How Chinese culture can help heavy metal bands - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Chinese-American rockstar Kaiser Kuo used to be frontman of the Beijing heavy metal band Tang Dynasty. For Sixth Tone he explains how Chinese culture can make a difference in music. "Drawing on Chinese culture can help bands stand out from the rest," he says.

Sixth Tone:

Kaiser Kuo, a co-founder of Tang Dynasty, tells Sixth Tone that drawing on Chinese culture can help bands stand out from the rest. “It’s an obvious touchstone for a musical genre that’s aggressive and quite martial,” says Kuo over email. Western metal bands have long drawn from Western legends, and Chinese artists have plenty of their own material to do the same, he says, pointing to the hero-filled epic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” or Louis Cha’s martial arts novels as examples. 

But it can be hard to incorporate Chinese musical influences without sounding monotonous or tacky, says Kuo. What’s more, metal bands with Chinese characteristics can face criticism from Chinese metalheads who suspect the musicians do so just to win over foreign audiences, even though — as Kuo notes — that’s not the only way to gain success. This summer, Beijing metal band Die From Sorrow won the battle of the bands at Wacken, Germany — the biggest metal festival in the world — without any traditional Chinese elements. “Without naming names, I’ve certainly seen some bad efforts to incorporate recognizably Chinese elements … that I suspect had no commitment to it and were clearly doing it in the mistaken belief that it would be a marketing plus,” says Kuo.

More in Sixth Tone.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on cultural change at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.  

Beijing, the Mecca of heavy metal - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Rock artist and Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo recalls in the Wall Street Journal how Beijing became for a short while the Mecca of heavy metal, as artists from around the world gathered for this niche market in music.

Wall Street Journal:

In 1988, Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese-American metal fan, traveled to Beijing on a student visa after finishing college at the University of California, Berkeley. The young musician, whose parents came to the U.S. in the 1950s, was surprised by what he found: Guitars and amps for sale, evidence of a nascent rock scene that had formed around local artists interacting with visiting diplomats and journalists. 

China was just opening up to the West, and fans were soaking up decades of U.S. music at once, Mr. Kuo says. He teamed up with two Chinese locals, including a charismatic singer named Ding Wu, to form Tang Dynasty, perhaps China’s first metal band. The group blended Western rock and metal with lyrics and sounds reminiscent of ancient China (The Tang Dynasty was a period of prosperity and cultural openness in medieval China.) 

Cassettes brought by Western visitors’ kids weren’t the only way metal spread in China. According to Mr. Kuo, in the early 1990s, U.S. music companies would dump unwanted inventory—say, leftover CDs from an artist that a label had dropped—because doing so would allow them to reduce their tax burden in various ways. The discs, off-loaded to third parties, would end up on Chinese ports at cut-rate prices, 15 cents or less, with little nicks to ensure they couldn’t be sold in the U.S. Cannibal Corpse, a U.S. death metal band whose music had been banned in several Western countries, was especially successful there, Mr. Kuo recalls. 

In the late 1990s and 2000s, waves of Chinese bands from Overload to Suffocated, along with Taiwan’s Chthonic and Silent Hell, helped build out the region’s scene. While metal is by no means mainstream in China, bands from different subgenres play in Beijing every night of the week, says Mr. Kuo, now an international communications director for Chinese search engine Baidu: “Beijing became a Mecca for this,” he says.

More on heavy metal in the Wall Street Journal.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in this speakers´request note.

Are you looking for more experts on cultural change in China? Check out this list.  

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