《China Peking Rock》，Apr.22,1985
Kaleidoscopic spotlights flashed. A slick crew of singers and musicians,led by a pair of go-go dancers in skimpy black leather skirts,gyrated rythmically as two boyish british rockers strutted and sang. Amplified music boomed.The sight was familiar: a concert by the british hit group Wham! But the setting,Peking’s workers’ stadium,was not.Neither was the reaction. The group’s visit to China last week,the first by a major Western rock group, was met largely with politeness and puzzlement by the audience, which included more than 6000 Chinese.
Most of the crowd,ranging from teenagers to high-ranking officials, watched expressionless, riveted to their hard folding seats thoughout the 11\2 hour performance. More plugged-in listeners tapped their fingers on their laps or gently swayed their heads. After hearing Wham!’s hits,including top moneymaker Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, a young Chinese music student offered her opinion:”All it does is make people crazy.”
But many of the almost 4000 foreigners present, most of them students, had no such inhibitions, and they whistled,cheered, and even danced in the aisles. A few adventurous Chinese joined them, to the consternation of green-uniformed policemen who kept trying to push them back to their seats, sometimes manhandling those who resisted. Such Western-style antics got little sympathy from the better behaved.” A bunch of liumangs(hoodlums),” smirked a 27-year-old Chinese college student.” Such a raucous response was not necessary.”
A more bizarre performance came from a band member flying to canton for Wham!’s second concert.Fifteen minutes after takeoff, a backup trumpeter went berserk and stabbed himself in the stomach with a pocketknife. The musician then forced his way into cockpit, briefly sending the airliner into a nose dive, before subdued by guards.
One regrettable effect of the visit by Wham!is likely to be an intensification of the debate over the “opendoor”policy to Western influences espoused by Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping. Increasingly,critics are warning that culture imports will lead to “spiritual pollution”. But the demand for Western fare is insatiable: a disco craze is sweeping the nation, Radio Peking carries a weekly hourlong program of contemporary western music, 5 American films, among them Star Wars and Coal Miner’s Daughter, are being shown in many cities.
The Wham!concerts are a significant sign of the government’s new permissiveness, begun last year. Just 5 years ago, rock’n roll was denounced as “decadent” and said to be a cause of rape, prostitution and drug addiction. But the judgment on Wham! Music by Zhou Renkai, an official of the All-China Youth Federation, which invited the group, was that it was “very heathy for the youth”.
多末美好的霹雳的80年代哇
虽然当时我还木有出生
但是看到careless wishpers响起时，还是心潮澎湃热泪盈眶哇
话说导演到哪儿找了那么多会说英语的人
看过所有相关资料后，整个事件最哈皮的莫过于George Micheal刚到北京机场时那一句
“Where are all the screaming girls?"
整个中国为之震精了。
