China In Force At Texas Music Festival

Six of China’s biggest names in rock will be playing Texas’s South by Southwest music festival (aka SXSW). SXSW is easily one of the United States’ biggest festivals. It’s a four day event with over 1,400 performers playing roughly 80 venues.

On March 20, Carsick Cars, P.K. 14, Xiao He, Snapline, AV Okubo, and White will be playing Speakeasy until the early morning. SXSW has also arranged for a special “China Day” event for all six artists/bands as well as arranging that each plays a minimum of three shows during the festival, opening for some of the bigger acts. According to the bands’ label, Maybe Mars, they will follow-up their SXSW performances with a one-month twelve-city tour of the West Coast.

For many of these bands, playing the U.S. is nothing new. Carsick Cars, P.K. 14 and Xiao He have already played sold-out shows in American music capitals like Brooklyn. AV Okubo has also received international exposure for playing with acts like Battles and Ratatat.

Are these cultural ambassadors in the making? We certainly hope so. It’s time for the deluge of articles fueling international anxiety about China’s economic dominance to be accompanied by those articles highlighting China’s forward-thinking and creative cultures. Having already seen the above bands play Shanghai and Beijing, I’m sure those in attendance at SXSW and the following shows will have something interesting to report.

For more on China’s music scene, check out Dan Shapiro’s November article in Timeout New York.

*On another note, here’s an interesting tidbit of information: The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 SXSW. They cleverly installed 60-inch plasma screens in conference hallways that exclusively streamed twitter messages. During the festival, usage went from 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000. Concert goers and bloggers came home from the festival raving about twitter. The rest is history…