How TV show The Big Band became a surprise haven of expression in China

A special edition in collaboration with Active Faults

Hello and welcome to Concrete Avalanche, a Substack about music from China. Thanks very much for reading.

Something a bit different here: I’ve teamed up with the excellent and always insightful

Active Faults

for a special edition looking at mainstream rock ’n’ roll reality TV show The Big Band.

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Even before the third season of The Big Band drew to a close in late October, fans of the Chinese rock reality contest had already begun penning obituaries. The show, which has transformed the landscape for Chinese rock bands and the previously low-key industry that surrounded them, launched its third series with plenty of fanfare in August, following a three-year wait since season two. Yet its return also came with rumours swirling that this would be its last hurrah. 

By the time Helen Feng of the band Nova Heart told cameras she hoped The Big Band would continue because “sometimes you need to step up onto such a mainstream stage to say what you want to say”, many viewers had already concluded that the party was over. Some posited that the pool of good quality bands who were willing to go on the show had essentially been exhausted, others pointed to declining viewership and ratings, yet most merely mourned the expected passing of what had come to be seen as a rare space for relatively unconventional entertainment in China.

As the country’s “main melody” grew ever louder, The Big Band had come to be seen as one of the few mainstream shows that, relatively speaking, danced to the beat of a different drum. 

Hosted on mainstream platform iQIYI, The Big Band launched in 2019 and quickly became a sensation. The Pop Idol-like show followed a standard formula: contesting bands played one song each round and were given various challenges (perform a cover, write a song in 24 hours, collaborate with a special guest, that sort of thing). Their performances were critiqued by celebrity judges and voted upon by an assembled crowd of seasoned music critics (including venue owners, other band members and writers), a studio audience, and the aforementioned judges. That may not sound particularly revolutionary, yet in a country where rock music had barely been given a glimpse of the mainstream before, it was revelatory. 

Overnight, bands who had previously been playing gigs to audiences of a few hundred were suddenly fronting campaigns for international cosmetics brands and getting booked for arena shows. There was also a knock-on effect for previously “underground” music venues, who faced higher levels of scrutiny as they abruptly became a viable entertainment option for far larger audiences than they’d been used to.

So how did a slightly silly mainstream TV show become a beacon for freedom of expression in China? I met up with

Active Faults

in a Google Doc to talk a bit about The Big Band’s significance and to pick over its apparent demise…

Jiulianzhenren, break out stars on series one, returned for series three of The Big Band because they said they’d heard it was the last series of the show.

Em: The most critical question to be asked here is a basic one: what do people need the show for? My tentative take is that the specific version of “rock music” curated by The Big Band props up a safe space of release and recognition for the masses. Observing the Weibo and Douban chitchats surrounding the show has been eye-opening. Many are savouring it as one of the last remaining media phenomenon with a rebellious spirit yet to be censored or terminated. Rock as seen on The Big Band is a symbol of resilience, offering breathing room when the ghost of Zero COVID lingers and more control on culture awaits. Some fear that it will not be allowed to renew for another season. 

Jake: It’s fascinating to me that The Big Band could become seen as a space of free expression and alternative thinking given the way it’s set up. I remember when it first launched that I was especially disappointed with the “zaniness” of it all — I knew there would be some of that for it to be palatable as a mainstream TV show, but at least with The Rap of China, despite all its faults, they tried to make it feel “cool” and relatively “edgy”. With The Big Band, it just felt like there was a lot of overt silliness, which only magnified the awkwardness of some of the bands. 

How series one of The Big Band was advertised.

But in a lot of ways, The Rap of China actually presented a “safe” version of hip hop after more underground and “challenging” versions had been scrubbed from the internet in China (for example, nearly all of 阴三儿 Yin San’er’s discography disappeared from streaming sites). 

What you’re saying is that The Big Band may be shiny and silly on the surface, but people actually saw it as a rare space for cultural wiggle room?

Em: I think so — and perhaps precisely because of its farcical appearance. When the main melody rages on, untempered silliness is a luxury. Big Band’s main producer and judge Ma Dong told reporters that the show’s only goal is to simply create and export “positive emotional values” (正向情绪价值) through content that makes the audience happy. This alone is a provocative message nowadays, considering how “entertainment for entertainment’s sake” in China is hard to come by without propaganda as its undertones. Look no further than the Spring Festival Gala (春晚) to see audiences struggling to get a good laugh without getting lectured. 

What’s more interesting to me is how the creation of positive emotional values involves and permits an articulation of negativity. Some of the most popular stages this season are melancholic, if not outright depressing and explicitly contradictory to the “common prosperity” vision CCP mouthpieces are claiming we have achieved.

This season’s viral performance, ‘Fallacy’ (‘大梦’) from the band Varihnaz (瓦伊纳), is a first person account of an ordinary working class man and his mundane misery. It secured the highest number of audience votes at the time of filming (219 out of 242), before going on to attract huge views within the week of airing and over 5,000 comments on streaming platforms. Thousands were moved to tears with its piercing portrayal of reality.

