The March Tentacle features the following book review and an interview with musician and activist Fred Ho.

Chinese popular music is less a mere adjunct to leisure than a battlefield on which ideological struggle is waged.

In Like a Knife, China scholar and UW faculty member Andrew Jones presents an absorbing sociopolitical analysis of Chinese popular music between the late 1970s and early 1990s, a period of unprecedented musical ferment in post-revolutionary China. Although China's musical landscape has changed radically since the book's publication in 1992, Jones' examination of the dichotomy between state-sponsored and underground spheres of contemporary music still makes for engrossing reading, and remains the only serious book-length study of a watershed era in Chinese musical history.

As a musical collaborator of many of the principal figures in the book, and as author of a forthcoming account of my own experiences playing in China during the same period described by Jones, I read Like a Knife with more than passing interest. Jones' insights enabled me to draw connections that had eluded me as a subjective participant, giving me a new appreciation of the complex forces at play in contemporary Chinese culture.

Jones' underlying thesis is that in the modern Chinese musical milieu, "genre is a function of ideology, not musical style." He argues that contemporary Chinese popular music can be divided into two basic genres: the entrenched, state-controlled tongsu, or "mass" music, and the more recent oppositional subculture of urban Chinese rock.

For decades after the 1949 communist revolution, music's sole purpose in China was as a transmitter of political and moral propaganda. The only forms of music sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party were ideologically correct socialist anthems, Madame Mao's revolutionary operas, and songs extolling the praises of the Motherland. Even Chinas rich classical and folk music traditions came under fire as representative of feudalist "old thinking." (Western music, of course, was virtually outlawed as an ideological contaminant.) Individual identity was subsumed in the long march toward a utopian Chinese socialist society, leaving little room for expression of personal feelings in the arts. Not surprisingly, most of the music produced during this era was dull as day-old bread.

Only after the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping opened the nation's doors to outside influence in the late 1970s did Chinese music begin to wriggle out of its ideological straitjacket. Government control over artistic expression relaxed, within limits, and creative impulses that had been stifled during China's disastrous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution were once again allowed to bloom, finding vent in confessional "wound literature," the cinema of the so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers, and a resurgence of Western-influenced popular music. "Bourgeois" musical values - as opposed to revolutionary paeans to Chairman Mao and songs praising model workers and soldiers like the mythical Lei Feng - crept back into the mainstream in the late 1970s in the form of glossy, saccharine love songs imported from Taiwan and Hong Kong, most notably the chart-topping hits of Taiwanese songstress Deng Lijun. These songs had an impact on the Chinese public out of all proportion to their surface banality, as Jones makes clear with a quote from the well-known mainland songwriter Jia Din:

The first time I heard Deng Lijun's songs was in 1978. I just stood there listening for a whole afternoon. I never knew before that the world had such good music. I felt such pain. I cried. I was really very excited and touched, and suddenly realized that my work in the past had no emotional force.

Before long singers in the mold of Deng Lijun were all the rage in China, flooding the airwaves and appearing in huge arenas backed by anonymous musicians from state song and dance troupes. But the singers' glamorous public image belied a life of virtual servitude to Party apparatchiks who controlled every last detail of their repertoire, lyrics, and performance style. Though ideological constraints on subject matter were relaxed to accommodate softcore love songs, mild social criticism, and even lighthearted parodies of Cultural revolution-era anthems, tongsu music remained essentially true to its prescribed function as music for "the people."

But just who were the people, anyway? Not the musicians, certainly. Jones cites an amusing passage from "A Superfluous Story" by author/composer/rock singer Liu Sola, in which she describes a fictional discussion between a tongsu singer and a government censor over the words to one of her songs:

"'Kissing,' 'losing sleep' - these lyrics don't describe contemporary youth... Then there's the end of the song. It should be the people, not 'ourselves.'"

"Aren't we the people? Aren't the people us?"

"No, the people are the people, the people are the People. They're not me, and not you, they're not anyone, they're the people."

In the words of singer Jing Gangshan, the difference between tongsu and the rock music that emerged in China in the 1980s is simply that "Rock musicians sing songs that don't have government approval. Tongsu singers do." Perhaps more significantly, rock musicians write and perform their own songs, while tongsu singers have no choice but to perform music that is written or filtered by government ideologues. As Jones puts it, "Tongsu singers are divested of control over their songs, their voices, even their bodies... what places rock in opposition to tongsu music, indeed what makes rock 'rock,' is its self-conscious reclamation of a subjective voice."

