Month: January 2014

Möminjan, Turkish Pop, and Islamic Devotion

Published by Darren Byler

Beginning with the very first cassette tape he released in 1999, Möminjan has been popular with young people. One of the main ways people experience music in the city is in nightclubs where the music envelopes the tight confines of a room and the pageantry of moving to the beat with friends and strangers comes to life. Uyghurs can dance. And Möminjan’s songs were eminently danceable. Not only is his voice remarkable similar to his uncle Abdulla, but Möminjan is a suave performer. He’s likeable. Even in his early days when he was still studying archaeology at Xinjiang University, his fellow classmates elected him president of the student club of his institute. Möminjan’s path as a musician has diverged from other performers in interesting ways. Unlike other young singers who made it big, he has not tried to cross over to a popular Chinese audience. He doesn’t even sing Chinese translations of traditional or “red” folk songs. Instead, beginning in 2003 he began to sing in the Uzbek and Turkish style. Möminjan’s goal in doing …

Success Stories and the Pop Star Möminjan

Published by Darren Byler

Of all the performers in the upper echelon of Uyghur pop music, Möminjan is perhaps the most widely traveled independent artist. Möminjan, and his brother the famous composer Ablet Ablikim, grew up in the shadow of their famous uncle Abdulla, the King of Uyghur pop. He and his brother have been following in their uncle’s footsteps for over a decade; they even recorded a song together called “We Brothers” (Qerindash Biz) which sounds a bit like a Uyghur version of the Everly Brothers. As an Archeology student in the History Department at Xinjiang University, Möminjan developed interests outside the family business. In the mid-2000s he went through the long arduous process of obtaining a passport without an Ürümchi hukou and went to Malaysia to study English. After he came back he recorded a song called “I’ll be Home Soon, Mom.” In the song Möminjan takes on the way life apart from one’s family puts an almost unbearable strain on family relations. Using a novel form of theatrical performance, Möminjan performs the way dreams can be …

Ablajan Channels “The Fast and The Furious” Kashgar-Style

Published by Darren Byler

Ablajan Awut Ayup is trending again in Uyghur cyberspace. Uyghur Weixin and popular social media sites like Misranim are amping-up Ablajan’s meteoric rise in Uyghur pop culture. This time it’s not just his highly orchestrated K-pop-style dance-ensemble performances, his catchy rhymes and bad-boy persona. Ablajan is crossing over. China, meet A-bo-la-jiang. In October the pop star released his first official Mandarin-language music video. It is epic. Starting from the top of an Ürümchi tower, Ablajan, his gang of slick Uyghur urbanites, his girl and his wingman, the rapper McKelly, take us on a car chase through Xinjiang cityscapes. Although the song itself is a fairly straightforward lyric of unrequited love and a playboy scared-straight, the imagery, like Bieber’s 2012 epic music video, is reappropriated from Hollywood car movies and Michael Jackson dance videos. After plotting the way the song, titled “Today,” has been transformed in its journey from Uyghur to Chinese, I will point out some of the key moments in the video when echoes of Beiber and Jackson emerge in a Uyghur imaginary. The Song In …

Xu Xin’s “Karamay” and Life in the New Economy

Published by Darren Byler

Xu Xin’s monumental 2010 film, Karamay (above, part 1, with English subtitles), is a meditation on the relationship humans have to the failings of ideology-driven Modernist political projects in our current historical moment. Using long-takes and repetitive framing shot during visits to Xinjiang in 2007, Xu Xin draws out the long duration of trauma and feelings of injustice. With the exception of a minority of Uyghurs and Kazakhs, the majority of Mandarin speakers featured in this award-winning 356-minute film came from elsewhere. Most of the families in the film came to China’s far Northwestern province of Xinjiang in the 1960s to work in the oil fields and protect the Chinese frontier. Trading rural social networks for the future benefits of membership in the industrial proletariat, these parents placed their lives in the hands of the Party. They committed themselves to a national-communist project thousands of miles from their natal homes; they developed skills for coping with displacement; they disciplined their bodies and the bodies of their children as weapons in a war with nature. Out on …