In December 2017, Luo Fuxing, the "godfather of killing Matt", had cut off the hair of the horse killer and opened his own barber shop in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, to take on the responsibility of supporting the family. Photo/Visual China
Reporter/Qiu Guangyu
Li Yifan first saw the pictures in 2012, the young man in the picture combing the colorful high bulge of the explosive head, with colorful clothes, painted with heavy makeup on his face, Li Yifan was very excited, thinking that China has "punk". But that's not punk, it's "kill Matt."
As early as around 2007, photos of "Kill Matt" youth began to go viral on the Internet, attracting the attention of many people. But soon, after a round of group ridicule, the exaggerated young people disappeared from the Internet without a trace, except for the occasional "revival to kill Matt" news, or a parody show in the funny section of a variety show.
But Li Yifan seems to have never forgotten since he saw the photos of the group, and as a documentary filmmaker, he wants to shoot Matt, who he mistakenly believes to be punk. But it wasn't until 2016 that he met Luo Fuxing, the "Godfather of Killing Matt.".
When the group of people told their true experiences unreservedly in front of the camera, Li Yifan found that these people have strong commonalities. They are not punk or aesthetic rebels, but a group of post-90s young migrant workers who were trapped in the "super factory" more than a decade ago, almost destitute, and extremely insecure. Shocked, Li Yifan decided to return the right to speak to Matt and let them tell their own lives in front of the camera. This is the documentary "Kill Matt I Love You", which is now in the high profile online.
Meet Kill Matt
When he first started looking for Matt, Li Yifan believed that they might be marginal college students or college students from rural areas, differentiated from the "non-mainstream" groups in the earlier online community, and gathered in Tieba groups, QQ groups and online game homes. These people were a bit aesthetically conscious, using the popular way of the time to "self-blacken" to oppose the commercial art trend. But in the actual contact, he found that he was wrong, and the young people he saw who killed Matt were another group of people, almost all of whom had the same experience: when their parents worked as children, they dropped out of school early, and when they were underage, they were taken out by the foreman to work in Dongguan, Shenzhen, Huizhou, Wenzhou and other places, and wandered for many years.
An Xiaohui, a Yi girl from Daliangshan, Sichuan, is a typical "first generation killer Matt". Born in 1993, she was taken to Huizhou by the foreman at the age of 12, and it was not until a long time later that she found that the foreman had swallowed up most of her wages, and she only had a few hundred yuan a month, and fled the workshop in a huff. It was one day around 2007, she escaped to the ice rink, saw two girls with conspicuously tall hairstyles, suddenly felt "very cool", and took the initiative to make friends with them. She lived with the two girls for a while and found out that they were "in that kind of business", but she liked the hairstyle too much and decided to stick with it until she learned to do it before breaking contact with them.
An Xiaohui did not know at the time that Luo Fuxing was the original leader of this super Saiyan-like hairstyle. Luo Fuxing, 25 years old this year, managed a huge number of Matt killing QQ groups 10 years ago, and of the 67 young people who killed Matt interviewed by Li Yifan on the ground, 64 of them were found by him through various channels. He spoke clearly, his mind spun fast, and he was particularly excited to talk about abstract, in-depth topics. Born in Meizhou, Guangdong Province, he followed his father to kindergarten 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, and he began to work in a factory near his home, and when he was happy, he also returned to school for a few days. During that time, he permed an explosive head, and according to the hairstyle of Japanese visual rock guitarist Takaya Ishihara, he stood tall with hairspray and put on makeup. He sent photos of himself combing this hairstyle to the QQ space, "a hit", and many people on the Internet began to imitate his style. According to the meaning of the word Smart (fashion, pioneer) found on the Internet, he gave this hairstyle an imposing-sounding name, called "Kill Matt".
This was one of the first sources of the Killing Matt trend. In 2001, after China's accession to the WTO, the process of internationalization began to accelerate, and this change in the general environment brought about two results: economically, Chinese participated in the international division of labor on a larger scale, and super factories such as "Foxconn", which is a link in the chain of international division of labor, became world-famous, and a large number of young migrant workers came into being. Spiritually, the cultural field after the "WTO accession" has become more open, and the already hot Japanese and Korean pop music and dressing fashion have further spread throughout China's cities and villages with the development of the Internet. Many young people like to dress up in the Japanese and Korean visual departments, love to use Martian language, and are collectively referred to as "non-mainstream". "Non-mainstream" culture is divided into urban and rural two types according to the region, after 2005, urban non-mainstream youth gradually fresh and literary, rural non-mainstream sprung up, of which the most eye-catching group of differentiation into Matt youth.
