龍 Dragons - Parfums de la Revolution

In 1966, the Maoist political faction dubbed "Gang of Four" began to help carry out Mao's disastrous and repressive Cultural Revolution. In 1975, Malcolm McLaren dubbed John Lydon "Rotten", called his band Sex Pistols, and helped launch the UK punk scene. In 1976, Andy Gill and Jon King formed Leeds post-punk stalwarts Gang of Four, not to be confused with the by-then-on-the-way-out aforementioned Maoists. And, in 1982, the first Chinese punk band broke onto the European scene with a record smuggled out of Guangzhou.

Except they didn't. Probably. The band is called Dragons (or 龍 in traditional Chinese), and while some people hold that they were a totally real, totally authentic black market export from Deng Xioping's PRC, they are more than likely the McLaren-esque invention of a French gonzo trickster named Marc Boulet. More on that later.

Laying the needle on the record, I could believe this was an authentic punk relic. The music is urgent and amateur, with smashing guitars and drums, but with the ghostly sound of a Chinese erhu where one might expect keyboards or other instruments. Picture the Velvet Underground but John Cale is playing a two-stringed bowed zither. The singing is off-key, almost entirely in Cantonese, though frequently there are no lyrics at all. On the second track, "L'ile Du Temple Maudit" (Island of the Cursed Temple), the guitar and erhu vibe is suddenly smashed by a scream that made my dog wince and perk her ears up, followed by apelike chanting over newly intensified guitars and drums. Punk as fuck, or at least my dog thinks so, and she's usually right about these things.

It's impossible not to think of Gang of Four on these songs, with martial drums, halting and screeching guitar riffs, and sparse instrumentation, except, well, just not as professionally recorded or played. The band that is. Not the Maoists.

And then we get to the end of Side A, which closes with...oh, it's Sex Pistols' seminal hit "Anarchy in the UK"! With an erhu! And incoherent wailing! It's absolutely batshit insane, and I can't look away.

Side B gives us more Gang of Four and VU grooves, and even a little venture into early Talking Heads territory with the song Nouvelle Chine. I don't know what the songs are about, but I assume it has something to do with buildings and food. Side B closes in similar fashion to Side A, except with a cover of Mick and Keef's "Get Off of My Cloud", which is a more straightforward cover than the let's-break-it-even-further energy of the Pistols one. Discrepancies in recording volume and mastering give it that made-in-a-basement quality, but something about it feels wrong, like it wants us to believe that in a heavy handed way. This was recorded hastily before the authorities could find out! Danger! Intrigue!

This is really a turducken of punk weirdness. McLaren concocted a band out of a couple of guys who could play instruments and sing and one guy who looked like he might knife you before he passed out, and they created one of the great anti-establishment anthems of our age. In turn, this group of Chinese punks completely deconstructs the already deconstructed, and turns it into weird performance art.

Except that, as mentioned, this band probably is not actually in the PRC, but actually just some guys who sing in Cantonese and play erhu living in France in 1982.

This brings us to a fascinating dive into the record, courtesy of post-doctoral fellow Nathaniel Amar at the University of Hong Kong, who looked into Marc Boulet and his mystery band's provenance and published an article with his findings.

A French gonzo writer who claimed to have lived both in China (posing as a Uyghur and marrying a local) and in India (posing as a Dalit), Boulet had an interest in underground music scenes that resulted in him bringing back an early Polish punk record, and eventually, his "discovery" of Dragons on a trip to China in 1981. But, as Amar finds, it's more likely that he recruited the singers and erhu player in France, and paired them with members of a local new-wave band to create the band.

There's an interview with Boulet on YouTube where he appears dressed as a Red Guard in front of the Eiffel Tower, and it's impossible to not view this as some sort of performance art. It's just too weird.

Likewise, the interview has pictures of the supposed band, but to my eyes they could be stock photos from anywhere. Just three guys having fun, wearing leather jackets, and possibly being cryptopunks. The record only credits them as Kuo on guitars, Liu on drums, and Li on the erhu. You wouldn't want to give them away to the Chinese authorities, would you? I'm certain that the committee wouldn't approve of punk rock hiding amongst the proletariat.

But what is authenticity? Are the Sex Pistols authentic, even though Malcolm McLaren recruited them out of a London punk fashion boutique? Sure. Are Dragons authentic? In as much as they themselves are an authentically weird piece of punk apocrypha, absolutely. Is this also some kind of weird French/Chinese cultural appropriation? Maybe? The singers and musicians may be genuinely Chinese. There's definitely an erhu sawing away over the music. Liu, Kuo, and Li may not be the underground revolutionaries bringing punk to Communist China that they are made out to be, but humans made this, whether as a genuine expression of the late punk movement or some kind of weird trickster performance art. Whichever way you slice it, it's a delightfully weird relic of a different time.

Anarchy in Guangzhou, baby. It's coming sometime. Maybe.