The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing.

Metallicman ^ | 8APR19 | Editorial staff

[vannrox]

Here we provide a mixture of the popular music now currently trending in China. Strangely, most Americans are unaware of music outside of the USA shores. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it, but there you have it. The Chinese have their own pop groups, their own rap groups, and their own version of Country & Western music. Additionally, music from Russia is amazingly popular, as well as selected Australian, and American music.

We are gonna talk about all of this. In fact, if I might be so bold, we are going to look at the music from the point of view of culture. Or, in other words, how the Chinese cultures influences the Chinese music scene and why it is similar or different from the American music scene. (As the case may be.)

Due to SEO rules and server limitations, this post is divided into multiple posts. (At least ten, but I lost track of my count. It’s a “bunch” of posts. heh heh.) Of course, we’re gonna need to do this in order to keep the bandwidth hogs to a minimum. There’s a ton-load of videos and audio embeds involved here.

The music is identified by group and song title, and you can hear and check out the music and videos as attached. Where possible, I have also provided direct links so that you the reader could investigate the groups, the songs or their compilations on your own. Just cut and paste into the browser.

Romanian translated Bulgarian Rap is popular in China

Let’s start with “Dependent” friends) thought was Russian. But, nope. It’s Eastern European.

Yah. It crashed it’s way into the hearts and minds of the Chinese. Russian pop music is very popular

[vannrox]

You know, the young folk out here have no idea what it must have been like. There wasn’t any internet back then. You NEVER got to listen to American music at all. Not unless you had a record player and some albums. There wasn’t even cassettes, or was there? I don’t remember.

It seems to me that cassettes came around after 8-tracks that was around 1976.

Though, I remember the Apocalypse Now movie having the young negro fella with a cassette player on the river boat. As far as I can remember, no one had cassettes. We have records, and nothing else.

Anyways, it must have been totally and completely jump for joy and dance around awesome! Right?

[VietVet876]

My second Western Pacific cruise was in 1970 and I had a small AC and battery powered cassette player and a set of decent headphones. I had maybe twenty cassettes from home including early Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac (before the girls), Grateful Dead, Paul Butterfield and more that I forget. Before heading back to San Diego, I bought a really good cassette deck with record capability and from then on never bought a new cassette. You could buy all the latest LP releases in Taiwan for a dollar apiece since none of the Chinese— Red or Nationalist— obeyed international copyright laws. The vinyl was really thin but if you had a good turntable with a light stylus, you would record the virgin record onto tape and it was almost like a factory recorded tape. We would sell the albums at flea markets back in California for $2-4 apiece.

[vannrox]

Wow! I never knew that.

You probably would pull into HK, or Subic Bay and load up on the latest music, right? Or did you and the guys all have different music. I mean you would only be able to carry so much, right? Today, we have MP3, and have come accustomed to 10,000 songs on a 8G USB. But then, you would have one cassette that might have perhaps 10 to 14 songs on it. If I recall, Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon) only had like 6 songs on it, and the Moody Blues “Days of Future Passed” only had 8 songs.

Never the less, that was all we needed. It was a different time then. Don’t ya think?

[VietVet876]

It was a different time. No internet. No cell phones. I remember in 1969 when we pulled into Hong Kong and I went ashore for the first time, I found a phone booth on the pier and called the family farm in Pennsylvania collect. My mother answered and we talked about a half and hour. This was the first time I’d talked to her in four or five months. The phone call cost them $16.50. When we were at sea in the combat zone (which was most of the time), I was on the port and starboard watch schedule which means eight hours on and eight hours off. After 30 or more days of that it starts getting real strange so only having three or four cassettes to listen to when lying in the rack trying to sleep simplified things. I must have listened to the Fleetwood Mac tape that had “Oh Well” about ten thousand times. Even today I will hear the guitar intro line in my head and have to stop myself from playing it over and over when I pick up a guitar at home at night. Taiwan was my favorite place to score records. Keelung and Kaiosung.

[Paul R.]

Hey, vannrox - Are you still in China and what’s your situation with this virus going around?