A shorter, edited version of this piece appeared in The Guardian under the title ‘Online Pop Explosion’. Please treat this longer, draft version as a separate article.
When unknown Chinese singer Yang Chengang wrote and recorded the song Mice Love Rice in Wuhan, Southern China in 2000, he would have had no way to predict it’s eventual impact. More… »
A friend of mine, David Mitchell, has been a regular at his local pool hall in Beijing for going on a year and a half now. It didn’t take him long after his first visit to notice the lack of care put into the music choice in this vast twenty table room. The management had made the effort to get nice pool tables and cues and, in doing so, had earned themselves a loyal crowd of patrons, but they seemed to just stick the same CD of offensively bland wallpaper music on day in and day out. More… »
