Jeoren de Kloet's China With a Cut is a unique and in-depth study of rock music in urban China. Based ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, readers can feel Jeoren's strong passion for Chinese rock and its changing music culture. Jeoren exhibits perspicacious judgment about how rock music has penetrated the life of the dakou and balinghou (the post-1980s) generations. This is a well-written analysis of the trajectories of development and meaning of rock music in China from the late 1990s to the pre-Olympic Beijing.

As interviews in the book revealed, there might be no Chinese rock, only ‘rock from Beijing and rock from Shanghai’ (p. 125). The ‘cut’ which appears in the title of book denotes the punched and illegally imported CDs that provide the abundant music resources in order for the controlled population to learn, imitate the global culture and lifestyle of and, above all, to reproduce the music with Chinese themes. The focus of the book is not much on why there exists a ‘cut’ on CDs, which is a matter of social and political control. Rather, it includes stories about how Chinese populations in urban settings react to the ‘cut’. The cut signifies the influx of global cultural music forms or ideologies into China. The latter results in numerous creative experiments in the localisation of global music in myriad forms and modes of local reproduction, articulation and expression that are beyond the suggested imagination of the original music form. The author is able to explicate clearly and concisely to non-Chinese readers the local meaning of these music forms from hip hop, punk and heavy metal to pop, and the intersection of the music forms with localities, spaces and values of femininity, generation and class. For readers interested in rock music, discovering how the local narratives of various rock genres in connection with the production, reproduction and circulation to/in various local sites are repacked, remade or reinterpreted in China would be of great interest. Here it is possible to see that de Kloet's analysis is very much influenced by the Foucauldian framework as he also admits on the first page of the book.

Implicit in any study of rock is always the undercurrent and the emerging values of rock. Here de Kloet thinks that they might, if not challenge, then produce paradoxical discourses outside the establishment, and bring forth alternative voices or cultural resistance in China. I think that if the development of Western rock marks the most upfront and radical values of the time, Chinese rock works more or less like that by representing ideologies and values tolerated by the authorities in China. Ostensibly, rock in China, as de Kloet describes it, did not have the privilege of becoming the pop or mainstream, and never will. Chinese rock musicians survive in subaltern mode while their performance is largely ad hoc, mobile and irregular in live house and, if fortunate, appearing in music festivals such as the MIDI festival. Despite the fact that they are not part of ‘mass culture’, de Kloet tends to foreground the life stories, the abnormalities and other social practices that are in common and are shared among the-not-so-much-normalised youth and their peers. Although without a particular classification in the balinghou, in the early period of Jeroen's study and before the Beijing Olympics, they constitute collectively as a significant generation trapped between the tight politics and the relatively free and expanding market. Rock music, in particular the direct quotes from the musicians cited in the book, seems to be presented by the author as a temporal and temporary solution to the vicissitudes of life in this very specific epoch, a period in which China was transforming into a global power.

The book's highlight is more on the early period of Jeoren's fieldwork. What is intellectually intriguing in this period are the subjectivities connected to the multiplicity of rock, and hence the strength of the book lies in such bottom-up perspective analyses. However, there is not much emphasis on another side of the story – how the state and its media control and limit the available avenues for rock music. These kinds of controls, although not discussed in detail, clearly explain why these music scenes appear as they were. Besides, since the 1980s, the official media have promoted different types of Chinese secular and pop music (e.g. the so-called northwestern wind), rather than rock. This has included Hong Kong and Taiwan musics, which have collectively become popular genres that have superseded the more anti-hegemonic Chinese rock. The state and the commercial force that the state has created might be deliberate efforts of the state to suppress the development of rock scenes in China.

Jeroen concludes in the last chapter that ‘rock is not dead’ (p. 193), and believes that the mythology of rock is a deparadoxicalising force with which we can unfetter the fixed framework of binaries – the dissidence and status quo, the grassroots and the privileged, or the people and the state – and explore the possibilities, potentiality and imaginations out of the rock scenes. While it may be true that rock scenes are still surviving, obviously, with the exorbitantly rising rate of China's economy, and hence the larger urban generation sharing the benefit of it, they are more fuelled by a vehement craving for a glamorous cosmopolitan lifestyle than by celebrating the productive and creative forces that accompany the utterance and performativity of rock. It is not that rock cannot unfold the heteroglossia of life in this transforming nation, but that the new generation, with the fantasisation or attraction of the post-socialist modernity, capitalism and materialism, chooses to indulge in immersing in, exploring or debunking paradoxes and contradictions.

China is neither going to collapse nor implode. Of course, this does not mean that rock music has had no effect on the dakou and balinghou generation. Perhaps today's China is the collective consequence of the reaction of the generation and their interaction with or the response from the ruling class. But we have to admit that today the rock scenes are fading away, or at least they are not as prominent as during the period under the observation of the author. We might not be sure what today's era of music could be called; on Chinese media, we now hear mostly Taiwanese pop (Gang is out of the Gangtai music) and some locally produced pop of Western musical forms with Chinese lyrics. Quite ironically, a few years ago the official media in China celebrated the historical past of rock music, inviting Cui Jian and other rock bands (who had previously been banned from appearing publicly in the media) to become visible on their screens. This implies that, in the eyes of the authorities, the influence of rock is no longer strong. Rock music neither rocked the status quo politically nor outweighed the commercial genres culturally. Now, for the state, celebrating the ‘legacy’ of rock is a gesture suggesting that it has been shelved in the historical past, and that the new epoch of music, echoing socialist capitalism, has entered and reigns. The latter necessitates more fieldwork study and more enthusiastic researchers like de Kloet.