With U.S.-China tensions at the center of so much of our discourse, it seems as good a time as any to look at a figure who channeled those same fraught energies into something constructive and inspiring. A twentysomething living in Beijing in the 1980s,…
Cui Jian’s music paints pictures: “A Piece of Red Cloth,” an anthemic song that Cui performed during the Tiananmen protests, instantly summons images of the young rocker covering his eyes with the titular cloth, a gesture representative of what had become a ‘blinding’ socialist…
If there’s any one quality that defines Cui Jian, it’s that he has never been content to be any one thing. Rock ‘n’ roll didn’t start with Cui — so he had to be a Chinese rock ‘n’ roller, fusing his own national identity…
Sometime during the tour behind 1994’s Balls Under the Red Flag, Cui Jian started employing the title of his most recent album as the name of his band, as well. This was Cui poking fun at himself, and his bandmates, suggesting a sense of…
By the mid-1990s, the political ambitions of what is known as the liumang generation — literally, “hooligans” — had devolved from a battle cry into feelings of wounded dejection, crushed under the weight of an intensified Chinese censorship, and the restricted freedoms enforced by…
Cui Jian’s status as a cultural icon was largely staked on the reputation of his first breakout song, “Nothing to My Name”: its progression from televised debut at a 1986 stadium show to anthem of the 1989 student protesters in Tiananmen Square. The song’s…
Was it when Elvis first suggestively gyrated his hips on national television? The first time a fan let out a piercing, adulatory scream as the Beatles sauntered by? Or was it further back than all that — the moment that Sister Rosetta Thorpe first…
