Oftentimes, life doesn’t play out like Disney movies; there are no sudden revelations or moments of eureka. Rather, the meaning of life and all its beauty is understood through a series of events: some of them joyful, some of them not; some of them intended, some of them unexpected.

They just happen.

The beauty just happens.

In my case, the MUSICAL EXPERIENCE just happened, and it led me to Chinese indie music.

1

It was an early winter day in Beijing - the fierce wind was blowing off the remnants of fallen leaves from the roadside trees. The sky was covered with a dense mixture of fog and clouds that I could hardly distinguish one from the other. Below the greyish sky, people walked in a hurry for mundane businesses they would forget about in a week, all of them detaching themselves temporarily from the world with their headphones, dreading the sound of their ordinary life.

A scene of almost mournful modernity.

And it was on this very day that indie music stepped into my life. I was walking home with my headphones plugged in, playing songs that were never known publicly in the introverted oriental land, but were once icons of popular culture on the other side of the planet. The distorted guitars gave me chills, and yet my heart was still empty. I was missing something important from the music.

“Classic rock songs weren’t enough,” I thought. I knew I must seek something buried deep in my cultural roots. Using the online music forums on my phone, I quickly found a few mandarin albums from the 2000s that I’d never listened to before and skimmed through their descriptions before click playing of Wan Xiaoli’s 2002 album 走过来 走过去 (Walking Here and There).

As I continued to read more about the albums, the word popped up… Indie. I continued to read: “it commonly refers to music produced independently from major record labels.” Simultaneously, a surprising serenity flowed through my head as the strumming acoustic guitar and Wan’s humming vocals created a tune like no other.

Wan’s music was of simplicity, and yet it discussed such a variety of subjects, ranging from the most commonly described love for mother to international relationships and warfare. However, it was the musical experience that made his music particularly special for me. Standing in a city street full of people but with no one willing to share their true selves with the world, I sensed the essence of Wan’s music: his sincerity and bursting emotions. These two features touched me deeply. The stories Wan told, the tales he sang, and the emotions he conveyed filled the hole in my heart with a medley of nostalgia, ecstasy, and desolation- the complex emotions I needed most on a cold winter day to vitalize my thoughts and fill my senses.

That was my first “musical experience”. Through it, I saw a realm of emotions surrounding me, kaleidoscopic scenes disguised in the form of the gently played notes and softly whispered tales. I had started to grasp what was hidden beneath indie music’s sincerity.

2

Unlike the first, my second musical experience happened during the summer. It was an ideal afternoon on the weekend: I had finished my work and was taking a nap after lunch. Some forty minutes later, the fat old sun beamed through the window and woke me up.

My head felt dizzy; I didn’t want to get up. Instead, I turned on my random music playlist and stayed in bed. When the first notes of the song played out, I immediately recognized the song without looking at its title. It was 河北墨麒麟 (The Black Qilin of Hebei) from the prominent Chinese indie rock band Omnipotent Youth Society.

The song unfolded with a slow-tempo lead-in using drums, bass, and some additional sound effects that illuminated the atmosphere, as if to match my drowsy mood. However, the song quickly turned to a progressive rock approach with the addition of guitars and brass instruments. Slowly yet steadily, the song pushed itself to climax, the part by which I gradually awoke. Listening to all the instruments playing in harmony was absolute satisfaction. The band performed it so well that, even without touching lyrics like Wan Xiaoli’s songs, it still moved me with the melody and the instrumentation.

Then the musical experience began: I visualized the song’s orchestral arrangements colliding with the rock elements like waves crashing against the shore, and I lay there in the intertidal zone, sensing the dynamics and movements from both sides of my body. My room fell apart, replaced by the boundless ocean; the roof above me changed into gigantic coconut leaves, casting shadows over the beach.

No, it can’t be. The song wasn’t about relaxation. Behind those musical shores were hidden dangers – the distorted guitars rumbling in the back, the inharmonic chords crawling beneath the surface. Though they were there from the start, they went unnoticed through their silent endurance, as if they were the staff of a grand show all hidden behind the curtain. Suddenly shocked by the screaming vocals, I saw the Qilin, the sacred mythological creature, emerging from the ocean. It dragged me downstream, all the way to Hebei, the industrial province of China, the hometown of the band.

Hebei is the nearest province to Beijing, but being close to the capital city didn’t benefit it; behind the rapid development of Beijing was the suffering of Hebei in multiple aspects. The province took in blue-collar workers and people Beijing left behind; it also endured the long-term aftermath of extensive industrialization to support the capital city’s economy. That’s where the Qilin took me. I could hear the place’s migrant workers calling for a way out; I could see their repetitive, hopeless lives spent serving “the common good”.

As the screaming vocals floated away, the song came to a close. The musical experience was over, and yet its effects were long-lasting. I understood that another essential part of Chinese indie music is its “Chinese” characteristics. It talked about the people on the same land as me; it is all about the emotions that my fellow countrymen experienced. Most importantly, they were not the emotions I saw in the newspapers and at the downtown centers; they were true, personal emotions that I felt connected with.

3

After everything Chinese indie music had given me, I was determined to offer something back. This autumn, I conducted a study on the cultural elements of Chinese indie music and the factors influencing them. I reviewed various academic sources on the topic, identified different cultures incorporated in Chinese indie music, and collected data from both personal experiences and online data. Ultimately, I came up with an academic paper and presented my results.

From my research, I concluded that the cultural category of ethnic folk (which illustrates lives in a certain region) is more likely to incorporate regional cultural elements. However, stylized indie (which employs various western music styles as the basis) was less likely to refer to regional culture. The mechanism behind the first claim was simple: ethnic folk songs tended to illustrate themes of a certain region; however, the low incorporation of regional culture in stylized indie was a likely result of the genre’s huge application of western music styles.

Furthermore, I recognized that socio-economic status (henceforth referred to as SES) was a determining factor in the cultural incorporation of Chinese indie music. In general, with lower SES came higher rates of regional culture incorporation, and with higher SES came higher rates of general traditional culture incorporation. The finding was consistent with my own observations. Growing up in an urban megacity and the cultural center of China, I was taught from a young age to recognize the importance of general traditional culture, as was the band JaJaTao from Beijing which implemented the traditional Chinese instrument suona into noise rock. Nevertheless, when I reviewed music from Gansu, my ancestral home and also a low-SES region, I found them mostly discussing the local customs and regional landmarks in a native tone. For example, the yellow river appeared multiple times as a motherly figure in the Gansu band Low Wormwood’s songs.

Through research, I created my own musical experience, one not of imagination, but of real-life achievement. They seemed to be disparate, but in essence, they were all rooted in my cultural resonance with Chinese indie music.

From simply feeling the musical experience to creating my own musical experience, I became imbued by Chinese indie music.

The musical experience just happened, and I found meaning in it. I found myself.