The Monday Media Diet with Jake Newby

Jake Newby (JN) writes the excellent Substack Concrete Avalanche about interesting music in China. A pleasure to have him with us this week. -CJN

Tell us about yourself.

My day job is with an international NGO, but outside of work I write Concrete Avalanche, a newsletter about alternative music from China.

I’m originally from the UK but spent over 15 years living and working in China. I went there with the British Council right after I graduated from university, thinking I’d go and see a different part of the world for a year before returning to England and getting sucked into life in London like so many of my friends at the time. But I quickly fell in love with Shanghai, decided to study Chinese at East China Normal University, and then just kept finding new reasons to stay.

I’ve travelled all over the country, lived in a small village in Fujian for a couple of years, and loitered in Sichuan while writing a guidebook to Chengdu, but the bulk of my time was spent in Shanghai. I wrote for a number of magazines and websites there, with my longest stint being as Managing Editor at Time Out Shanghai. I’ve also been fortunate enough to have bylines in The Financial Times and The Times, and to write about music from China for The Wire, the NME, and Bandcamp Daily.

Describe your media diet.

The first thing I open on my phone in the morning is either the latest Semafor Flagship in my inbox or WeChat.

I originally found the former’s FT-like look a bit clunky for email, especially as when they launched my go-to morning newsletter was the more cleanly-designed Quartz, but they’ve grown on me a lot.

The latter is so much more than a WhatsApp equivalent; yes I’ll look at messages from friends and family there but it’s also my continued connection point to the Chinese music scene and Chinese cultural life more broadly. I follow a host of bands, gig venues, cultural platforms and more there, who all post articles and updates regularly to their channels.

I’ll usually take a quick scan of the BBC home page, and The Guardian; I have both those and Al-Jazeera open as tabs on my work computer for news updates throughout the day.

Then I look through my inbox, which is mostly dominated by Bandcamp notifications, those Semafor yellow dots, and Substacks: Peter Frankopan for the long view on current events, Stephan Kunze for ambient and ambient-adjacent sounds, Philip Sherburne for some of the best music writing and recommendations going, Bill Bishop for an idea of what’s really happening in Chinese politics, Shawn Reynaldo for searing commentary on contemporary electronic music, Cold Window for insight into today’s Chinese literature scene, Zeteo for a different spin on the news, Animation Obsessive for fascinating stories even though I’m not obsessed with animation at all… And of course, my most-read newsletter: Poetry Lab Shanghai, which features interesting poetry in translation, including from young Chinese writers (and happens to be run by my wife).

What’s the last great book you read?

(Other than the latest releases from Nü Editions, the small press also run by my wife, ahem…) Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa still sits with me months after I finished it.

It’s the sort of book I don’t really want to say too much about – I came into it not knowing a lot about it and I think that’s a good place to start from. I will say it’s absolutely brutal at times – it’s a long way from being a light read – but it’s a necessary brutality for the story it wants to tell.

Alice Walker captures it far better than I ever could: “Susan Abulhawa possesses the heart of a warrior; she looks into the darkest crevices of lives, conflicts, horrendous injustices, and dares to shine light that can illuminate hidden worlds for us.”

What are you reading now?

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I picked it up without too much thought from a secondhand bookshop on a visit to London, having finished the excellent Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi mid-trip, but it turns out to be quite a suitable read for the current times.

I always have at least one book on the go, a physical paper book — I’ve never gotten into audio books or e-readers.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

Ashamed to say (especially after years of working on them myself) that I don’t pick up too many print magazines these days. The Wire and The New Yorker are my main exceptions.

For the latter, I’ll skip a lot of the local stuff and go straight to the feature that most grabs my attention. But wherever I start, I usually end up reading all of the features, even the ones I think I have no interest in initially – I know it’s what everyone says, but it’s true that the quality of the writing there is so high that stories you think are irrelevant to you somehow become completely gripping.