Many resonate with a not-so-glamourous narrative of life in China that contests the all-is-well facade. Discussion threads on Zhihu and Douban feature commenters telling of their own struggles in life. Some went as far to say that the refrain in the song, “what shall be done?” is an implicit criticism of the party-state that “cannot be discussed any further”.

Likewise, MaYuan Poets’ (麻园诗人) angsty rendition of ‘Tatami’ tells of the difficulties of pursuing one’s dreams as unrecognised musicians. Viewers welcomed their blood-boiling performance as an anthem, again, for everyone labouring to bounce back after three hellish years.

When MaYuan were told to adapt a chirpy 00s bop, ‘Rainbow’s Smile’ * (‘彩虹的微笑’) by Wang Xinling during the show, they wracked their brains for days. They couldn’t stomach the bursting positivity and hopefulness in the original lyrics that’s almost disparaging to sing in today’s day and age. In the end, they sought out a young boy as a guest singer to sing those lines on their behalf. In MaYuan’s strain to lighten up we see how government-mandated “positive energy” (正能量) is allowed to be rebutted on the Big Band. The show offers a dopamine hit with its comedic backbone and gripping musical performances, but also acts as a space where people can let loose and see their own agony reflected back at them. 

Jake: That sense of it being a “safe space” I suppose in a lot of ways reflects how narrow the space is elsewhere. I saw one comment on Weibo saying, “if there’s really no next season, then all I have is films and Netflix.”

And of course, there were still limits to how far it could go — winners of season two, Re-TROS, had their lyrics cleaned up for example (resulting in them singing “sun on the beach” instead of “son of a bitch” in one case); Joyside, a band who were renowned for their rock ’n’ roll lifestyle back in their heyday (partly captured in the documentary Beijing Bubbles), had their drummer edited out of the show throughout with rumours suggesting this was due to his less-than-harmonious past.

But even within the constraints of mainstream Chinese entertainment, the show still found ways to surprise, across all of its seasons.

The way that Hedgehog drummer Atom had her status as a single mother played up in the first series, for example, was really interesting to see at a time when there’s a strong top-down push on “traditional family values”. And even on the latest series, I was interested to see how flamboyant Second Hand Rose — a band known for their strong Dongbei aesthetic and some gender fluid outfits — would be allowed to be, but they managed to bring some of that flavour to their performances and even ended up as champions.

Em: Their victory is particularly shocking if you are familiar with the current landscape of Chinese entertainers and reality shows. No one else quite dares to mirror their psychedelic stage design and genre-defying artist image. For a band delivering performances on the edge of lunacy to emerge as an undisputed winner takes a crowd that finds their hysteria relatable. 

I am reminded of “insanity talk” (发疯文学), an internet vernacular I’ve briefly written about here, that is used by netizens to vent through gibberish. It emerged and gained traction in the second half of 2022 at the height of Zero COVID, an inevitable product of collective trauma across multiple generations to express serious distress through extremely unserious nonsense. Similarly, Liang Long, the lead vocalist of Second Hand Rose, asserted that the band has always been very “serious”, striving to be a “representation of an era”. Big Band and Second Hand Rose’s performative insanity it houses is what people need. It vocalises the pains of an unfortunate lot and their futile attempt at quelling it. 

Jake: I wonder if there’s something in Second Hand Rose being a slightly older band — they formed in 1999 and came to prominence on the “underground” scene during an era of slightly more space in terms of artistic expression. They came with a certain confidence in their style and outlook that was reminiscent of Wutiaoren, another older band (formed 15 years ago) who became mainstream famous during season two of The Big Band for their laissez-faire, don’t-really-care attitude — wearing flip-flops on stage and (shock, horror) making last minute changes to their set.

We could probably do a whole discussion just based around Wutiaoren, but without wanting to get too sidetracked, it’s been fascinating to see them balance out the “playing the mainstream TV game” with their pre-existing folk hero status and a newer role as sort of flag bearers of Chinese “glocalisation”, with academic events at both Harvard and Yale.

This latter role comes in part from Wutiaoren emphasising their regional identity and insisting on singing in Cantonese, not in Mandarin Chinese, on the show. Jiulianzhenren, another Guangdong band who took part in the first Big Band series (and briefly the third), did something similar and were especially bold in continuing to sing in their Hakka dialect given they were a young, new act and were pointedly grilled on this aspect of their songwriting during the show. 

Given the pushback against certain dialects in other parts of life in China, it’s notable that the third series of the show has doubled down on this, with Anda Union performing songs in Mongolian and Vareihnaz singing partly in Zhuang dialect.

