A weekend of studying before the last week yielded some free time to attend China’s largest music festival, Midi. Midi is China’s first modern music school, which years ago began hosting a festival showcasing the music of its students. What began as a one-day concert has evolved into a corporate-sponsored 4-day long extravaganza featuring five stages which each showcase a certain genre. After wandering around for two hours trying to find the park where this was taking place, we finally arrived to witness a very un-Chinese sight – there was a huge line of people who were all very well dressed. This was strange for two reasons. Firstly, the Chinese don’t line up and instead prefer to shove and push their way to their destination. The phenomenon of standing in a line, though rarely seen, is the result of the Beijing government preparing for the Olympics. On the 11th of every month, volunteers force masses of people into neat queue in order to board subways and busses. Though I imagine that this was originally difficult to manage, people are now doing it on their own, submitting to the government’s call to do their part to help out with the Olympics. The second strange incident was that everyone was very well dressed. However, they weren’t dressed in drab darks and gray dress shirts as if they were going to visit their in-laws, the uniform of most Chinese men I see on the street. They also weren’t they donning the gaudy jewelry and high-heels of Beijing sophisticates. Nor was anyone was trying to pull off something that doesn’t suit them, a common sight in Beijing’s bars. Rather, they were wearing very much the same thing I saw most people wearing at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago - hip, relaxed and well-put-together outfits that looked good on a scrawny person, such as an American hipster or an average Chinese guy.
As we drew closer, we quickly realized that a large number of the attendees were not Chinese, but rather were assorted foreigners. Perhaps a full eighth of the attendees were 老外. However, that did not make the mesmerizing effect of the crowd any less strange. Often when looking at the stage, you only see the back of people’s head – their hair. But, this crowd was different because everyone’s hair was black, which sort of hypnotized me. I felt empathy for the hypnotized lion who has cannot decipher one zebra from another when staring at a herd. This effect was magnified at the rock stage, as everyone was also wearing black t-shirts. Still, I wasn’t in enough of a trance to enjoy, Honey Gun, the nü-metal band (pictured left) that came out. They began their show by broadcasting, over the jumbo-tron, their music video, which depicted them racing cars through the streets of Shanghai and rocking out in both an abandoned apartment building and a cube floating over the city. When they finally came out, they were wearing the same clothes as in the music video. If that wasn’t disastrous enough, they began playing their instruments, which my companions and I took as a sign to see what else was going on at the festival.
There was a hip-hop stage where some American schmuck copped DJ Shadow and small rave tent, but the best part was the experimental music stage, in front of which about 200 gorgeous and incredibly dressed Chinese sat in the shade and listened to the ambient noise flowing from the speakers. As I had said earlier, the Chinese have a thing for photography and these people were no exception, as they continuously were snapping shots. However, these were the kind of people who preferred film over digital and would rather take a picture of their feet than a flower. Everyone was sitting with their self-designed clothes and a husband-wife group came out who played traditional Chinese instruments while doing noise. The wife must had been traditionally trained, as she clearly had control over her instrument. After we saw that, we decided to leave to go studying, as this last week is finals. In fact, I ought to get to studying right now.
