In an entirely futile effort to keep my finger on the pulse of Chinese popular culture, I’ve been watching the current TV hit series Rock it, mom (Yaogun kuanghua 摇滚狂花, directed by Li Jun 李骏 and Jing Lipeng 荆丽鹏). It’s well contextualised in a China Project article (cf. this review).

Rock It, Mom tells the story of Peng Lai [played by Yao Chen 姚晨], an over-the-hill, middle-aged rock singer. A run of disappointing relationships caused her to move to the US, where her music career never took off, leading her to return to China. As she tries to put her troubled life back together in her home country, she reconnects with her long-lost teenage daughter Baitian [Zhuang Dafei 庄达菲], whose passion for rock music inspires her to restart her career.

The mother-daughter dynamic, competing in their destructiveness, makes a refreshing study in alienation. Once again I am reminded of Long March veteran Wang Zhen’s classic riposte to Cui Jian’s Nothing to my name:

What do you mean, you’ve got nothing to your name? You’ve got the Communist Party haven’t you?

You can watch all twelve episodes as a YouTube playlist, currently without English subtitles:

To help keep roughly on track, the first two episodes with woefully impressionistic subtitles are here:
https://www.iq.com/play/rock-it-mom-episode-1-l6o2m3oxv8?lang=en_us
https://www.iq.com/play/rock-it-mom-episode-2-m2ta0571zk?lang=en_us

It does make me miss Beijing—skyscrapers, underpasses and all (cf. Beijing yogurt).

See also Platform, New musics in Beijing, and Liu Sola, voice of alternative China.