The Audioscapes of the Contemporary Chinese-Speaking World I - The Mountain Tit (山雀) of Hebei
By Ella Eagle Davies
Omnipotent Youth Society (Image: Omnipotent Youth Society Facebook Page)
From vast mountain ranges, to childhood classrooms, to bustling night markets, performances of landscapes can be found everywhere in music from across Sinophone communities. In The Audioscapes of the Chinese-Speaking World, columnist Ella Eagle Davies takes the reader on a whirlwind trip through these musical worlds, examining instances where concepts of place, youth, and identity collide to produce sometimes explosive, sometimes subtle, and often weirdly wonderful negotiations of contemporary Chinese youth. In this instalment, Ella focuses in on the bluesy notes of environmental rock from Hebei province, China, and what they reveal about a landscape under siege.
In this song, nature is our generous custodian. She gives us the tree canopies to shelter us and the gentle gusts of evening breeze from the Bohai sea to guide us. She gives us a companion, a mountain tit. This little bird is loyal, balanced, never still as she hops through the peaks and valleys of the Taihang Mountains. She co-exists with us, confronting our shared fate in the vast wilderness. And yet, despite this peaceful existence, she is plagued with an unshakeable uncertainty as she watches the river waters grow distant, flowing away hastily, without a sound. New waters arrive, bringing unwelcome guests: bandits, the blazing fire of their torches cutting through the cool fog that for so long has preserved nature’s idyllic effigy. Their companions are not of nature. A vision of industrial advancement and the cacophony of production. The fog grows heavy, blackened with soot. As the trill of the flute fades to silence, we end this story on an anxious note. For this small mountain tit, life will never be the same again.
“Have they changed? Literally shedding old tears. It’s me who’s changed,” one comment reads under Omnipotent Youth Society’s page on Douban, a Chinese social media platform. The four-member alternative rock band hailing from the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang released their sophomore album, Inside the Cable Temple (冀西南林路行), back in 2020. Although certainly worth the wait, it was only their second effort to grace our ears in over ten years, and in the decade since many of their starry-eyed young fans have made the inevitable descent into nine-to-five jobs and mind-numbing commutes. The band themselves have also been unable to escape the passage of time. Their nickname amongst fans, “Omnipotent Grandfather Society”, is an affectionate play on their youthful brand (after all, they have been rocking the alternative scene since 1996). “We can't expect these "omnipotent adults'' to still be those middle-school students who hung out by the ping pong courts for a secret smoke,” says another listener. “They have finally grown up.”
Though it may seem strange to begin my exploration into youth, place, and music in China with a band that spans generations in such a way, to dismiss Omnipotent as an ageing act out of touch with the current social milieu would be to ignore their galvanising potential. They have always had a finger firmly on the pulse of the moment, and their second album, a poetic dive into the environmental history of their home province of Hebei, is no different.
《生活历险; 并肩莽莽原野荒》 “An adventurous life, side by side in the vast wilderness.”
Let us start with a dive into the aural landscape of this little mountain bird. The song Chickadee (山雀 in Chinese) is simply one ‘landmark’ in the panorama imagined across Inside the Cable Temple, an unusually long and heavily instrumental project that contrasts with the singles and soundbites that often define our modern listening habits. ‘The tracks merge into one as the songs play one after another,” reads one Weibo post from January 2021. Indeed, the songs act as chapters in the story of this album, which reconstructs the landscape surrounding the 250-mile-long Taihang Mountain Range for listeners to traverse. It is the story of a natural world and a humankind drained of vitality and dignity, but not one in which all hope is lost.
The album was inspired by a trip the band took in 2013 through the mountains, which partially run through Hebei province. The contrast of the claustrophobic darkness inside tunnel passages against the overwhelming beauty of the landscape outside inspired a ten-year-long quest to demystify this natural phenomenon and our relationship with it. Through Omnipotent’s powers of observation, the life and power exuded by this dynamic ecosystem, one which has been at the forefront of China’s industrial history, is recounted to us as fellow passengers. Listeners can relish in the wonder of the “gentle breeze, the pouring rain” themselves, catching a glimpse as the carriage speeds by.
