The Chinese Invasion (by Tunnel, Because it's Underground) Performance Report 1

Introduction
On April 31st, the Chinese underground band AV Okubo played to a barely- there Texan audience at the Denton venue Hailey's. The show was a part of the Chinese Invasion tour that brought the group, among others, on a blitzkrieg tour of the southwestern United States following their unprecedented reception at Austin's acclaimed South by Southwest festival. While marketed in the US as Chinese punk rock, the band does not easily fit into that peg, but may have been cast from the same die somewhere in it's genesis . Post- Punk and experimental are closer to the mark, if still not entirely descriptive of the group, but genre is periphery when concerning these musicians; the American interest lies in the origin, not the classification.


AV Okubo plays an American venue.



Music
AV Okubo opened the night with a set list of high energy, synthesizer- driven Chinese language melodies. The gritty, punk-inspired timbre of frontman Lu Yan will be familiar to American audiences on the Invasion Tour; the coupling with melodic synthesizer harmony may not be. Okubo's stage energy came courtesy of the high tempo drum rhythm played alongside a looped synthesized dance beat, often used as a platform for drummer Hu Juan to depart from. The band made full use of electronic effects, including the old megaphone-in-the-microphone punk standby. Here however, the gimmick is more Tienanmen Square and less Green Day.

Performers
The band, a four piece ensemble from Wuhan, takes obvious lessons from the west in terms of composition and dress. All in their early 20's, the musicians seem to be keenly aware of western culture and stage persona. Leather jackets, bleached hair, and low-slung guitars draw from punk sensibilities, and the attitude and delivery of Chinese revolutionary-themed lyrics allows the former to be authentic. Ending the set list on a drawn out, reverb-laden bass note, bass guitarist Zuo Yi threw his instrument violently on the ground, and ran off stage, lighting a cigarette.


Audience
The Wednesday performance kept up only a handful of Denton residents, almost entirely comprised of students from the University of North Texas. Small but spirited, the audience was not afraid to dance to the Chinese band's offerings, and often interacted humorously with the performers. When vocalist/keyboardist Lu Yan prefaced a song with “In old times, Chinese could destroy people with their minds”, the audience answered "Now what do you do?!” to which the leather jacket and chain choker clad bassist Zuo Yi menacingly exclaimed “Now, we destroy everything!”, much to the delight of the similarly charged young crowd.

Time and Space
The performance, which came late in the evening, marked the last Texas stop on the band's Invasion Tour. The unnecessarily ample space of the Hailey's concert floor saw little to no seated attendees; only the most curious and dedicated of the local music going crowd had the makeup to drink and make fist gestures in support of like minded young musicians from half the world away, and they did so on their feet. Most watchers were comfortable being only feet from the stage, not conscious of being small in number and having the option of maintaining a cautious distance. The weekday, late night performance did much to endear the band to the audience, and vice-versa, drawing energy from the close connection between the two peer groups, now not separated by any ocean or authority.

Conclusion
The Chinese Invasion tour is doing much to bridge the divide between youth cultures of the east and west. Chinese bands like AV Okubo are fighting and winning the attention of a generation of young American listeners, not as an empty echo of western punk or counterculture ideas, but as a utilization of these ideas in practice. The themes will find a commonality between the two, and as AV Okubo's performance is evidence to, there will be western ears open to the Chinese bands that find themselves planning similar invasions.



Chinese Invasion Tour. Texas, Denton. 31 Mar. 2010. Performance.