Em: And if you observe closely the public reception to those two bands, the marked difference is even more intriguing. Viewers react negatively to Anda Union and critique the heavy emphasis on their Mongolian heritage, calling them a “Gala Band” (meaning too loyalist) that should appear on CCTV-3, the (ethnic diversity) arts and culture channel of the national broadcaster. 

Vareihnaz, on the other hand, is widely loved in a way not dissimilar to how Wutiaoren was lauded as a “voice of the people”, with a kind of “untamed” quality (野生感), a truly accessible band who’s in touch with the masses. They owe a large portion of their popularity to how much they are unlike musicians because their day job is farming in Guangxi, one of the most remote and agricultural provinces in China. Their lyrics are deliberately conversational, stripped bare of poeticism. Expert judges’ high-brow attempt to sophisticate the show was dramatically thwarted by their complete lack of pretense, when professional jargon used to analyse their music went over their heads. They just sing what needs to be expressed, Vareihnaz said. 

Jake: This makes me think of the winners of the last series, Re-TROS, who felt very much like a “critics’ band” and whose main story arc was all about their technical ability and mission to “take Chinese music to a new level” as frontman Hua Dong said on the show. They were basically the antithesis of Vareihnaz.

Em: Many questioned why Re-TROS won — in my circles that is, the young and casual listeners of rock music who are accustomed to hearing highly palatable pop hits that speak to the general public. To us, Re-TROS felt too “irrelevant”, even though their technical ability is objectively admirable. Vareihnaz’s popularity further illustrates this aversion for the “bigger-than-life”, intensified by the pandemic. A disillusioned society wants to see the dust, the flesh and the gore because everything else no longer speaks true to their immediate surroundings. In fact, some are saying that even Vareihnaz is too glamourised and misrepresenting real-life farmers. This sparked a whole new debate on Va Philosophy (瓦学), the implications of the band’s “neo-ruralist” image.

There’s also a connection here with the rise of “the earthen” (土味) in recent years. A new swathe of working class influencers on Chinese internet have viewers flocking to their “rustic” or rural content, be it beachcombing (赶海), farming, dancing to tacky music, or simply cooking a meal with natural and basic produces. The majority of them are based on Kuaishou, Douyin’s backcountry cousin with drastically different user profiles. Its core value being to see “every kind of life”, Kuaishou does indeed reflect, to a larger extent, everyday experiences of living in China below the top 1% of the pyramid. It is one of few tech giants that actually turned a profit in 2023, overcoming the financial fiasco in 2022 of a 9 billion RMB loss. 

From Li Ziqi to 寒王, 郭老师, 药水哥 and “giao哥”, 土味 internet personalities gained attention in the past 5 to 6 years because they are comfortably unheroic, like Vareihnaz. Their earthenness makes their silliness approachable and entertaining. Re-TROS, on the other hand, stands like a flamingo amongst pelicans.

Jake: They do seem to represent a different vein of China’s music scene almost. Re-TROS ended up working on videos with Mercedes-Benz, which is hard to picture Vareihnaz doing any time soon. 

This touches on another aspect of The Big Band: Re-TROS not only ended up doing adverts with Merc, but they also packed out Shanghai’s Mercedes-Benz Arena with a crowd of around 9,000 (I’m old enough to remember them playing to more like 2-300 in the old Yuyintang venue in Shanghai). They also produced part of the soundtrack for a Tencent production of The Three-Body Problem, which was a pretty massive deal. Whether they brought The Big Band to another level or not, the show certainly helped them get to another level — and it’s done this for other bands, too.

So if that show no longer exists, what happens now? For some of the bands, it seems there are a couple of (broad) routes available: go back to pretty much what they were doing before, possibly with bigger audiences (depending on how far they got on the show); or attempt to push further into the mainstream and follow in the footsteps of Wutiaoren’s Ren Ke, who has appeared on a host of non-rock entertainment shows since doing The Big Band.

There’s also the question of what it means for the wider music scene in China. Can it continue to grow or will the extra scrutiny that the show’s success has brought it end up throttling its sense of creativity and expression? In some respects it’s been great to see bands who were toiling away playing in front of small audiences finally get some wider recognition and appreciation (and a belated pay day). But on the other, I wonder if some on the scene were quite happy staying “underground” without so much attention and all the baggage that that comes with in China today. 

Em: This is a universal dilemma for all content creators in China’s cultural scene: whether to be an artist or an entertainer. Choosing the former would mean years of fumbling with boundaries and caution tapes, going unrecognised, expressing but also dealing with endless frustration and drawbacks. Choosing the latter entails playing safe and earning seniority as meagre protection against potentially grave consequences, enjoying the limelight but also scrutiny on the skeletons in the closet, receiving cheques and maybe drifting away from their content-creation eventually. It’s truly a toss-up without a correct answer.

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That’s it for this edition. If you haven’t already, make sure to sign up for Active Faults here. As you can tell from Em’s comments above, it’s a super smart and entertaining look at contemporary Chinese culture.