web analytics

Rockin’ the Chicoms

One of the great things about being an artard — I can have a whale of a time just looking at stuff. Give me stuff to look at and I’m a happy weasel.

I love the internet.

I don’t know what led me to this site, but they sell reproductions of Chinese propaganda posters from 1925 to the present. Hours of wholesome, snarky amusement.

Most of them have titles like “let us strive to forthrightly repel the foreign invader through Mao Tse Tung Thought.” The artwork ranges from really very good to “yikes!”

And then there’s this.

Published in 1986, titled Youthful dancesteps. The description: “Disco is a huge craze in the 1980s. The poster shows that it is accepted and should no longer be condemned as a form of Western decadence.”

There is so much wrong with this picture. His mom jeans. Her capri pants. The finger snapping. The fact that their “disco” band includes a flute and somebody sawing on a bass fiddle with a bow.

Man, what I wouldn’t give to listen to whatever they’re playing back there. (Listening to stuff is my other great pastime. I really, really love the internet).

Anyhow, start at the beginning and have a browse through their gallery. If that doesn’t make you happy to be a Namerican, I don’t know what will.

Comments


Comment from David Gillies
Time: July 5, 2010, 10:32 pm

Commies never got us. Read What do they do for fun in Warsaw? from Holidays in Hell. Hilarious, but sad.


Comment from Skandia
Time: July 5, 2010, 10:58 pm

But have you ever heard Chinese Opera?


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 5, 2010, 11:15 pm

I have a DVD of Chinese folk music around somewhere. Mating cats are more mellifluous.

I can’t help wonder what went through their heads when they were issued posters of fields exploding with fruit under the glorious communist system, while they starved to death in their tens of millions. Did they think it was right around the corner? Did they blame themselves and assume it was really like that somewhere in China?

I’d love to know.


Comment from Nina from GCP
Time: July 5, 2010, 11:45 pm

Just wrong in so many ways I can’t possibly count all of them, but still…strangely compelling at the same wretched time.

Thanks, Stoaty…thanks a lot.

Hmmmpf.

🙂

And yeah, I’ve heard Chinese Opera…Stoaty sums it up quite well, I think.


Comment from lauraw
Time: July 6, 2010, 12:13 am

Hey, hey, HEY now. Shhh.

Everybody had mom jeans in the 80’s. Cinched around the natural waist, which is somewhere up around your throat.

I had a pair of deeply pleated red gabardine pants that zipped up wayyy over the navel and then buttoned with two buttons just under the ribs, with a waistband that you turned down to cover the buttons. They were very stylish.

*goes to closet to check integrity of the dustcover on grey and pink checkered asymmetrical blouse from 1985*

Perfect.

It’s all coming back someday. Soon. I see the ruffles and baggy shapeless dresses with dolman sleeves in the stores already.

Soon, my pretty.


Comment from TimB52
Time: July 6, 2010, 12:32 am

Is it just me, or she having a little camel-toe issue??


Comment from Dawn
Time: July 6, 2010, 1:13 am

I have a friend who was a teenager in China during Mao’s rule. Fascinating stuff.


Comment from lauraw
Time: July 6, 2010, 2:48 am

Is it just me, or she having a little camel-toe issue??

Tim, check out the dude!
His pant situation is more like camel-face.


Comment from scubafreak
Time: July 6, 2010, 4:42 am

“I have a DVD of Chinese folk music around somewhere. Mating cats are more mellifluous.”

OH, speaking of which. I need to track down a bunch of catnip plants to stick in the ground for Schroedinger……


Comment from Andrea Harris
Time: July 6, 2010, 8:08 pm

“It’s all coming back someday. Soon. I see the ruffles and baggy shapeless dresses with dolman sleeves in the stores already.”

Baggy dolman sleeved blouses that seal at the wrist and have elastic at the waist so all that sweat gets to stay inside, where it belongs. Wearing one of those shirts in Florida was like wearing one of those plastic bags for roasting turkeys. And being inside the oven.


Comment from Sockless Joe
Time: July 6, 2010, 9:19 pm

Get yer Soviet and other propaganda posters here: http://posters.nce.buttobi.net/

Some of the translations seem to be a little rough, but they get the point across.


Comment from buzzion
Time: July 7, 2010, 10:02 pm

Don’t forget that fact that its also promoting disco in 1986. Seems about a decade behind the times to me.


Comment from Bill (still the .00358% of your traffic that’s from Iraq) T
Time: July 9, 2010, 10:42 am

Problem is that the poster was created in 2005 and backdated…

*kidding*

Write a comment

(as if I cared)

(yeah. I'm going to write)

(oooo! you have a website?)


Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.


<< carry me back to ol' virginny