Pumpkins Should Be Squashed, Not Smashed
Shanghaiist told me that Spli-t is casting a vote for performers to appear at the Shanghai Yue Festival it is promoting in October. Here is a list of the performers I can choose from:
Counting Crows, Smashing Pumpkins, !!!, Foo Fighters, 范晓萱 (Bo Bo Mavis), Rihanna, REM, Kanye West, Ben Harper, The Verve, Mastodon, The Strokes, Interpol, Wolfmother, Massive Attack, Feist, Franz Ferdinand, Jack Johnson, Rage Against the Machine, MC HOTDOG, Gnarls Barkley, Against Me!, 黄立行 (Stanley Huang), 苏打绿 (sodagreen), Metallica, 林一峰 (Chet Lam), Kings of Leon, Cypress Hill
I’ll keep an open mind about the bands I don’t know, but there is a lot of old crap in this list from performers who are well beyond their sell by date. It’s an obvious list of boring student bands from the eighties and nineties. I’d rather sunbathe naked on Nanpu Bridge in January than endure The Smashing Pumpkins again. Spli-t earned lots of good karma for putting on Sonic Youth last year and I know they have to make their money back, but it would be good if they could spice up the list a little. Here are a few suggestions:
- Melt Banana
- Sufjan Stevens
- Nina Nastasia
- Princess Superstar
- Buck 65
- Beirut
- Four Tet
- Rapture
- Jonathan Coulton
- PJ Harvey
- Vialka
Good luck to Spli-t for putting their neck and trying to make this festival happen and I’d be happy if Massive Attack and MC Hotdog made it. Putting on a rock festival in Shanghai is not going to be easy given that Bjork was such a loose cannon at her recent show.
Tags: Shanghai, music, Yue Festival, Split