. Cui says he thinks it's an example of how "the system is not changing at all."
But is Li a dangerous man?
"That's stupid," says Cui. "I don't like him because he says his followers aren't supposed to listen to rock'n'roll," but, quick to see the bright side of things, Cui adds, "Master Li has a lot of imagination. I don't believe in him but I think he could be a good artist or writer or director."
The band has come a long way since their first gigs. Does Cui Jian think that he's made a difference in China over the years?
"Some people think I'm like a student in high school who hates my teacher even after I graduate," says Cui, echoing critics of his political lyrics. "Those people say that China has already changed, but I don't think it has changed enough."
To reach Jonathan S. Landreth or Jonah Greenberg:
E-mail: jlandreth@virtualchina.net
greenberg@virtualchina.net
Phone: 212-226-1160
