Killing Matt is not a punk or aesthetic rebel, but a group of people who were trapped in the “super factory” more than ten years ago to work, almost destitute, extremely Insecure young migrant workers born in the 90s. This article is from the WeChat official account: China News Weekly (ID: chinanewsweekly) , author: Chou Guangyu, head Figure from: vision China < /span>
Li Yifan first saw those pictures in 2012. The young man in the pictures wears colorful high-rise explosive heads, matches with colorful clothes and has heavy makeup on his face. Li Yifan is very excited and thinks China There is “punk”. But that’s not punk, it’s “killing Matt”.
As early as around 2007, photos of the “Kill Matt” youth began to go viral on the Internet, attracting a lot of people’s attention. But soon, after a round of ridicule, those exaggerated young people disappeared from the Internet without a trace, except for the occasional “Revival Kill Matt” news, or in the funny part of variety shows. It’s hard to find traces of them.
But since Li Yifan saw the pictures of the group of people, it seemed that he couldn’t forget. As a documentary director, he wanted to shoot the killer Matt who was mistaken for punk. But it wasn’t until 2016 that he met Luo Fuxing, the “Godfather Killing Matt”.
When the group of people told the camera their real experience without reservation, Li Yifan discovered that these people have a strong commonality. They are not punk or aesthetic rebels, but a group of young migrant workers born in the 90s who were trapped in “super factories” ten years ago and were almost impoverished and extremely insecure. Li Yifan, who was shocked, decided to return the right to speak to Kill Matt and let them tell their lives before the camera. This is the documentary “Kill Matt I Love You” that has received much attention on the Internet.
Get to know Kill Matt
When I first started looking for Kill Matt, Li Yifan thought that they might be marginal college students or college students from rural areas, differentiated from the “non-mainstream” groups in the earlier online communities, and gathered in Tieba, QQ groups and online game players . These people were a little bit aesthetically conscious, and used the prevailing methods at the time to “black themselves” to oppose the commercial art trend. But in actual contact, he found that he was wrong. The young killers he saw were another group of people, almost all of whom had the same experience: their parents worked as a child, dropped out of school early, and were taken out by a foreman to Dongguan, Shenzhen, Working in Huizhou, Wenzhou and other places, wandering for many years.
An Xiaohui, a Yi girl who came out of Daliang Mountain in Sichuan, is a typical “first-generation killer.” Born in 1993, she was taken to Huizhou by the foreman at the age of 12. It was not until a long time later that she found that the foreman had swallowed most of her wages, and she had only a few hundred yuan a month, and fled the workshop angrily. It was one day around 2007. She fled to the skating rink. Seeing two girls with conspicuous and tall hairstyles, she suddenly felt “extremely cool” and took the initiative to make friends with them. She lived with the two girls for a while and discovered that they were “doing that kind of business”, but she liked this hairstyle so much that she decided to insist on learning to do it before she broke her contact with them.
An Xiaohui didn’t know that Luo Fuxing was the original leader of this super Saiyan hairstyle. Luo Fuxing is 25 years old this year, and he managed a huge number of QQ groups to kill Matt 10 years ago. Among the 67 youths Li Yifan interviewed on the spot, 64 of them were found through various channels. He speaks clearly, his mind turns fast, and he is particularly excited to talk about abstract and in-depth topics. He was born in Meizhou, Guangdong. He went to kindergarten with his father in Shenzhen when he was a child, and later returned to his hometown to live with the elderly. His outstanding thinking ability comes from the influence of his grandfather who is a rural teacher.
At the age of 11, the rebellious Luo Fuxing dropped out of school. He started to work in a factory near his home. When he was happy, he went back to school for a few days. During that time, he burned an explosive head, followed the hairstyle of Japanese visual rock guitarist Kiya Ishihara, stood tall with hairspray and put on makeup. He posted a photo of himself wearing this hairstyle to QQ Zone, and it became a hit. Many people on the Internet began to imitate his style. Based on the meaning of the word Smart(fashion, pioneer) found on the Internet, he gave this hairstyle There was a name that sounded imposing, called “Kill Matt”.
This is one of the first sources of the killing of Matt. After China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, the process of internationalization began to accelerate. This change in the overall environment brought twoThe result: economically, the Chinese have participated in the international division of labor on a larger scale. As the “Foxconn” and other super factories in the chain of international division of labor have become world-renowned, a large number of young migrant workers have emerged.
