Justin and I were reflecting today on how drastically things have changed in the past three years in Beijing. These changes have impacted nearly every aspect of daily life including things like ease of payment (you can now use a domestic debit card in at least 60% of restaurants/stores), variety and quality of restaurants, variety and quality of imported food and rising costs for nearly everything, just to name a few. Another major change to add to the list is the number of international artists that have begun to include Beijing as a necessary stopping point on their world tours.
Currently, Beijing is scheduled to host such internationally well-known recording artists as Kylie Minogue, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park, Coldplay, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kanye West. The city also has scheduled a number of large music festivals including many locally/nationally popular artists.
Here's the problem: there's no guarantee they will happen. The dates for the Kanye West concert, to which I am very excited to now have tickets, have been changed at least three times. Last year Celine Dion, a local goddess due to the success of Titanic in China, was scheduled to perform and "cancelled" at the last minute. Most people here knew it was the government trying to avoid a foreigner with a microphone and a large crowd gathered together in a venue. This is partly thanks to Bjork publicly expressing her widely shared (and largely justified) political views at a concert last year in Shanghai. Odds are she won't be invited back to China anytime soon.
The good sign is that these big artists are even on the schedule to perform here. Venues have been set aside and tickets have been sold. Not that this means anything in China, but at least it gives us hope that international variety in music might one day be at the caliber of the international food that we have so come to enjoy.
"Without music life would be a mistake." ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Kanye, welcome to China!
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