Ten years between albums
万能青年旅店 released their second album after ten years. On listening to a band that sings about industrial decline in Hebei, and why art gets better once you can see the structure under it.
This one isn’t about technology.
万能青年旅店, usually translated as Omnipotent Youth Society, put out their second album 《冀西南林路行》 in December. Their first album came out in 2010. Ten years is a long time between records for anyone. For a band whose first album became something close to a generational text for a lot of Chinese people my age, it felt like waiting for a letter from a friend who had moved very far away.
I’ve had the new one on repeat through the holidays. It’s slower and denser than the first, full of images of quarries, mountains, rivers and industry in southwest Hebei, and it takes several listens before it opens up. I’m still working through it.
But the song I keep going back to is from the first album, 《杀死那个石家庄人》. I heard it in college and liked it without understanding it. I only started to understand it in the last few years.
It’s a song about a man in Shijiazhuang, an industrial city in Hebei, who changes out of his pharmaceutical factory uniform at six in the evening, whose wife is cooking porridge, who drinks a few beers, and who lives this way for thirty years “直到大厦崩塌”, until the building collapses. It’s about the end of the state factory era, the layoffs of the late 90s, a whole generation whose lives were organized around work units that disappeared. There’s a line about buying a fake gun with a counterfeit bill to protect the life he has, which is absurd and heartbreaking at once.
What changed my listening was reading about that history: how large state enterprises in the north were restructured, what happened to the workers, what cities like Shijiazhuang went through. Once I had that structure, every image in the song had a specific weight. The factory clothes. The people’s department store. The emptiness at the end. It stopped being a vaguely sad song and became a very precise one.
It also reminded me of Camus’s The Stranger, which I read around the same time. A man living an ordinary routine that suddenly shows itself to be arbitrary, and a flat, almost detached way of narrating something terrible. I don’t know if the band had Camus in mind. The feeling is similar: the routine holds until it doesn’t, and nothing in the routine prepared you for that.
I think this is true of most art I love. I enjoy it more once I can see what’s underneath it: the history, the constraints the artist worked in, what they’re answering. Some people think analysis kills the feeling. For me it’s usually the opposite. The feeling gets sharper because I understand what it’s about.
Anyway, if you read Chinese, go listen. If you don’t, find a translation of the lyrics first. Ten years was worth the wait.