All posts tagged: Popular Culture

Adil, “Prince of the Sky,” Uyghur Diplomat

Published by Darren Byler

Last month Adil Hushor (Ch: Adili Wuxor) pulled off his latest feat– walking over the Pearl River on a wire suspended 116 meters in the air. Over the past decades he has walked between skyscrapers, over China’s most iconic valleys, canyons, stadiums, lakes and rivers. He’s broken multiple world records by doing it faster andlonger, higher and weirder. As a nineteen year-old he broke 12 bones when a rotten rope broke in Shanghai and he fell 15 meters. But the everyday trauma of risking his life has not stopped him from tackling bigger and more dangerous feats. Above is Adil’s biography as shown on CCTV 9: Adil brings the Uyghur tradition of dawaz-style tightrope walking forward into global spotlight of Asian cities. According to the Uyghur oral tradition, dawaz or darwazliq (Edit: see comments below) – a kind of dashing, court-performance, dance-style of tightrope walking – has played a role in Uyghur society for 2000 years. It was first noted as a Uyghur cultural feature in Mahmud Kashgari’s authoritative dictionary of Turkic languages in Kashgar in …

Abdulla, King of Uyghur Women

Published by Darren Byler

This is the third post in a multi-part series on Abdulla Abdurehim hosted by The Art of Life in Northwest China Abdulla, the undisputed king of Uyghur pop, receives 1000s of love letters from Uyghur women. According to those who traffic in insider knowledge of Uyghur models of masculinity, Abdulla’s effect on women first became a subject of manly discussion in the early 2000s when his song “Ranjima” was released. As you will see in the linked music video of that song, the camera lingers on a young woman while Abdulla, clad in a bad-ass Harley-Davidson t-shirt, crones lines such as “Don’t be sorry, let’s just be friends” – a clear allusion to a failed illicit affair with the distracted young woman. Young Ranjima swoons. Abdulla basks in love letters which rain down around him from his female admirers. Despite this direct appeal to his sexuality in the images of the song, Abdulla carries on a line from Sufi poets who were devoted to “one true thing.” He sings: “Our souls cannot share the same flame.”  Thirteen years …

Sufi Poetry and Ablajan Awut Ayup

Published by Darren Byler

The Uyghur-language songs of the teen heart-throb Ablajan Awut Ayup run on a loop through the heads of many Uyghur tweens and young urbanites in Northwest China. Taking cues from Justin Beiber, the ever-popular dance moves of the late-Michael Jackson, and the pretty-gangster affect of Korean pop-stars, Ablajan is a self-styled chart-climber; he is a self-made song-and-dance man. Whether  you love him or hate him, the fact remains that he has cornered the Uyghur youth music market by tying clever songwriting with catchy beats. Yet beneath this veneer of auto-tuning, dance rhythms, and theatrical spectacle are melancholic questions. His songs tackle contemporary social issues in a major-key; on the upbeat they cheerfully report the serious problems inherent in rapid urbanization, the erasure of local lifeways, and the pollution tied to unsustainable planning. Ablajan indexes Sufi imagery to the rhythms of electronica, the harmonies of Chinese children’s music and aesthetics of pretty-boy pop not in a negative process but in order to generate language, to catalyze new conventions. His cheerful performances are thus heteroglossic movements — …