I talked to musical performer and writer Kevin McGeary about how and why he came to “write controversial songs in the world’s largest authoritarian state” (his own turn-of-phrase).
He got in touch with me because he had read my blog chat last November with Kunt & The Gang.
Coronavirus conversations via Skype are becoming the norm. He was self-isolated in his flat in Manchester while I was self-isolated at my home in Borehamwood.
Kevin McGeary talked to me from Manchester via Skype
JOHN: In the last two weeks, you’ve released an English-language album TMItastic and a Chinese language album 失败博物馆 (Museum of Failure), both humorous. How are they different?
KEVIN: My English comedy songs are often foul-mouthed and use a lot of swear words, though not to the extent of Kunt & The Gang. My Chinese songs tend to be offensive in a different way: they satirise Chinese culture and society. The Chinese ones are PG-friendly. They are not sweary; they are more satirical. They satirise aspects of society like wealthy men who keep mistresses. There are entire villages in China where pretty-much everybody is a ‘kept’ woman.
JOHN: Presumably you could not sing these Chinese songs in China… The authorities would take exception to them.
KEVIN: Well, my initial wave of creativity in writing Chinese songs came just before Xi Jinping took over as President. Under him, censorship of the media and the blocking of websites has got a lot stricter. But I used to busk in China; I used to perform on the streets singing my songs in Mandarin and people were very friendly.
JOHN: Are there loads of buskers in China?
KEVIN: No, not at all.
JOHN: So you must have been stopped, surely. They have Party people on every block, don’t they?
KEVIN: Urban administrators, yes. But they’re not really very powerful and they’re only there to stop violence or actual crime. I wasn’t committing a crime and I got away with it because my stuff was so off the wall.
Kevin McGeary busking in Shenzhen (Photograph by Jesse Warren for China Daily)
JOHN: You were in China for…
KEVIN: …for eleven years. The first 3½ years, I was teaching English. I studied the language very hard, so I was conversant within a year and could read a newspaper within two years.
The second year, I lived in a small city in the middle of the country in Hunan Province – the equivalent of living in Arkansas or Oklahoma.
The only form of entertainment, really, was karaoke: I went almost every night and that’s where my Chinese songwriting grew.
JOHN: And, after you finished teaching English…
KEVIN: I worked on a newspaper for two years – the Shenzhen Daily. Then I left China, but I missed it, so I went back 2014-2018, working for a massive Chinese company Midea who make home appliances.
Kevin McGeary on GuangdongTelevision
JOHN: Not a creative, artistic job, then…?
KEVIN: Same as Kunt & The Gang, I don’t expect to monetise my creative work, so I need a steady job that gives me the material basis to be creative. You can’t be creative if you don’t have a roof over your head and clothes on your back.
I started writing Chinese-language songs in November 2008 and, in February 2012, it just suddenly struck me to start writing comedy songs.
When I started writing songs in Chinese, I had only been learning the language for 18 months, so my pronunciation was not perfect and also the novelty of having a white person singing in Chinese meant most people were just laughing at my attempts. After a while, I realised I had to turn this weakness into a strength. If people are laughing at my attempts, I might as well try to make people laugh. That’s how it started.
JOHN: Is satire a good idea in China?
KEVIN: Well, people are more open-minded than you would imagine. There was a feature in China Daily about my songwriting; I also performed and was interviewed on Chinese television.
JOHN: So being offensive is OK?
KEVIN: A lot of my stuff is beyond bad taste. It’s too silly to even be offensive.
JOHN: You don’t have any problem getting your music heard online in China?
KEVIN: I didn’t originally but, within a year of the Beijing Olympics – which was supposed to be China’s ‘coming out’ party – they blocked YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Back when blogging was big in the early 2010s I had quite a popular blog with a decent audience – tens of thousands of hits for a video – but now, with the internet being more heavily censored and pretty much all Western websites blocked in China – the New York Times, the BBC – it’s harder now to get my stuff heard.
JOHN: So how do you get it heard? What sites do you put it on?
KEVIN: Youku and Tencent and QQ – Chinese-owned video-sharing sites which are the equivalents of YouTube. Youku is owned by Alibaba; QQ is owned by Tencent. They are not as censorious as some people might imagine. You can get almost anything on there unless it’s sexually explicit or violent.
JOHN: The Chinese love Yes Minister, don’t they? And that satirises bureaucracy. So there must be a liking for taking the piss out of your own system – though keeping low-key about it!
KEVIN: Definitely. I think Yes Minister was a vastly superior show to The Thick of It because, for a start, the characters are a lot more likeable… and there’s a lot more subtlety. When the Chinese criticise the regime, they tend to be very subtle about it.
For example, when the #MeToo movement broke in 2017, all internet posts with the Mandarin phrase for ‘Me too’ – ‘I also am’ – were censored. So the way to get any subversive message across was to use the image of a bowl of rice and the image of a rabbit. Because (in Chinese) ‘mee’ is the word for rice and ‘to’ is the word for rabbit. So ‘mee-to’ sounds very similar to the English expression. If you do that, you are not breaking the law.
JOHN: Very subtle.
KEVIN: Yes, images of Winnie the Pooh were banned because there was this paranoia he looked like Xi Jinping.
JOHN: In a sense, you must have had to change your ‘self’ to live in China. What terrible Western habits did you have to drop?
KEVIN: There is a lot more subtlety to the way people communicate in China. In a country like America or Australia, where people came from different parts of the world and they grew as a nation state in a very short time, the only way to get by was to be very direct. But, in China, a much larger percentage of communication is unspoken. So much is about context and reading between the lines. Criticising people as individuals is generally very taboo in China.
JOHN: Are you worried one night there is going to be a knock on your door and a Chinese man will be saying: “We have been reading and listening to your work in Beijing…”?
… CONTINUED HERE …
… There is a taster for Kevin’s Chinese-language album 失败博物馆 (Museum of Failure) online…
… There is a YouTube playlist for the album HERE …
… AND THERE IS A TOTALLY UNEDITED AUDIO VERSION OF MY CHAT WITH KEVIN ON THE PODBEAN WEBSITE HERE.
IT RUNS 42 MINUTES.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 