BRIC POP: The Blog

I’ve been watching the unrest in Urumqi (which technically started in Guangdong) for the last few weeks, but rather than thinking about Islam, the Silk Road, Han vs. Uighur culture, or the usual framing we give Chinese subcultural tension, the story brought me back to imagining a kind of Grand Ol’ Opry in China.

I’ll explain.  Meet Dao Lang (刀郎):

Now before you think he’s some kind of Elvis impersonator.  I was researching regional pop cultures in China when I came upon this guy, and when I mentioned his name among Shanghai and Beijing ad-types a few years ago, they’d never heard of him.  (That’s another story.)

Dao Lang is Han, and based in Sichuan, but his style of music would be consider “Western”, as in Western China, as in Xinjiang.  The Chinese have a vivid, romanticized imagination of their West not dissimilar to Americans with our own West: desolate, a little swashbuckling, horses, swords.  But they get to throw in some old school Mongol raiders.

I stumbled onto this guy and his music pretty much by accident, and it was a refreshing change of pace from syrupy Cantopop and wannabe Beijing punks.  Basically, he fuses Uighur and other folk and tribal music from China’s West, with modern production values sung in Mandarin.  When I first heard his music, I loved that it was alien and familiar, from everywhere and nowhere.  Some of it sounded South Asian Indian, some American Indian, a little Himesh Reshammiya, a little Jon Bon Jovi.  Here’s a couple of videos I scrounged up from YouTube:

(Don’t ask me to transcribe.  My method of reading Chinese is to memorize character shapes, so Dao Lang’s name to me reads “Platform Diving Board with Rabbit Wine Opener and German letter ß”.  Believe it or not, I can read street signs this way.)

What I find so interesting about Dao Lang is how he, and a large contingent of Han Chinese fans, are quite fond of the culture of China’s West, even if the situation in Urumqi is being reported like some kind of Crips v. Bloods deathmatch.  So it lead me to wonder what Dao Lang might make of the last few months.  Not being in China to find and interview him, I had to rely on the Google (again, I wish it could be Baidu but my illiteracy prevents it).  I saw a reference in the national Chinese press that he was in the process of recording one of those happy-people-of-the-world benefit singles, but couldn’t find it anywhere yet.

Critics of cultural globalization when defined as Westernization have often pointed to regional and folk arts as the first to go.  But in my BRIC Pop travels, the folky-gone-modern stuff often winds up the coolest.  I’ve seen it in Brazilian sertanejo music crossed with techno, Siberian folk costumes on Moscow catwalks, Rajasthani textile design taught alongside CAD in Indian creative training, and Dao Lang.  This local folk/global future hybrid feels like an evolved definition of cultural globalization to me, rather than some bland, LCD homogenity in the middle.  If you want that, you can find plenty of it in Tier 1 China, but if you want to get beyond that, make a plan to motor West.