In spirit, the cultural field has become more open after China’s entry into the WTO. With the development of the Internet, the already hot Japanese and Korean pop music and clothing fashion have further spread throughout China’s cities and villages. Many young people like to dress up in Japanese and Korean visual systems and use Martian writing, which are collectively referred to as “non-mainstream”. “Non-mainstream” culture is divided into two types: urban and rural by region. After 2005, urban non-mainstream youths have gradually become fresher and more literary, and rural non-mainstream youths have sprung up. Among them, the most eye-catching group has been divided into killer youths.
Although they have different styles, the first-generation killers in Li Yifan’s lens are completely different from the “bad boys” in people’s established impressions. They have clear eyes and simple speech, telling how they left their hometown and how they were deceived. The experience of working in shifts in the factory. In the interview, a young man smiled and recalled the scene of part-time work: I can fall asleep even standing. This sentence is almost exactly the same as a poem by Xu Lizhi, a “working poet”. In the more than 900 factory videos collected by director Li Yifan, some are depressing and some are shocking-some people send bloody fingers that were cut off by a machine, and some people send a long line of job hunters. The assembly line of late mechanical work.
Although they are all migrant workers in the “super factory”, there is a big difference between the “Three Harmony God” who killed Matt youth and the Shenzhen group of daily wages. The “Sanhe Great Gods” are even more desperate, and the killers are generally more sensitive. This sensitivity is not only sensitive and shy in character, but sensitive to body and aesthetics. “Hair style is a reaction of his sensitivity to the body.” Li Yifan told China News Weekly. This sensitivity led them to rebel from the styling, flee the factory, and search for a broader world outside the factory.
Hair is the simplest and most observable styling rebellion. The long hair is shaped with thick hair gel. The brighter the hair color, the better-it only costs tens of dollars for a single dyeing. Killing Matt likes to wear slippers, boys like tight T-shirts, and girls like to wear suspenders. Sometimes they even have two small change in his hand instead of a wallet. What they do most often is to post these photos to QQ space for display. An Xiaohui’s husband is also a young man who killed Matt, and he has more than a thousand photos of himself. As for the songs that Kill Matt liked, except for some online songs that were later criticized as “vulgar”, they were “pirated”, Luo Fuxing laughed and said that those songs were too shameful. At that time, many killers would download the accompaniment in the software, sing and record like shouting, even if it is “original”.
Matt’s favorite activity after escaping from the factory is roller skating. An Xiaohui later went to Shipai, Dongguan, the “sacred place” where the young people of Killing gathered.Zhentou Ben cousin. The cousin became obsessed with Killing Matt after seeing her hairstyle. The two girls often got up early, made a hairstyle, took a few buns and went to the skating rink. When they were thirsty, they drank tap water, and they could play for 3 yuan. All day long. There is also a disco on the ice rink. Young boys and girls huddled together to play, some boys will ask them to skate, young people have fun, and some become boy and girl friends. During holidays, many young people who killed Matt would walk and party in the street. They called this “Blow Street”.
“Kill Matt I Love You” stills.
It is a family and a social group
Li Renqing, secretary-general of the Rural Social Issues Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Li Yifan once visited the hometown of many young people who killed Matt. He found that the young people who killed Matt once grew up as left-behind children in a period of social transformation, probably because the community of rural society was disintegrated, and the traditional units—society, school, and family—that were not in the process of socialization. Provide them with the necessary support. They were forced to enter the “frictional collision” of society when they were teenagers, and they were completely dependent on themselves to support them.
Many killer Matt works more than ten hours a day in the super factory. Physical fatigue comes second. Being bullied and cheated of wages are the most chilling for them. A worker named Han Yajie once recounted the experience: One year when he was waiting to receive his salary, he planned to take his girlfriend home to get married. After working for a few months, he was supposed to receive seven or eight thousand yuan in wages. In the end, the foreman only paid After paying him 29 yuan, he started crying when he returned to his girlfriend, and now the two have already separated.
They have been deceived many times but they need to socialize. How do they judge whether they can associate with someone in the city? The conspicuous hairstyle has become a simple common logo on the street. In order to gain attention and recognition of the same kind, they would rather make themselves strange and conspicuous since they were young.
The word “family” has become the key to understanding the young people who killed Matt. For example, the most famous “family family” in the Kill Matt group, heWe love this naming and form. Li Renqing, secretary-general of the Research Center for Rural Social Issues of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, realized after many chats with the young killer that many people are still in this “psychological family” state even if they have their hair cut or other things done. in. This kind of mutual recognition and mutual help between families and communities is simple and rude, but useful. Finally, it can even be used to build a talent network to help the young people of Kill Matt introduce each other to find jobs. In Luo Fuxing’s words: “We are very simple, just ask if you have a job there? Yes? Then I will go to you.”