For many Chinese, the embodiment of that voice was Cui Jian. In post-reform China, Cui Jian was John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Kurt Cobain all rolled into one, a one-man rock-and-roll revolution whose rough-edged songs of alienation spoke volumes to a generation searching for identity amidst the precariously shifting realities of late twentieth century China. Cui Jian's music represented the first complete break with the thinly veiled socialist musical orthodoxy of tongsu. While tongsu music functioned for the most part as an opiate for the masses, Cui Jian dared to sing about such verboten topics as individualism, sexuality, and, by inference, the integrity of the Communist Party. To a generation numbed by deadening propaganda, the honesty of Cui Jian's lyrics was like a clarion call. His figure necessarily looms large in Like a Knife, which takes its title from one of Cui Jian's lyrics ("The guitar in my hands is like a knife... I want to cut at your hypocrisy until I see some truth").

Cui Jian's early career reads like a good paranoid conspiracy thriller, as the authorities constantly harass him at every turn. It didn't help that his most affecting song, "Yiwu Suoyou" ("Nothing to My Name"), was adopted as the unofficial anthem of the protesters encamped at Tiananmen Square in 1989. But the sensibility embodied by Cui Jian was a spark that could not be extinguished, and other musical rebels soon followed in his wake. Even more extreme in this context was He Yong, China's first self-professed "punk," whose "Garbage Dump" was a strong antidote to the propaganda-lite dished out by the CCP censors who controlled tongsu music:

The place where we live is like a garbage dump
The people are like insects
Everyone's struggling and stealing
We eat our consciences and shit ideology
Is this a joke?
No - tear it down!

While tongsu music was performed in government-controlled theaters and sports arenas and on widely broadcast TV variety shows, the furtive rock underground operated on the margins of society, hounded by the authorities into the relative safety of basements and private "parties" hosted by the foreign diplomatic community. For many young Beijingers, these parties were the Chinese equivalent of San Francisco's Summer of Love or the punk explosion of the late 1970s in New York and London:

For some fans, a rock party may just be a chance to let loose, to scream and shout in relative safety and anonymity. For others, including the majority of rock musicians themselves, participation is seen as one manifestation of the individualism and anti-feudalism upon which the whole subculture is founded.

Sadly, the era covered by Jones in Like a Knife was a fleeting golden age of idealism that was soon hopelessly corrupted by narcissism and the pressures of the marketplace. In a cruel twist of irony, the Chinese rock revolution was brought down not by gun-toting Public Security agents but by the virus of corporate rock culture. Predatory foreign record companies arrived on the scene, eager to cash in on China's booming youth culture market; most musicians were only too happy to sign on the dotted line, in keeping with the nation's newfound obsession with me-first mercantilism. Rock music emerged from its underground of secret parties onto the stages of slick new commercial venues like the Beijing Hard Rock Cafe. Perhaps most significantly, MTV and its pantheon of questionable role models invaded China via satellite TV, forever changing the face of Chinese rock.

Gone were the amateurish but refreshingly sincere garage bands of China's first rock generation, supplanted by self-consciously polished performers embodying the MTV aesthetic of style over substance. Even the "Peking Punks" movement of the late 1990s, ostensibly a reaction against the gutless commercialism of much Chinese rock, succeeded only in substituting self-destructive nihilism in place of the idealistic humanism of Cui Jian and his kindred spirits.

Viewed from 1999, China's rock and roll revolution was largely a failure. Yet for a few heady years the music of Cui Jian and others was a tremendously liberating force for Chinese youth, a vital outlet for long-suppressed dreams, longings, and fears. Jones succeeds admirably in capturing a pivotal moment in China's musical evolution that, despite its failings, should provide inspiration for creative musicians anywhere who believe in music's power as an agent of social change.

Dennis Rea, the Tentacle's Great Helmsman, is a longtime Seattle creative guitarist. A member of LAND, Stackpole, Axolotl and Outland, Dennis also lends his talents to numerous other projects.

I was especially interested in Fred's creation of work that's highly political while being soulful and emotionally engaging. I wanted to know more about the gorgeously powerful unity of his progressive activism and his artistry.

Jeff Perlstein: Its a real pleasure to welcome you to Seattle. What will you be performing this evening, and what projects have you been working on lately?

