I HAVEN'T BOUNCED THIS MUCH IN YEARS, or, ROCK N' ROLL WILL SAVE YOUR SOUL

I held my first focus group last Saturday morning and spent the rest of the day in a sort of fog. It was successful in some ways, a fiasco in others, but mostly I was just burned out on preparations and excessive thinking. I was entertaining this malaise at the Treehouse when my friend Xiangzi called. He had a free ticket to a show that night, M, and did I want to go?

I've loved M since Alessandra, one of my roommates in London, introduced me to his album Je Dis Aime. Alex used to play the record on repeat, and the scratchy guitars, sleazy bass, and melodious French vocals won me over rapidly. I've tried finding other albums of his but have had little luck, though I was delighted to find his song (and video) in the film The Triplets of Belleville several years ago. I had heard he was playing in Beijing, part of a tour for his new album Mister Mystere, but didn't take the initiative to go out and buy an expensive ticket, even though I knew I would probably regret it.

But an unexpected free ticket! What a glorious thing! Xiangzi and I arrived at the venue early to discover most of Beijing's French community drinking Tsingdaos and gesticulating excitedly with their cigarettes. Some were costumed: I saw wigs of many colors, a bridal veil over geisha make-up, high pigtails and sunglasses, and one man wearing a silk kimono and a wrestling mask.

The crowd went wild for the opening band, 新裤子 (New Pants) who emerged from a cloud of dry ice wearing skinny Mao suits and cute haircuts. Here is a picture of the band's founding members that I found on the internet:

On my part, I discovered that the something that had been missing from my life was apparently Chinese stadium rock at the exact moment that the cure was at hand.

But I am at a loss to describe what happened next when M took to the stage. I considered linking to youtube videos or wikis or music reviews, all of which I have turned to in the last few days to supplement the pleasure of the live performance, but I hate substituting a simulation and pretending it will give anyone a sense of the reality.

My own brief introduction is this: M, the stage name of the performer Matthieu Chedid, put on one of the best shows I have ever seen. In the photo below, his hair is shaped like his titular M, a style he favors and which makes him look like a cross between a Japanese anime character and Eddie Munster.

At the show, he wore a feathered hat in this exact shape, but with even more exaggerated peaks which you can sort of make out on the right of the crappy phone photo below.

M is apparently also known for his costumes, shiny tailored monochrome suits with vampiric collars. He seems to have enormous amounts of fun on stage. At times during the show, members of his band would disappear and re-emerge wearing ridiculous costumes that may or may not have had anything to do with the song they were playing. Below, a guitar player in a padded superhero suit holds aloft a giant cereal box during Le Complex Du Corn Flakes. Later he stripped down to cape and underoos.

At other points, almost everyone in the band would briefly march or dance in formation, huge smiles on their face. We, the audience, were entirely in their thrall. We bounced, we sang along, we murmured excitedly and craned for a look as M entered the pit and ran madly around the elevated VIP area, playing his guitar on the guardrail. I haven't bounced up and down that much in years, if ever.

I don't speak a word of French and so didn't understand M's lyrics or flirtatious asides to the audience, though I could grasp the essential idea of songs like Je Dis Aime. Still, between the insane costumes, songs sung like ecstatic poetry with dirty electric guitar riffs, and brief band member performance art that seemed to refer to violence and consumerism, I got quite enough to keep my hungry mind busy. I also just loved being in the same room as M, someone who clearly enjoys playing with exaggerated ideas of himself. As David Byrne, who M reminds me of in many ways, has said, "I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself".

The band played for almost two and a half rapturous hours, by the end of which I had completely lost track of Xiangzi and merely wandered about, sometimes holding my place near the stage, sometimes wandering around the edge of the crowd, complimenting one of the guys from New Pants and at one point realizing that I was standing four feet away from Cui Jian, the father of Chinese rock.

It was a fantastic night, healing even. I spent the next day, from 8:30 in the morning until 11pm at night, at a conference on Chinese anthropology at my university here, meeting two famous American anthropologists, suffering through hours of presentations and comments, and marveling that even at the "Chinese Harvard", karaoke was a vital part of the evening banquet.

It was a little boring in comparison to what had come before but oh my what a weekend.