Naturally, factory owners don’t like this weird hairstyle because it represents non-domestication. For the sake of freedom of hair, Luo Fuxing specializes in working in small factories in his hometown. After playing and killing Matt, An Xiaohui also went to work in a relatively free private factory. One of the factories where she worked was to produce auto parts for BMW. Foreigners often visited them. One foreigner who visited saw that their hair was very Shocked and praised with a thumbs up, after that, the boss actually publicly allowed her to continue playing with this hairstyle. She laughed and said that she later “leaded a group of people” in the factory.
“Kill Matt I Love You” stills.
After Killing Matt Era
Some media estimates that the number of young people who killed Matt was tens of millions. There are also legends that Luo Fuxing manages up to 200,000 people who kill Matt’s QQ group, but so far this statistics has not There is no actual evidence, because the “bond” that kills Matt’s youth is only a popular trend. Luo Fuxing honestly stated that he is actually not sure how many people there are. After the number of netizens exceeds 10,000, things are no longer under his control. “Not everyone listens to your deployment, and I did not pay them. Right?”
But with several “exterminations”, the killing of Matt culture has become less and less visible in people’s sight, and many photos have been removed. Why do theyBeing attacked has also become an unclear public case. In 2011 and 2012, first some video bloggers began to spoof and imitate the appearance and behavior of killing Matt, which caused discomfort and scolding wars among users on Post Bar and forums. In 2013 and 2014, network cleanup operations made the pictures of killing Matts considered “vulgar” and gradually disappeared. From the point of view of their own reasons, according to Luo Fuxing’s memories, they may have played “too high” at the time, and went to popular sites like “Li Yiba” to find their presence with pictures on the screen, and finally annoyed other groups of people .
On the other hand, different from other youth subcultures, the killing of Matt, which only relies on exaggerated modeling and a few pirated songs, does not have its core support, and objectively caused a decline. In the past two years, only a few children with Kill Matt’s haircut have been seen in the skating rink in Shipai Town. Because of the suppression of society and mainstream culture, many of the young men Li Yifan saw who killed Matt became shy and introverted, afraid to contact strangers. He estimated that there should be only a few hundred people left in the killing Matt group in the country.
Some of Luo Fuxing’s friends who killed Matt were “rushing to the petty bourgeoisie”, saving money to buy cars and houses, including himself. He works as a hairdresser himself, plays Douyin and Kuaishou, and can earn more than 10,000 yuan a month by relying on craftsmanship and rewards. He feels that his life is much better than in a factory. Some of his little friends who kill Matt are mixed up well, and will drive to him when they have time, and play the role of “big brother” in his live broadcast room.
An Xiaohui now runs a barber shop with her husband, and no longer keeps Matt’s haircut. Sometimes she thought it was naive to kill Matt when she was young. Now it’s different. Two people have a house and a car, and the pressure is not small, and they have to save money for kindergarten for their son who is less than two years old. “I used to think that it was okay to have money or not, but now it is different. Now you must have money, for the children.” On social networking sites, there are photos of her wearing Yi costumes with a bright smile.
But their future is still not optimistic. Li Renqing believes that the development of the young people who kill Matt is limited by the dual social structure of China’s urban and rural areas. The gap between rural education and urban education is too large to provide them with sufficient ability to engage in high-level jobs, making it difficult for them to face the future society competition. “The human capital between urban and rural areas is very different, and the quality of education is very different. In addition to the gap in years, there are also educational gaps, digital gaps, status and identity gaps, social resource systems… The restrictive conditions for their future development.”
After the documentary “Kill Matt I Love You” was released, Li Yifan received unexpected feedback: the urban youth groups from “post-85s” to “post-00s” have the most common feeling for this film. Maybe it’s because of the aspirations of being a “beating worker”, or maybe it’sEmpathy among peers. Li Renqing feels that the factory environment should be better now than when he visited the factory in Shenzhen 20 or 30 years ago, but the mechanization of factory work has not changed at all. “What I saw is that (workers)’s wages have risen and benefits have improved a bit, but the production method is still piece-based, and it is all based on paying Physical and mental, based on excessive squeeze.”
Li Renqing believes that killing Matt is like pimples. It is a normal and necessary part of society. It forms part of the history of migrant workers born in the 1990s. The so-called development sacrifices cover the interests of some groups. The appearance of Killing Matt is the best proof of this existence, and society should give them a chance to speak. And this is what Luo Fuxing said: Those who can express always get more than those who cannot.
As the director, Li Yifan found that as long as people who have watched this movie, they all have a different idea of killing Matt. He feels that people are gradually seeing and understanding, and even falling in love with this once regarded as heresy Groups.
(Intern Cao Yuyue also contributed to this article)
This article is from WeChat official account:China News Weekly (ID: chinanewsweekly) author: Chou Guangyu