Rock Music in China

“Fuelled by the new sounds that entered China's illegal doorways, and driven by a desire to move beyond the stereotypical hard rock idiom, new bands started to experiment with different sounds. Today, sounds ranging from hardcore punk to deep house can be heard from Urumqi to Beijing. Let's get dakou'ed!

By the end of the twentieth century a new generation emerged in urban China, named after the cut CDs available at illegal markets in Chinese cities. The cut on the margin of these ‘dakou’ CDs, as they are called in Chinese, has brought this young generation to the centre of global music culture. One of its followers writes on a website: ‘When Americans fiercely give themselves a cut, they also give the world a possibility of communism and unity. Our government doesn’t encourage 1.3 billion people to listen to rock and roll. “Dakou” products usher a million Chinese youth into a new wave, a new listening sensibility, a new awareness, a new mind and a new set of values.’ ‘Dakou’ stands for far more than just CDs that infringe copyright legislation; it stands for a lifestyle very much in vogue among China’s urban youth.”

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