I remember when I first heard the song, bundled into a cramped train carriage as I fled the bustling streets of Taipei for the natural wonders of Yilan county. What struck me was the deep sense of immersion. This story of a small mountain tit and her beloved mountainside tapped into my every sense to transport me to another time and place. I was overcome by awe at the majesty of the ecoscape captured, and yet I grieved its degradation as it succumbed to the “bandit”, who symbolise the miners who have since the early 20th century been carving deep pits into the mountain range in search for its rich natural resources. Omnipotent may have taken a departure from youthful city streets in exchange for vast tree canopies and quarries. But the band’s ability to capture a snapshot of what makes a place remains unparalleled, with or without an understanding of the lyrics. The sonic markers of the mountains that I found in the chirrup of the flute and swells of angry guitar granted me passage to this aural landscape. It is truly as if you are present in the adventure, “side by side in the vast wilderness.”
Road to Guoliang Village in Taihang Mountains (Image: Sanjay P. K, via Flickr)
《平原不可见; 晦暗﹑无声﹑未知的存亡》 “The invisible plains, and their obscure, silent, and uncertain existence.”
It is safe to say that many young listeners from the Chinese-speaking world have found an appreciation for the auditory panoramas presented in their music; their first album won Douban’s Top Record of 2010, and their second was deemed Top Record of 2020. But Inside the Cable Temple is clearly more to fans than an aural histoire. Chickadee itself is a space where concepts of place, environmentalism, and social anxieties collide. Omnipotent’s music has often tapped into the sense of fatalism felt by many young Chinese listeners as they face future uncertainty fuelled by contemporary socio-economic forces, such as lack of equity and sustainability of high growth. Environmental incidents since the turn of the century have also reified how physical landscapes inform identity formation and youth nihilism just as much as other factors. The cost of industrial pollution is just as clear in their lyrics as it is on the street of the band’s hometown, Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province that was thrust into the international limelight as one of the biggest victims of China’s ‘airpocalypse’ during the 2010s. In Inside the Cable Temple, it is not just nature that is suffering, but also us human beings, and it is this imagery that many fans resonate with. The mountain tit here symbolises all those being choked by the smog, and the leading of the “bandits” into the Taihang mountains grants an insight into the role of miners in China’s environmental and industrial history. Just like the mountain, the miners share the brunt of modernisation. But as they follow the fire of the torches, they also represent a blindness to environmental and human costs. A blindness that still permeates environmental discourse today.
《火光忷忷；指引盗寇入太行》 “The flames blaze, and guide the bandits into the Taihang mountains.”
What permeates Chickadee is a creeping sense of unease, the feeling that we are facing the inevitable end of something. Omnipotent is a cross-generational voice that perfectly encapsulates these social and environmental anxieties. Thanks to their musical aptitude, a landscape is rendered familiar even to those who have never been there. By imbuing the music with their own negotiations of place and contemporary society, the band fashions an aurally constructed landscape in which fans find solace in the commonality of their struggles. It is not just a personal journey. Rather, listeners are accompanied by other fans through this aural world. Communities (both physical and virtual) are being shaped and created here.
The story of the Taihang mountains is inexplicably tied to the lyrical themes posed to the audience, which encompass relatable, often compassionate debates on existence, nature, and uncertainty. They are also indicative of the binaries central to many issues Chinese society faces today: power versus vulnerability, advancement or stagnation. Undoubtedly, the burden of this question of success or failure is felt most by China’s youth. And it is here, in this liminality, that Omnipotent Youth Society’s rebellious, bluesy Shijiazhuang rock finds its niche.
Find Omnipotent Youth Society’s (万能青年旅店) discography on Spotify. I recommend 采石 (Quarry), 郊眠寺 (A Night at a Remote Temple), 在这颗行星所有的酒馆 (Throughout the Drinkeries of This Planet), and 杀死那个石家庄人 (Kill That Man from Shijiazhuang) for further listening.