With The Wire, it’s similar: I usually turn straight to Global Ear and then work my way through the features. I might be a bit more selective once I hit the reviews section, but I often end up reading most of those too – with Bandcamp at the ready so I can listen to the most intriguing releases.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Em’s Active Faults Substack deserves to be read by a wider audience. Ostensibly it’s a newsletter centred around fandom and pop idol culture in China, but it’s really so much more than that. Even if you think you have no interest in those topics, it’s hard not to be drawn in by Em’s super smart writing and analysis, which regularly broadens out to examine wider cultural and societal issues.

There’s been a lot written about the rise of ‘Chinamaxxing’, but few pieces have been sharper than Em’s take on it all:

“My unease with this is how none of it translates into real-world interest about the country, its histories, cultural intricacies, strife and political dynamics beyond the Economist headlines. It is appealing only insofar as it is the antithesis, the Other Side with greener grass in the sense that we go to bed without hearing gunshots and Meituan delivers your food in twenty minutes.”

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Wish I had a better answer here, but I’ve largely stripped my phone back to more utilitarian apps (mail, messages, maps etc) and gotten rid of social media in the hope I’ll stop losing so much time staring at my phone screen. The exception is WeChat, but with a claimed userbase of well over a billion, it probably doesn’t count as ‘non-famous’.

Plane or train?

Train, as much as possible. For environmental reasons, but also because I like to watch the world go by. I love seeing landscapes change through the window, and while you might get the odd glimpse of that on a flight, I like being able to see the details of those transformations.

What is one place everyone should visit?

I was going to say Fujian, a province that aside from Xiamen has long been overlooked by tourists, but the last few months have seen a rush of visitors to the capital city Fuzhou, spurred by even faster rail links to Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, and Fuchsia Dunlop just did a big feature on its food for the FT, so it’s probably getting enough attention right now.

Instead, I’ll say Yunnan, which is not without its own share of attention, but has more of a foreigner-friendly tourism infrastructure, plus plenty of opportunities to get off the beaten track. A beautiful province with a perfect climate and incredible cultural, culinary and geographical diversity, a lot of Yunnan’s charms are evident immediately, but it also rewards longer, slower travel. Yes you should stop by ‘Dalifornia’, but also take the time to check out smaller spots such as Shaxi, with its elegant Qing dynasty wooden theatre stage, babbling brooks, and ricotta-like cheese sold by Bai minority women at the Friday market.

While you travel, listen to the region’s traditional sounds (Kink Gong has a load of Yunnanese field recordings), long-term residents such as Oklahoma-born multi-instrumentalist Li Daiguo and folk act Wild Children, and its new wave of contemporary acts such as South Acid Mimi Dance Team, and read up on the Victorian- and Edwardian-era ‘plant hunters’ while you experience the area’s brilliant biodiversity (shout out to my mum for putting me onto this particular part of Yunnan’s history).

And once you’ve done that, you can head into western Sichuan, which is less-travelled but even more spectacular – especially its Tibetan areas.

I realise people may have reservations about travelling to China, but visiting it and perhaps understanding it a little better doesn’t have to mean you’re endorsing everything about it.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Two decades ago, I went to a gig in Shanghai at a venue called Yuyintang. It was unlike any show I’d ever been to. There were a few hundred people crammed into a tiny space with no air conditioning. The ‘bar’ consisted of an elderly gentleman stood beside a small drinks fridge selling cans of Coke, bottles of water and bottles of Tsingtao.

The band that night was Rebuilding the Rights of Statues (Re-TROS), who would go on to perform in arenas, tour Europe with the likes of Depeche Mode, and soundtrack a major TV adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. That night, they played to a few hundred people crammed into a tiny space with no air conditioning. It was hardly glamorous, but the atmosphere was electric. And sweaty. Very, very sweaty.

Up until that point, my search for Chinese music had mostly consisted of buying knock-off CDs of Taiwanese pop groups from street sellers in Shanghai. But that night was a revelation. It was also when I first met Sophia Wang, who was working at Yuyintang at the time and sidled up to me in the crowd, presumably because I was one of only a handful of foreign faces, wondering how I’d gotten there. When she heard I was interested in finding more bands like Re-TROS, she took my number and would send me links to Chinese post-punk, psych-rock and lots more besides.

I’ve been in that rabbit hole ever since. (JN)