Although the shape is different, the first generation of Killer Matt in Li Yifan's shot is completely different from the "bad boys" in people's established impressions, their eyes are clear, their words are simple, and they tell how they left their hometown, how they were deceived, and their experiences of working in factory shifts. In the interview, a young man laughed and recalled the scene when he was working: I could fall asleep while standing. This sentence is almost exactly the same as a poem by Xu Lizhi, a "migrant poet". In the more than 900 factory videos collected by director Li Yifan, some of them are depressed and some are shocking - some people send bloody fingers that have been cut off by the machine, some people send long queues of job search queues, and the assembly line of mechanical work all day long.
Although they are all migrant workers in the "super factory", the group of daily wages that kill Matt youth and the group of daily wages in Shenzhen have a big difference. The "Three And Great Gods" are more desperate, while the Killer Matt is generally more sensitive, and this sensitivity is not only sensitive and shy, but also sensitive to the body and aesthetics. "The hairstyle is a reaction to his sensitivity to the body." Li Yifan told China News Weekly. This sensitivity allowed them to rebel from the shape, flee the factory, and look for a wider world outside the factory.
Hair is the simplest and most easily observed style rebellion, with thick hair gel set to the sky long hair, the more vivid the hair color, the better - dye once is only a few dozen dollars. Killer Matt loves to wear slippers, boys like tight T-shirts, girls love to wear suspenders, and sometimes they have to take two pieces of change in their hands without a wallet. The most common thing they do is to send these photos to the QQ space to display, An Xiaohui's husband is also a matt youth, he has more than a thousand photos of himself in his hand. As for the songs that Kill Matt liked, except for some internet songs that were later criticized as "vulgar", "they were all pirated", and Luo Fuxing laughed that those songs were too shameful to say. At that time, many Killer Matt would download accompaniment in the software, similar to shouting Mai, even if it was "original".
Matt's favorite activity after escaping the factory is rollerblading. An Xiaohui later went to Shipai Town, Dongguan City, a "holy place" where the young people of Matt had gathered, to join her cousin. The cousin also became obsessed with killing Matt after seeing her hairstyle, and the two girls often got up early in the morning, made their haircuts, carried a few steamed buns to the ice skating rink, drank tap water when thirsty, and spent 3 yuan to play all day. There is also a discotheque on the ice rink, where young boys and girls huddled together to jump around, some boys would ask them to skate, young people played, and some talked about boyfriend and girlfriend. On holidays, many young people who kill Matt will also walk and gather in the streets, which they call "blowing up the street".
Stills from Kill Matt I Love You.
It is a family as well as a social group
Li Renqing, secretary general of the Research Center for Rural Social Issues of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Li Yifan went to the hometown of many Matt youths to investigate. He found that the young people who killed Matt had grown up as left-behind children during the period of social transition, perhaps because the communities of rural societies had been dismantled, and that the traditional units that could be followed—society, schools, and families—did not provide them with the necessary support in the process of socialization. They were forced into society when they were teenagers to "friction and collide", and they completely survived on their own.
Many of Matt's killers worked more than a dozen hours a day in the gigafactory, physical exertion fell on the back, being bullied, and cheating away their wages was the most chilling thing for them. A worker named Han Yajie once told the story: one year he was waiting to receive a salary, planning to take his girlfriend home to get married, he worked for a few months, should have received a salary of seven or eight thousand yuan, and finally the foreman only paid him 29 yuan, back to his girlfriend he cried, and now the two people have long been separated.
Repeatedly cheated but need to socialize, how do they judge in the city whether they can socialize with a person? Conspicuous hairstyles became a simple common sign on the street. From childhood, in order to gain attention and recognition of their kind, they would rather make themselves strange and conspicuous.
