, a sister venture of the music promotion company Split Works, has basically two missions: One is covering good new music in Chinese; the online component. That could include anything from Qingdao trip-hop producer SIG and interviews with defunct Shanghai band PAIRS to… Drake. We're talking feature-length journalism -- something of a rarity these days, especially in Chinese digital media. The other is the "offline" component, which is club nights and music documentary screenings (they do the Chinese subtitles themselves). So far they've brought out some impressive acts for the club nights, like New York Transit Authority and Bok Bok, the head of the Night Slugs label. This Saturday afternoon at XP, they're hosting a double-header of music docs, replete with Chinese subs: The Story of Common People (Pulp doc) and Pepperoni Playboy (a Mac DeMarco doc). It's the sixth in their "Community Films" series, designed to translate and relay a little music history in Chinese. For the kids. Always for the kids. SmartBeijing talked to wooozy's web editors Bobby Sleepless, Jeremy Guo, and Ross Miles about media and music in China. ***
In Chinese － Wu jie（无解）－ it looks great and sounds great. It has the Chinese meaning “no answer” or “no explanation”.
Not like a music blog, more like a music website with offline activities all the time. At first we had Wooozy Session. The main point of Wooozy Session is to bring non-Shanghai bands to Shanghai to play. There are very good bands, young bands, that play music but they don’t really have a big audience to show their talent so Jeremy and Archie came up with this idea to give [non-Shanghai bands] a chance to play in Shanghai to see a wider audience.
No. Wooozy Offline and Wooozy Sessions, they are like separate things but also we have Wooozy Screening, which started two years ago. [There are] music documentaries [that] don’t have Chinese translation/subtitles so we double subtitle them in English and in Chinese.
We've been running the website for five years. We’ve gained lots of followers on Weibo, I think now the number is like 16,000+. The website itself is a very good platform for local bands and local artists to showcase themselves....I think this is the best thing about Wooozy. Especially [because] it’s in Chinese.
Ross: And I think that’s the problem with offline, it’s that -- and this is a bit rich coming from an expat -- but the electronic scene is dominated by expats, primarily. I mean there are obviously exceptions, and I think you know, a lot of Chinese kids, especially kids that are already readers of Wooozy, before it had taken a slight directional shift, I think probably weren’t being exposed to this kind of music. Probably wouldn’t feel comfortable… being part of the environment. And I think what we were trying to do was hopefully try to bring people in.
[DJ Sleepless selecting some tracks and trading stocks]
Yeah. And some of my friends listening to this kind of stuff back in university days or high school days, they got like a proper job and then got married soon after and decided to give up all that kind of stuff. I sometimes invite my friends and say “Hey, tonight the DJ is really good, the music is really good, you wanna have a try?” but they say “Naw, it’s too late for me. I’d still rather listen to CDs.”
Jeremy: As a Chinese teenager we don’t really have a club culture. There are no clubs friendly to the Chinese teenager. So it’s like either a very adult kind of club we call "dance club", where they play very shitty disco and the only thing you can do is just...drinking and dancing...but you don’t really know what you are doing. So Chinese teenagers always listen to music at home in [their] own room. So before graduating from university, there is nothing in that field and after that, after graduating, it’s more like you’re gonna start work…you need to also think about building a family...
[Night Slugs' DJ Bok Bok cueing up at Dada Beijing for Wooozy Offline #2]
In Chinese peoples’ minds, it’s a bad thing if you start to drink when you are...below 18 or you go to a dance club. [These people are] always categorized as "bad boys"... Ross: It’s weird because...we were always desperate to be bad boys... I can chart my adolescence through my club/going-out experiences... And there was never a fear of sort of being a social pariah, cause I went to go out and listen to music in a club you know. Jeremy: Yeah also it’s kind of the, just the whole like people’s mind/culture [is] different because Chinese people don’t like adventure and we don’t like any new things. Bobby: I don’t think it’s not liking adventure, but definitely it’s a different understanding of the world, like socializing. Socializing in China and socializing in Western countries is different. Socializing [here] is more like building relationships. Like, we can do something together. I can offer you something, you can offer me something. That’s very real.
Not really, I don’t think so. Jeremy: Yeah not really. We also have some friends who did similar things several years ago but just gradually, one by one, it’s all gone. So they kind of stopped and kind of moved on to other stuff.
We can’t really say there is a market for that. For us, it’s like we are doing something which already happened and developed [for] a long time in the West. On the other side, I don’t really need to consider it a job. There are a lot of followers and loyal readers, and some of them become our friends, some of them we still don’t know. But we know they are still keeping an eye on the website... That’s what already makes us very happy and motivates us to keep doing more.