Fred Ho: Tonight I'll be doing a solo baritone sax recital of Asian Pacific Islander folk songs that I've reworked, reinterpreted for a radical Asian Pacific-American sensibility. These are folk songs that I've found in the last 15 years of my research and investigation into the heritage and traditions of Asian Pacific-Americans. They're folk songs that come from the ancestral homelands in China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines that have particular significance because I think they reflect the struggles and the experiences of "The Folk" - the workers and the peasants. I've readapted them with my own late-20th century matriarchal socialist sensibility.

Recently I've created this opera we'll be touring with early next year, released as a double CD on Koch, called "Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Woman Warriors." It's a mythological telling of how these African and Asian woman warriors from the past come together and free Assata Shakur and take her to Cuba. I've done the 1999 Womyn Warriors/Sheroes calendar; for every day of the year it celebrates a woman rebel, someone who broke the mold, who challenged patriarchal society - in all fields, whether it be the sciences or the arts, warfare or politics. It celebrates these women from many different cultures and societies. There's also a new opera of mine called "Night Vision - A Vampire Opera," in which the vampire is a female vampire but, even though she's the vampire in the story itself, the real vampire is the music business.

JP: You referred to yourself as a "matriarchal socialist." Would you explain what that means to you?

FH: If we take the position that the problems are eurocentrism, white supremacy, racism, patriarchal capitalism, then we must ask ourselves: what we'll replace those oppressions with? What is our vision of liberation? I believe it's multicultural internationalist matriarchal socialism. I believe that before the rise of class society, society was matrilineal and matrifocal - that there was a lot more egalitarianism. And that had to do primarily with the position of women, which was much stronger and more central to the functioning of society, to the running of society, the direction of society.

Today when we talk about who's last in society, we're talking about women - across the board, in all cultures, for the most part. And if we take the view that women bear 100 percent of the world's children, grow 60 percent of the world's food, do 70 percent of the world's work - however, they earn 10 percent of the world's income and own less than one percent of the world's property - then to reverse that injustice would be to overthrow patriarchy and replace that with matriarchy.

Now that's not saying that women become like men, become oppressors and so forth. It's a complete re-visioning of society in which the producers get what they're entitled to. So that's in a nutshell my vision of matriarchal socialism, which many socialists don't articulate as such because they still have problems dealing with male supremacy as well as issues of white supremacy. They don't respond to the world's majority. That majority being women who are the producers of the next generation, of the majority of our food and our work.

JP: Recently in the Tentacle, a local journal of creative musics, there's been a heated discussion touched off by an op-ed piece by Dennis Rea entitled "Identity Politics in Creative Music: Rebuilding the Walls?" He expresses concern over a trend he sees as "the co-opting of creative music as a soapbox for expressing narrow notions of cultural identity." Rea decries "the new border mentality" embodied in the works of John Zorn, the Asian-American jazz movement, and the Gay/Lesbian American Composers Series. He argues that "certain musicians these days seem bent on redrawing the lines and reversing the progress that's been made toward establishing a non-culturally-defined musical lingua franca." What are your thoughts on this topic?

FH: There are a number of cultural studies people that I've read who have this same kind of framework. They come from a liberal left angle that we should have universalism and we should be free to draw from whatever influences we want. For example, Hakim Bey and a lot of the people from the anarchist school feel that cultural appropriation is fine - that in fact it's radical to do so. And I think its the same old tired white chauvinism that tends to think somehow in the past creative music was free, was liberated, did not have inequality, did not reflect issues of imperialism, of national oppression, of racism, of privilege, and so forth. And that's a mythological past that never existed except for those people who enjoyed it - but it didn't include myself and many others.

The question of identity is very important, and what we need to get beyond is oppression and racism. Not beyond identity. We need to maintain identity because it's part of the diversity of all life. Life without it would be dull, for one, and it would not have any sources of tension or challenges for us. So I have a problem with a lot of these, what I call closet white supremacists, because they actually don't come out and say, "Hey, our problem is that we feel somehow guilty or indicted and that these ethnic explorations seem to be competing more with what we're doing, either in terms of grants or recognition or whatever."

On the other hand, I'm gonna support him in a qualified way in that I do have criticisms of a lot of the people he mentioned. For example, John Zorn is a Zionist, I feel. John Zorn is a racist. His whole racist erotic fascination with the dismemberment of Japanese women - y'know, he's actually had protests at his concerts by groups who do work around anti-violence against women, anti-violence against Asians. So to me his radical Jewishness is not very radical. It's not the Jewishness of a Marx, or the Jewishness of an Emma Goldman, or of the anti-Nazi resistance fighters who took up arms against the fascists. It's an ethnic multikulti capitalism.

