All posts tagged: Pop Star

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 …

Children’s Music, Uyghur Memories and Berna a seven-year-old pop star from Ürümchi

Published by Darren Byler

(Part 1 of 2) As has been well documented in discussions of the cultural situation in Xinjiang, many minority people in Xinjiang feel the future of their language and culture is insecure. Efforts to replace Uyghur-medium education begun in 2004 have intensified as the capillary spread of Chinese capitalism embeds its network and ideology deeper and deeper into southern Xinjiang. Although the first site of conflict was urban Uyghur schools, the extension of the railroad to Hotan has brought with it the “leap-frog development” of brand-new schools staffed by Mandarin-speaking teachers; in some cases the signs which accompany this “opening up of the West” were written in Chinese rather than the legally-required Uyghur script of the Uyghur Autonomous Region. These schools are popping up in the desert towns of Southern Xinjiang as tokens of the “sister-city” relationships established around conference tables in Ürümchi following the trauma of the 2009. The sister cities build kindergartens and schools. They erect signs with names such as “Beijing Kindergarten”; “Beijing elementary school”; “Beijing middle-high school”; and leave their sign …

Aspirational Desire, Migrant Masculinity and “Dao Lang”

Published by Darren Byler

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on Sichuan-born singer Luo Lin, a.k.a. Dao Lang. As I wrote previously, Luo Lin’s voice and melodies are extremely catchy. In a true sense of the term, he catalyzes — that is, he channels energy toward, and thereby accelerates — an aspirational ethos for many migrant workers in Northwest China. I also noted that Uyghurs often resist his catalytic charge by jealously guarding their indigenous cultural heritage. Yet, clearly, critiquing Luo Lin’s “Dao Lang” persona does not deny the very real force of his voice. He is an immensely talented performer; he has proved himself to be very adept at tuning in to desires particular to a Chinese rendering of an alien environment inhabited by displaced people. Since a majority of his fans, like himself, are earnest, hard-working men who come from elsewhere — Gansu, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong, just to name a few common natal homes — Dao Lang centers his more recent work on stories of lack inscribed over Xinjiang’s landscape. Migrant workers in the oil fields, …

Speaking for the “Dao Lang”: Cultural appropriation and the singer Luo Lin

Published by Darren Byler

I first heard of “Dao Lang” from an economics professor on the way to a fancy dinner at a four star hotel on the northwest corner of the People’s Square in downtown Urumqi.[1] We had been discussing our taste in cars as we slowly careened across three lanes of traffic and walkers. The professor said she found the American Hummer to be the best car and then turning, as though catalysed by the brawn and force of a combination of army machine and Michigan muscle, she asked if I had ever heard of Dao Lang. She said he was the best Xinjiang singer. Later during the dinner with an investment banker who commuted between Urumqi and Beijing, she brought him up again. The banker too attested to his fondness of Dao Lang’s musical stylings. He said that, after coming to Xinjiang, listening to Dao Lang just made sense. He liked his “flavour.” As I mentioned last week, one of the reasons the recent red song “Harmonious Xinjiang” does not resonate with marginalized minority people is …