Wooozy is starting to pay for itself, basically. There was a long time where there was a lot of help, and it was a real long hard slog. It was literally just Jeremy and a few other contributors keeping it going. And, you know, it feels like it’s getting to the point where it’ll be able to support itself, which is great. And the ad stuff, I think if and when the ad stuff wants to happen it’ll be done in a creative way, it wouldn’t be slapping banners left, right, and center. You know, I could say that 100% we’d never go down that route.
[DJs Veeeky & Howie Lee repping the Wooozy fam in Beijing]
Right now we’re doing a thing for French website that's basically like the French Spotify in a way. So we do playlists for them, like forming a partnership.
They give us a little bit of money, not that much, but still it’s very healthy. Also, in May I went to Beijing to do a report on Ableton's first official Beijing workshop [at Dada Beijing] and Ableton paid all the fees. That’s a very good sign. And [it was] 95% Chinese people, local people there.
Ross: Yeah, I think it’s gotten to the point where people want someone from Wooozy there, which is great.
Bobby: Also, I think like two weeks before, I wrote a review of the rapper WOOTACC's new album. And that review was pretty well-received, and after that, lots of Chinese rappers DMed me on Weibo and said, "Hey can you look at my new mix tape?” But I still say, “Yeah you can send me the mix tape but I still need to listen to it. I won’t write about it if it’s really shitty.” But unfortunately, those are really shitty [laughs].
Ross: Yeah, Wooozy don’t take hong bao ["red envelopes," bribes that are frequently given to media people in China in exchange for coverage].
Bobby: No I mean even for Ableton, it’s just like train tickets. They don’t like give me hong bao, they give me like two t shirts but that’s fair [laughs].
[Wooozy punters having fun and not being afraid of the club]
I think our readers have like a open mindset in a way. They like new music. That’s what I’m talking about. We introduce new music, not just electronic music, not just rock music...
Definitely the PAIRS interview. Jeremy: Recently, yeah the PAIRS interview. Good features can get more clicks and views because I mean, that’s very exclusive. We did a lot of background research; all this kind of stuff that people can never find in other websites.
As an editor I don’t really care too much about that. We are not just pursuing clicks. We also believe that good quality content, in the long-term [will] get more views and clicks and can be remembered by the readers more than that kind of short term, one-off content. Websites for us, [are] more like a database...more like history...more like a dictionary.
Ross: Yeah, in five years time, we hope someone might actually want to read into PAIRS or a feature on SIG. Hopefully in five years time, no one is going to give a shit about a floating restaurant in the sky...
[Wooozy Resident Jackie gettin' down]
Not enough people contributing their own stuff to us. I hope there will be a lot more people send us saying, "We’re gonna [play] shows next month. Can you do a listing for us?" I hope there will be more...record labels saying, "Hey. We are releasing an album next month, can we do an exclusive play-partnership?’ Yeah, I expect that kind of thing in the future for Wooozy. It’s good for both parties... Jeremy: A lot of bands, they don’t know how to make themselves big, how to really book shows or get the media coverage or all this kind of stuff. Also, a lot of local Shanghai bands, the music they do is still, for me, quite old-fashioned. I mean...if you play something like Guns n' Roses and Led Zeppelin...and after you listen to all these kinds of new music and you’re still into it, okay, you can play it. But a lot of bands never really listen to what’s happening in the West or in the world [right now]. You play Guns n' Roses because you only listen to Guns n' Roses. That’s something that happened a long time ago is still happening now. I hope more and more people can really do [more] sharing. Either you can make your own blog, make your own website, or you can tell your friends "this band is cool, that band is shit." Because we get a lot of emails from bands, like metal bands, or hardcore bands, or some bands actually their music may not be suitable for Wooozy, but we appreciate that they write to us. But sometimes you can write by yourself, you can make a music website. For us, it’s not competition, it’s more like more people involved and more people sharing more stuff, so that’s something I really would like to see.
Maybe they listen to mp3 on their home system. Maybe that's it. Jeremy: There’s a trend in the last two years. A DJ set by a member of a famous rock band can get more local people. Peter Hook and Peter Murphy from LCD Soundsystem and...Nick Banner, even Andy Rouke’s DJ set. [That was] actually my first DJ set because it’s Andy Rourke. This kind of form maybe stimulates local kids' or Chinese peoples’ interest to try it once [even if the DJ is shit]. Jeremy: You need to have some inside people help you spread the news, like a student union or whatever. If they can lead it, if someone they're familiar with tells them, "Okay there’s a bar or club or electronic party, which I think is very fresh," you might follow them, but if it’s just a party which no one really knows or knows what’s going on then students are kind of scared of going there and trying it.
Yeah. So September is Nguzunguzu, October is Untold, November is Lone. *** Wooozy's "Community Films" is this Saturday afternoon at XP. Starts at 2pm. No entry fee.
