To all of you Marriott people, this thread has nothing to do with the Capital Ren.

I'm posting in order to plug the twinz and Zero because I simply like them. Due to political reasons (unofficial), they aren't playing much these days, but we're in store for a good summer. Hence, all of you prospective tourists should consider staying south of Chang'an Jie (I would never have dreamed of offering this advice 5 years ago, but times are changing).

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/lOEslpCm_vQ/

Some things aren't subject to change: i.e. they axed that song from Dylan's set list in both Beijing and Shanghai.

The Dylan thing doesn't surprise me...actually having the concert go ahead at all did (I remember the last attempt a few years ago). Not to hijack the purpose of the thread, but in the same vein, there's a lot of serious crap going down in Beijing now. Over the last month, something has definitely taken a turn for the dark side with crackdowns and disappearances going on. Never seen the official gov't paranoia level this high in the years I've been here.

I really hope it doesn't get to the stage where foreign acts and foreigner-heavy music and entertainment venues get seriously affected. :-(

I vaguely recall, around 5 years ago, that a big name band (Rolling Stones, U2, etc) was scheduled to play BJ/SH and ended up bailing on the trip very close in, reportedly due to issues with the censors.

I have heard that for one off concerts, it's common practice to submit set lists that please the Big Brother, but then play other stuff.

Rolling Stones, but unofficially the real reason they were happy to bail on the China part of the tour was poor ticket sales. AFAIK, U2 has to date not really tried to do shows in the PRC. But Dylan definitely was supposed to play China several years ago and got deep-sixed by TPTB. And then there was the famous flap over the Shanghai 2008 concert by Bjork, the Icelandic singer...

I didn't bump this thread since April because, due to licensing issues, the R Lounge simply wasn't very good (the Marriott Corporation plays by book and this makes sense for them; there's no reason for them to put their China operation at risk for the sake of a single hotel bar).

Fortunately, things are looking good for the R Lounge now (in the clear), so I'm pleased to replug it. While it might take a month or two to get it back up to speed, the current situation is quite nice... in spite of the fact that the "ladies night" crowd tends to rather "senior", largely due to the fact that a certain airline that has a long term contract with the hotel (and a significant percentage of the rooms of the rooms on offer), there's a silver lining in every cloud (i.e. those airline crews seem to like me).