The word "family" became the key to understanding the young people who killed Matt, such as the most famous "funeral love family" in the killing matt group, who loved such a name 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 people who killed Matt that even if they cut their hair or do other things, they are still trapped in this state of "psychological family". This kind of mutual recognition and mutual assistance between family and community, although simple and rude, is useful, and eventually even developed to the point where it can be used to build a talent network to help the young people who kill Matt introduce each other to find jobs. In the words of Luo Fuxing: "We are all very simple, just ask you if there is a job over there?" Yes? Then I'll go to you. ”
Factory owners naturally disliked this strange hairstyle because it represented unamulation. Luo Fuxing worked in a small factory in his hometown for his hair freedom. An Xiaohui also worked in a relatively free private small factory after playing Kill Matt, one of the factories she was in was to produce auto parts for BMW, often visited by foreigners, once the foreigners who visited saw their hair was very shocked, gave a thumbs up and praised, after that, the boss actually publicly allowed her to continue to play this hairstyle. She laughed and said that she later "took a group of people with her" in the factory.
Post-Kill Matt era
Some media estimate that there are tens of millions of young people who kill Matt at the most, and there are also legends that Luo Fuxing manages the QQ group of 200,000 killed Matt youth, but so far there is no actual evidence for this statistics, because the "bond" on which Matt youth are killed is only a popular trend. Luo Fuxing honestly said that in fact, how many people he is not sure, after the number of netizens exceeded 10,000, things are no longer under his control, "Not everyone listens to your allocation, and I did not pay them, right?" ”
But with several "crackdowns", the culture of killing Matt has become more and more faded in people's sight, many photos have been cleared, and why they were attacked has become a less clear public case. In 2011 and 2012, first some video bloggers began to spoof and imitate the shape and behavior of Killing Matt, causing discomfort and scolding war among netizens in Tieba and forums. By 2013 and 2014, the internet cleanup operation made the images of the Killer Matts "vulgar" and gradually disappeared. From their own point of view, according to Luo Fuxing's recollection, it may have been that they played "too hi" at that time, running to a popular place like "Li Yi Bar" to use pictures to brush the screen to find a sense of existence, and finally annoyed people in other groups.
On the other hand, unlike other youth subcultures, the killing matt maintained only by exaggerated styling and a few pirated songs has no core of its support, and objectively has also caused a decline trend. In the past two years, the ice rink in Shipai Town can only see a few children with a killer Hairstyle. Because of the oppression of society and mainstream culture, many of the young people Li Yifan saw who killed Matt became shy and introverted, and did not dare to contact strangers. He estimates that the Killing Matt group should now have only a few hundred left in the country.
Some of Luo Fuxing's friends who killed Matt were "running to petty bourgeoisie", saving money to buy cars and houses, including himself. He works as a hairdresser himself, plays vibrato and kuaishou, and can earn more than 10,000 yuan a month by relying on craftsmanship and tips, and he feels that such a life is much better than in the factory. Some of his killer Matt friends mixed well, and when they had time, they would drive to him to play, and also 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 hairstyle. Sometimes she thinks it was childish to play kill Matt when she was young, but now it's different, two people have a house and a car, the pressure is not small, and they have to save money for their son who is less than two years old to go to kindergarten. "I used to think it was okay to have money and no money, but now it's different, now you have to have money, for the sake of children." On social networking sites are photos of her dressed in Yi costumes, smiling brightly.
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 urban and rural areas in China, and the gap between rural education and urban education is too large, which does not provide them with enough ability to engage in high-level work, which makes it difficult for them to face the competition of future society. "There is a big difference in human capital between urban and rural areas, a big difference in the quality of education, in addition to the gap in years, there is also an education gap, a digital gap, a gap in status and identity, a gap in social resource systems... These are all restrictive conditions for their future development. ”
After the release of the documentary "Kill Matt I Love You", Li Yifan received unexpected feedback: "post-85" to "post-00" urban youth groups have the most empathy for this film. Maybe it's because of the same "hit worker", or maybe it is out of empathy between peers. Li Renqing feels that the environment of the factory today should be improved compared with the factory research he went to Shenzhen twenty or thirty years ago, but the mechanization of factory work and the suppression of human nature behind it have not changed at all. "What we see is that (workers') wages have risen and welfare has improved a little, but the mode of production is still piecemeal, and it is all based on physical and mental effort and excessive squeezing."
Li Renqing believes that killing Matt is like pimples, it is a normal and necessary part of society, it constitutes a part of the history of post-90s migrant workers, the so-called development sacrifices, covering the interests of some groups, and the emergence of killing Matt is the best proof of this existence, society should let them have the opportunity to speak. And this also responds to Luo Fuxing's words: those who can express always get more than those who cannot.
As a director, Li Yifan found that as long as people who have seen the film have changed their minds about killing Matt, he feels that people are gradually seeing and understanding, and even falling in love with this group that was once regarded as a heretic.