China with a Cut arises out of Jeroen de Kloet's long-standing engagement with the Beijing rock scene. Based primarily on his thesis which drew on fieldwork in the early to mid-1990s, much of the material here has been previously published in article form, but it has been substantially revised and updated following extended fieldwork in 2008.

“Cut” comes from dakou daizi, the cut or clipped American and European CDs which were shipped to China for recycling but, still playable aside from a few tracks, found a new market amongst young Beijingers hungry for alternative sounds. The term was attached to a generation of rock musicians. De Kloet is fascinated by the idea that an urban generation might name itself after rubbish dumped by the West, and uses it to mine a rich vein of theoretical musings on the relationships between global and local, east and west, and strategies of authenticity in the mythology of Chinese rock.

So much is familiar from earlier articles, but in this book, which functions almost as a guided tour of the various rock scenes of the past 20 years, de Kloet leads us well into the “post-dakou” generation of “little emperors,” and the less well-known territory of Chinese hip-hop, “extreme Heavy Metal” bands like Voodoo Kungfu, and “fashionable” and “pop-punk” bands like Sober and New Pants, whose outlook de Kloet delineates (drawing on Regev 2007) as aesthetic cosmopolitanism, tapping into global structures of feeling, full of self-conscious irony and parody.

This is not an ethnography in the classic sense, with little description of musical life in the capital aside from occasional anecdotes. (I was charmed by the vision of the author pogo dancing at a Queen Sea Big Shark gig at Mao Live House screaming along with the crowd, “money fucker, money fucker” [p. 117].) It draws on an impressive array of interviews with musicians, blogs, and commentary from Chinese critics.

Arguing against the notion that Chinese rock died in the mid-1990s, de Kloet contends rather that rock is falling apart into separate scenes which are linked by the rock mythology, and maintained by a spatially and ideologically inscribed divide between rock and pop. For de Kloet the discourse of authenticity is crucial to this mythology. For each scene that he delineates in chapters one and two (largely following terms used by the bands or critics in his classification) he offers a section focusing on “authenticating styles” and “place.” This survey format is sometimes unsatisfying in the necessarily brief treatment accorded to each scene, but it does provide an excellent overview of musical styles and ideologies in the Beijing rock scene, and (with the accompaniment of YouTube) a very amusing musical excursion. This will make the book a valuable resource for students. Also useful for students is de Kloet's strong engagement with cultural theory, and his ability to summarize and clarify the sources on which he draws.

Equally amusing (and attractive to students) is the extreme bitchiness of de Kloet's interviewees: an important aspect, as he argues, of their strategies of self-authentication, like the delightful underground musician Qiu Ye critiquing Chinese punk bands for “screaming ‘Fuck You Fuck Me’ without making clear if they have the potency to fuck anyone” (p. 65). De Kloet occasionally betrays a similarly combative attitude towards his fellow academics, but his insights on the paradoxicality of musicians are more devastating: Yin Ts'ang, a hip-hop group composed of three Americans and one Chinese who promise on their Myspace site to “bring real 100% home-grown Chinese hip-hop music to the mainstream,” or Peter of punk band “69” who is also a stock trader.

In some ways China with a Cut appears to be more of an ongoing scholarly process than the logical culmination of a coherent research project. This is particularly apparent in de Kloet's deployment of theory where in different sections he espouses, seems to reject, then retreats again to particular theoretical frameworks. Appadurai's (1996) notion of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ cultural forms is central to his argument, but I wonder if this dualism is not too easily grafted onto the popular stylistic dualism of “hard rock” and “soft pop.” De Kloet too appears uneasy about his own framework, rejecting it in favour of a clear-opaque dichotomy in chapter three, then returning to worry over it in the conclusion.

Chapter three perhaps sits most uneasily within this volume, with a strange assorted group of “others” to the Beijing rock scene: female rock musicians, rock musicians in Shanghai and Guangzhou, and Anthony Wong, lone exemplar of Cantopop. It is somewhat bizarre to find Cantopop included in a chapter titled “Subaltern Sounds,” as if the tiny minority scene of Beijing rock actually exercised hegemony over the monolith of mainstream Chinese popular music, but this short section points tantalizingly to new perspectives and future research projects.