Dakou 打口

Let me take you back to the streets of China in the 1990s, because something unusual started circulating there.

Young people in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities began buying strange-looking CDs and cassette tapes. These were not ordinary records. They were deliberately cut, saw-marked, or drilled at the edges. Western music companies had shipped surplus stock to China as scrap plastic, meant to be melted down and recycled. To stop the discs being resold, they were damaged first. What the exporters and customs officials did not fully account for was how the media were read. Compact discs are not read like the vinyls you’d own today. They’re read from the centre outward, so a cut or hole on the outer edge often destroyed only the last track, or the last moments of it. The rest of the album still played.

People called these records dakou — roughly “cut mouth” or “saw-gash.” What was marked as trash became one of the main ways a generation of Chinese youth heard Western music that official channels rarely licensed or broadcast.

In the early to mid-1990s, the cuts started appearing on cassettes first, then on CDs. Surplus and rejected Western tapes and discs arrived in containers and turned up on blankets, in small shops, and on street corners in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and elsewhere. Listeners who had grown up with limited access to foreign popular music began gathering around them. Rock, punk, hip-hop, metal, jazz, and pop that state outlets would not stock became available for a few yuan. The music was incomplete — scratched, holed through the artwork, the last song cut short — but it was there. That generation started calling itself after the objects that carried the sound: the dakou generation.

They were not the same as the liumang, the “hooligan” figures associated with the earlier underground rock scene. Many dakou listeners were younger and came of age in the reform years, with more room to look outward. The cut discs were a way in. Nirvana cassettes with the end of “Something In The Way” missing. Early CDs of Wu-Tang Clan or Public Enemy tapes that stopped before the last bar or before the fade. Records by Miles Davis, Madonna, metal bands and experimental electronic records. All of it arrived damaged, and therefore, in practice, available to the public.

Black markets like Xinjiekou in Beijing, electronics markets near Suzhou Creek in Shanghai, and similar spots in other cities — became informal classrooms. People traded recommendations, dubbed copies of the cut originals, argued about what the music meant. Some repaired tapes; others lived with the silence at the end. Bands formed. Punk groups, metal bands, hip-hop crews, and experimental outfits grew out of that listening. The music arrived as culture, not just as sound.

What made dakou more than cheap records was the overlap it created. The cuts were local; the content was global. To belong to the dakou generation was to hold something discarded by one system and made useful by another. You listened to music that was never supposed to reach you, knowing the ending had been removed on purpose.

By the early 2000s the physical trade thinned. Downloads, licensed imports, and a more open cultural market changed the flow. The objects themselves grew rare. The memory stayed. Musicians who had built their first ideas on dakou kept talking about it. Critics and writers returned to the story. Documentaries and essays followed. For some, dakou became nostalgia: a particular kind of freedom between cultural silence and total openness.

The generation that grew up with the cut edges did not invent the desire for Western sound. It found an imperfect, practical way to feed it. Discs meant to be thrown away became a foundation for new bands, new aesthetics, and a new scene inside China.

Today dakou survives mostly as memory. Most of the physical copies are with collectors. Streaming carries the full tracks. The idea still holds: something arrives incomplete, marked as useless, and a group of people decide it is enough. They fill in the missing endings, or they learn to live with the silence. Either way, they make a space of their own.