so I'm in Beijing right now and I went to a really small convenience store that happened to sell CDs. now the selection wasn't very bag - eight racks max - but on one rack, they had promninently displayed: joy division - unknown pleasures, surfer rosa, arab strap, cocteau twins (pink opaque, blue bell knoll, victorialand and some others), red house painters, nick cave and the bad seeds, all 15-25 rmb each (2-3 bucks american), some jazz (john coltrane, nat king cole, and some others), and a looot of tracy chapman.
...while two racks above there was britney, christina, sugababes, etc...and the rest was c-pop.
wtf? my friend said that record labels will market domestically unsuccessful 'indie bands' in other countries (i.e. 'we're big in japan') or something like that. or could it be there's a BURGEONING INDIE UNDERGROUND in beijing that I just don't know about.
I ended up buying unknown pleasures, and it is actually really nice - really nice fold out cd book, with a nice booklet (with mistyped lyrics/slightly poorly worded retrospective), apparently redistributed by 'centredate'...oh and produced by 'martin h annet'
― danny why (daggerlee), Wednesday, 21 June 2006 05:14 (nineteen years ago)
I think in some cases there's this idea that marginal rock acts from the west can be sold to certain parts of the rest of the world as just, well, rock. I.e., they're imagining some foreign niche market that's just looking for "rock music," and isn't making super-fine distinctions between different types of it the way we are here, and is presumably looking for something "different" to begin with, and so won't be put off by any of the marginal elements of these acts.
That might sound weird or patronizing, but compare it to the way Americans consume certain bits of world music: someone with a generalized interest in, say, music from Nigeria would probably buy all kinds of different things (under the category "Nigerian music") that might seem contradictory or strange within a Nigerian context. Certainly this person wouldn't pick up a record from the "Nigeria" section and be weirded out that it wasn't popular.
A better example, actually, might be Brazil -- where e.g. bossa nova and Tropicalia were in certain ways seriously culturally opposed, but get consumed by lots of the same people in the US and UK.
― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 21 June 2006 05:27 (nineteen years ago)