And I would make the same accusations about some of these Asian- American jazz musicians, some of whom I came out of that same movement [with]. There's another kind of multicultural capitalism. It's not about challenging imperialism. I think that they open themselves to these kinds of criticisms because their work, I find, is self-serving. So they're not examples of a radical or revolutionary work.

On the other hand, the tone of where [Rea] is coming from is one of trying to protect white privilege, white male privilege. That is the primary thing that I'm going to attack - I'm not going to primarily attack John Zorn or some of these so-called Asian-American jazz musicians, because I do criticize them in other forums.

And I think the question that faces white Americans is "what is my identity if I don't want to subscribe to this white settler colonial heritage and legacy?" And I think that it's a new identity that has to be forged in struggle to transform America. We support white people who use their cultural expressions or who are involved in struggle, that identify with the struggles of oppressed nationalities, because they find their own heritage to be very problematic - and it is a very problematic one. Though there have been white freedom fighters, from John Brown to Sacco and Venzetti, etc., that can be celebrated.

I think that the expense of becoming white has been the de-ethnicization of European Americans. And so what we find are the John Zorn kind of phenomena - people going back to their Jewish heritage or identity but in a narrow, limited, non-anti-imperialist fashion. It becomes a form of multicultural capitalism. A way of capitalizing in a self-serving way, as opposed to a more politicized, radicalized way that challenges injustice. For example, the same Jewish freedom fighters that opposed Nazism supported the liberation of Ethiopia. Do we have that kind of solidarity? No, we don't have that kind of internationalist anti-imperialist solidarity from a John Zorn. Zorn should be, for example, supporting the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and some of these Asian American jazz musicians should be doing the same thing. Supporting the liberation of indigenous Hawaiians, for instance.

We don't have that kind of thing because its all about my ethnic capitalist piece of the pie, let me be cool, let me be OK with myself and let me play a little bit of the oppression card but not get to the root of the oppression. So it is very self-serving. Because when one looks at one's own oppression as a particular identity or nationality, then one should look at the systemic roots of that and find solidarity with all people struggling for liberation.

JP: What suggestions do you have for artists interested in engaging these complex issues of equity and justice?

FH: I think the foremost thing we need to do as radical artists is to resist [the] commodification, the star syndrome, the individualism that's promoted by capitalism in its contextualization of art and the artist. What I mean by that is we need to see ourselves as warriors within a broader social movement. I'm of the opinion that we need to create work that is both aesthetically dangerous and threatening to the establishment, and at the same time work that is, in terms of form, not easily co-optable. If it is, we need to drop it and move on to something different. At the same time as we develop content that has a radicalizing impact, we need to conduct ourselves, both in our personal behavior as well as in our business practices, in ways that personify the values that we articulate.

I think artists need to move much more to the left. We need to see ourselves as shapers of society, and not only in our artistic work, our expressions. We need to struggle much more to find solidarity with broad social movements and identify with, give voice to, lend inspiration and vision to those social movements. So I think we have to do more of that, and we need to struggle with artists to be about that. We need to impact upon people's consciousness and see that creating a new art and new culture can't happen without a new society, without new structures. So we need to redouble our commitment to that.

JP: Thanks so much for taking the time to share some of your thoughts. How can interested folks find out more about you and your work?

FH: If people are interested in what we're discussing, my ideas, my work especially, please check out my Web site at www.bigredmedia.com or email me at bigredmedia@hotmail.com (bigredmedia being my production company). I would hope that people check out independent bookstores and find the 1999 Womyn Warriors/Sheroes Calendar, the Sounding Off! book, as well as my many recordings available in record stores on Koch. Thanks.

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Dennis Rea responds: Fred Ho's knee-jerk assertion that I am a "closet white supremacist" is too ludicrous to dignify with a defense, as anyone who knows me can attest. But tirades of this sort are only to be expected from an artist whose entire shtick is based on victim politics. A careful reading of my article will reveal that, far from attacking anyone's ethnicity or right to explore their musical heritage, I was simply advocating greater unity in the face of recent trends toward cultural Balkanization in "new music." It's a curious paradox that Ho, a self-styled warrior in the cause of "multicultural internationalist matriarchal socialism," apparently finds the idea of a level playing field in creative music so threatening.