Kaiser Kuo

QUICK FACTS

• born in New York
• graduate of U.C. Berkeley and University of Arizona
• was a part of the band Tang Dynasty from 1988-1999
• currently in the band Spring and Autumn and AC/DC tribute band, The Dirty Deeds
• has written for the Red Herring and has a column in the The Beijinger
• was director of digital strategy for Oglivy China
• is now Baidu's director of international communications
• lives in Beijing with his wife Fanfan and two kids

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Hotties.

Kaiser Kuo (Guo Yiguang) was born in 1966 in New York to immigrant parents and grew up listening to the Who, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and others that would totally influence his life as a musician and writer.

After college at Berkeley, he went to live in China for a year. That was when he founded the rock-metal band Tang Dynasty (Tang Chao), which, true to its name, made music that was (quote Wiki) "part progressive rock and artistic metal and part traditional Chinese vocal techniques with lyrical poetry and musical arrangements meant to hearken back to the glorious days of ancient Chinese civilization." Considered the first heavy metal band in China, they became extremely popular in the Chinese rock scene; their irreverent cover of the Communist song "L'Internationale" was an especially huge hit, even as it was not on the Mainland version of the album.



(Here you can see them featured in the documentary Rock in Berlin: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Parts 5 and 6 on Youtube. It only has Japanese subtitles, but you can check out concert footage from their amazing days.)

Today the band lives on with new members, while Kaiser Kuo is now a founding member of the band Spring and Autumn (Chun Qiu) (named after yet a different period of Chinese history!).

Listen to them here and watch Kaiser introduce the band, talk about the rock & metal scene in Beijing & China, and Tang Dynasty:


I wonder what kind of shampoo he uses. His hair is amazing!

Recognizing that his music is somewhat of an "indie" genre in China, here is what Kaiser Kuo has to say about Chinese people and rock:

"To this day, I think that most Chinese people are not prepared to accept rock. It's so antithetical to what Chinese people want out of music. They don't want to listen to music to feel aggression or any emotion aside from relaxation. They want relatively simple melodies, relatively slow rhythms, they like familiarity, they like the pentatonic scale which has inherent limitations. That's fine with me. I understand that it's always going to be something on the periphery, rock that is, and that its biggest obstacle is that people simply don't like it. That's fine, there are people who do, I'm not out to convert the world."

[Source: CRI English interview]

Living in Beijing since 1993, he is always intelligently commenting on Chinese politics, economy, news, media, and of course, rock music.

Check out this video of him talking about misconceptions about the internet and social media in Mainland China:



Kaiser Kuo's blog has had no posts for 3 years, but you can still follow him on Twitter, check him out in The Beijinger (only a few editions of his column Ich Bin Ein Beijinger are available online (including through his now-inactive blog), though many old ones can be found on the typepad blog and in this excellent 2009 essay collection of his), and listen to his weekly podcast that has been going on since April 2010.



Emo note: I was way pumped to pimp out this entry after managing to find a copy of Ich Bin Ein Beijinger on a cafe bookshelf. Hooked on it for a couple days, I'd been marked some relevant essays with post-it notes. Alas, one day, it mysteriously disappeared, prolly 'cause someone else found it and wanted it too. So! To be continued, hopefully.

BTW, just found people in The Beijinger forums dissing him & his book which I personally thought had great writing and personality. And why did these sarcastic, ironic doods think that anything needed to be controversial or offensive in order to be good?

So I decided to obnoxiously post a picture to promote it. Right here. Thas' right.

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