Nothing to My Name 8 comments

By Joel Hartse

"We don't care about politics." A sentence I have heard many times during the last two years from my students, for whom the pressing issue of the day is whether or not they will find jobs after college, when China is churning out more university graduates than it knows what to do with.

I can relate: I do not know politics—I just know pop songs.

They say that there was a song, but that detail, like so many others, has faded—not so much lost in time as in the gauze of silence wound carefully around the events of today, twenty years ago, at a place called “the gate of heavenly peace.”

The song, they say, was "Nothing to My Name" by Cui Jian, a man who is sometimes called the Elvis or Dylan of this country where I live, although neither of those seems particularly useful or accurate. Soon after the incident, Cui would begin to lay low, to fade—today he is better known as the Father of Chinese Rock and Roll, "Old Cui," than as provocateur or rebel.

The cover of the album is striking—the title, a traditional Chinese four-character idiom or chengyu, is rendered in a dripping-blood red on a black background. Cui Jian appears, wearing a red blindfold, his lips parted: maybe he is singing, but he could also be gasping, or on the verge of speaking. It's a disarming image.

Cui performed for the protestors in Beijing, wearing the blindfold, not long before the square was cleared. They must have joined in the final refrain—"ni zhei jiu gen wo zou," or "just go with me." It's hard to call "Nothing to My Name" a protest song—as other have noted, the lyrics are ambiguous at best, more like pleas of love than revolution.

Still, those final lines do feel like a movement, though "Nothing to My Name" is no "Anarchy in the U.K.," a song I introduced to my students during a dubious course I teach on "British Culture." I wrote on the chalkboard the purest distillation of punk rock philosophy ever written: "Get pissed, destroy."

Any class that starts there is bound to be good, I figured, and most of the students—who were born in 1989—were paying more attention to the Sex Pistols and the Clash than they had to my lectures on colonialism and immigration. After we finished watching Johnny Rotten bend his voice and body into beautifully, terribly awkward shapes on Top of the Pops, there was some discussion.

One girl asked, in a spirit of practicality rather than naïveté, "How can they be so angry all the time? I think they will feel tired." If the Sex Pistols only lasted long enough to make one record, someone else pointed out, did punk really "do" anything? Was there any real political passion behind the vitriol—did they really believe in anarchy—or was it just a fashion? Someone pointed out that the Sex Pistols' manager, Malcom McLaren, was married to Vivienne Westwood, the fashion designer who made punk chic. (I had not known this.)

These are smart kids.

I don't believe in anarchy, but I believe in melody, guitar solos, three chords, and the truth.

I cannot honestly say what I would be telling my students if this were 1989 and not 2009. Maybe I would be giving the same lecture on punk rock, and saying that even if nothing happens, even if you're not really sure you believe it, music means something—it sets you on fire sometimes.

Maybe. I have been thinking about what I would say, and what I should say, for weeks. I read the twenty-year-old New York Times reports on my computer every morning, the fateful date looming. Usually the only articulate thing I can come up with is no, no, please, no—because truly, I don't know politics. I only know pop songs.

So this week I will not say anything. I will only listen.