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HONG KONG HARDCORE
King Ly Chee’s Riz Farooqi shares his thoughts.
King Ly Chee is arguably the biggest (underground) band in Hong Kong. Their aggressive blend of punk and metal work only too well with their social and sometimes political lyrics. In the last few years, they have revolutionized Hong Kong’ s music scene by merging local and Expatriate rock cultures and introducing ‘Hardcore’ to Hong Kong. Their name reaches from the likes of our neighbors in Singapore and Japan to the other side of the world in America.
They’ve released two studio albums and have opened for metal giants, Korn. (HKClubbing’s Indy Shome) had a long chat with KLC’s founder and frontman, Riz Farooqi. The following is his story and his words, compiled from comments and responses to (HKClubbing’s) questions.
(The following has been compiled from Riz’s responses in an interview with Indy Shome.)
For me, in general, Hardcore is… I wouldn’t consider it just music. For me, it’s an attitude, and there are lots of different interpretations of what ‘Hardcore’ really is to other people, you know, some people look at it in a positive way or a negative way. For me, it’s all about the positive. That’s what attracted me to the culture. It’s a culture that really involves the whole being. You can’t just listen to the music passively.
The beauty of ‘Hardcore’, why I got into this music when I was 13 or 14 years old, was the lyrical content, and how it pushed me to think. The music and the lyrics of the bands I was listening to- even punk bands, like Bad Religion. When I first heard them, their lyrical content- it was the first time where bands were actually pushing me to think about certain social issues in the world, and, you know, Bad Religion will take it to the point where it becomes political. At 14 years old, you really could care less about politics, but they actually got me to sit down and think, “Wow, maybe I want to read a newspaper today.” You know? You want to find out about stuff like that. That’s what drew me to ‘Hardcore.’
I’ve been playing guitar since… I don’t know… since I was 9, or 10, or 11, or whatever, and I’ve always been into heavier types of music. At that time, 14 years ago – a long time ago, music wasn’t as accessible as it is now. Stores like HMV – we didn’t have HMV back then. If something gets released in the States, say today, it will be released in Hong Kong today. Same time, you know what I mean? It’s crazy. Where as back then, stuff would be months behind, so we didn’t really have access to lots of different types of music. The only types of music we had access to was the mainstream stuff, and for some weird reason, metal was the mainstream at the time. Iron Maiden, AC/DC… that’s the stuff I grew up listening to. Being a guitarist, my (original) focus until I learned about punk and hardcore was always the music; I never really cared about the lyrical content. I sort of got into some really aggressive metal where the lyrics are just negative, just pure negative, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to listen to the guitars and listen to the drums. Finally, my skateboarding friends would go to the States and come back with all the new underground stuff. They showed me all this stuff… and the music was so simple. When I first listened to the music, it didn’t seem like there was a lot going on, and then I finally looked through the booklets and read the lyrics and thought, “Wow, this is where all the emphasis is”. And the music is so fast that it’s got a sense of urgency to it. It’s like we’ve got to get up and make a change now. There were finally some socially conscious lyrics that got you think… That’s what got me hooked.
Slowly, from then, it built up. I wanted to know more about this. I learned more about punk, learned more about hardcore, got into more bands, started reading the zines, and learned the whole D.I.Y (do-it-yourself) aspects of hardcore. You don’t wait around for people to approach you to sign you, or invite you to play shows, or whatever. You do everything yourself. If you really believe in your band, and especially if you have a message, why wouldn’t you want to promote that message and let more people know about it? would we want to just play that music to our friends or to each other? If you’re just going to sit around and wait around, you’re never going to have an opportunity for other people to hear what you’re about.
Even at the beginning of King Ly Chee, no one invited us to shows. For the first two years, we put on our own shows. I would have talked to bars about it, and I was like, “We write our own stuff blah-blah-blah,” and of course we had doors slam on us all the time, especially for the first few years, because people were just not into it. This is like a few years ago – five years ago – when metal or punk wasn’t as big. If you even played anything remotely heavy, people would be like “No, no, no. That’s not what we’re in to.” That whole (situation) added to the attitude I grew up with: if you believe in something, you go and do it- you don’t sit around and wait. That is ‘Hardcore’. The whole point of this band is to promote that same mindset and attitude to the younger generation. I mean, I work at HKIS, so I can see certain kids who don’t seem like they have a goal in their lives or somewhere to go – something to do. I don’t mean it’s like a religion or anything, but it gives you a sense of identity, a sense of purpose. That’s the toughest thing I remember when growing up. I didn’t feel like I was valued by anyone: not family, not anyone. Then once I started playing in a band and writing music I realized how much of an effect I had on my bandmates or my friends and how much of an effect I could have had on society if I got up and did something.
In the beginning, we wrote in English, because my bandmates at the time didn’t speak Chinese. My earlier bandmates were just friends that were helping me out. I had just graduated from college and moved back to Hong Kong and I felt like the scene was dead. There was just no scene; there was nothing, especially in terms of punk and hardcore. At the time, it was really an Expat kind of thing. It was mainly focused on the ESF schools or HKIS and the local kids were just not getting into it, and there was something wrong with the picture. You can’t claim to be representing Hong Kong to the rest of the world without having any local kids involved in the scene. I felt like I had to try to make it more accessible to local kids, so I put out a zine called Start From Scratch- it was a bilingual zine, and I put out eight issues of it. It was the first time that local kids could read about punk bands or metal bands or hardcore bands from around the world, and read it in a language that makes more sense to them.
With King Ly Chee, after the first year, the earlier band members moved on and we finally got a secure line up. Alex, my bassist, joined for the same exact reason that I started the band: he wanted to be a part of a band that had a message and that inspired the younger generation. He said to me, “Dude, we’re singing in English. The lyrics aren’t going to have any impact on the kids, especially when we’re playing a show.” That’s when you want to leave your biggest impact. That’s when you want to inspire them and encourage them enough so that they go home and want to log on to your website and find out more about the band. So we had to start singing in Chinese. For the past four years, every single song has been bilingual, and no one does that. It opens doors for everybody, for both sides- the Expat kids and the local kids. That ignites the world. It’s cool because you can see the Expats and the locals together in a show. There’s no segregation at all. Unfortunately, that’s not how it was a few years ago, but now it is. At our shows, there’s no separation. Finally, you can realistically say that there’s a Hong Kong scene.
www.kinglychee.com
Article By: Indy Shome |
