The Words Still Ring
Soundtrack to Hellworld #3
Below is the third entry in the “Soundtrack to Hellworld” series, covering Chapter 3, “Speak of Blood.” This chapter examines the structure of China’s export industries (particularly in the electronics sector in Shenzhen) from both the perspective of the workers that keep them running and the individual enterprises inset within hierarchical value chains. One key touchstone throughout is the poetry of Xu Lizhi, one in a spate of suicides among workers at Foxconn’s iPhone factory in Shenzhen. Xu’s poetry is gut-wrenching, especially when read in retrospect. The basic approach of the chapter is to counterpose the real lives of workers such as Xu – their bodies caught and slowly broken in the churning gears of interfirm competition – with the glossy, oversimplified narrative of growth in GDP per capita, rapid robotization of industry, the rollout of vast infrastructural megaprojects, and of course the rise of glittering skylines over the old factory districts.
The tone is, in other words, simultaneously sad and sublime, tracking the flow of history in the terrifying torture it inflicts on individual human bodies. Here is a representative section, describing industrial workers emerging from an electronics factory in Shenzhen:
As the bodies split and flowed around us, the workers emerging into the plaza from the darkness of the factories beyond did not seem to carry any noble historic mission. They instead bore the same weight of loss as Xu, shoulders worn down by the clock-time of precise and measured movements. It is in moments such as these that you truly realize the extent to which the economy is quite literally embodied – and not just in the abstract or aggregate sense, but literally in your body and in mine and in their slow breaking as labor-power is extracted into the endless roar of machine system sin carefully allotted units of time, all of which returns to us crystallized in the shape of money. In a way it is this breaking that connects us, a class of increasingly atomized individuals nonetheless united at a distance in the myriad sameness of work and its horrors.[1]
Given these themes, the playlist below collects a range of songs that approximate this feeling of sublime, somewhat terrifying sadness and social isolation. Shoegaze is used as a guiding thread through several interrelated subgenres ranging from post-rock to emo to screamo/skramz to depressive black metal. Though some representative examples are included from the international scene, the vast majority are from mainland China.
In the 2010s, both post-rock and shoegaze boomed in popularity in China. Meanwhile, indie rock and emo bands like Omnipotent Youth Society and Chinese Football gained a global audience. While conducting my field work in the Pearl River Delta in the mid-2010s, I would often attend shows in the now-all-but-extinct Livehouse scene in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, many of which featured these subgenres. Similarly, many people in the small leftwing circles in China in those years – detailed in the early sections of Chapter 3 – circulated in similar musical circles, attending post-rock festivals and listening to sun-soaked Guangdong shoegaze bands playing to small audiences in tight-packed bars. For example, the intro track here, 失梦客from electronic guqin post-rock band Zhaoze’s (沼泽) 2013 album Yond / 远, was chosen in part because I distinctly remember hearing it played live in the summer of 2014 in Guangzhou. This music therefore quite literally set the tone of the chapter, the content of which was formulated, in part, in these tightly-packed livehouses after long days walking through wholesale warehouses and factory districts.
In attempting to keep up with the Chinese music scene after returning to the US, however, the Substack Concrete Avalanche has been an invaluable resource. In these playlists, the blog will serve as a regular reference. Here, for example, is a “beginner’s guide to Chinese shoegaze:
In addition, see the two volumes of “Kind of Shoegaze”, available on Bandcamp:
Another good resource, though slightly more focused on the mainstream, are the best-of and genre overviews put together by Radii, such as this “best of the 2010s” list. In future playlists, I’ll also mention a few labels for those interested in specific subgenres. For now, enjoy the music:
[1] Hellworld, pp.130-131