All posts tagged: Xinjiang Style

Hip-Hop vs. Folk Music

Published by Darren Byler

In the film The Silk Road of Pop a classically trained Uyghur tambur player tells viewers that listening to Western music such as hip-hop and jazz does not carry the same feelings of love, tradition and family as Uyghur folk music. He says that he hopes that the generation of Uyghur musicans coming of age today do not forget about their past. This tambur player, a member of a group of studio musicians who often accompany the King of Uyghur pop Abdulla, is repeating a refrain heard frequently by performance artists trained under the legacy of the Maoist regime of multiculturalism. During the Maoist years, ethnic theater, opera, music and dance troupes, were major institutional outlets for ethnically-ascribed life projects. Not only were they economically and politically secure positions, but they provided a space where the souls of people could leak out through gaps in the filter of Socialist Realism. Classically-trained performers of state-approved culture inhabited a role many people highly valued. Of course I’m not suggesting that Uyghur cultural performance was invented by the Chinese …

Chen Zhifeng, Xinjiang Billionaire, Patron of the Arts

Published by Darren Byler

Untitled #1 Chen Zhifeng is a “self-made” billionaire, founder of the Western Regions Photography Society, and a major force in Xinjiang’s art scene. He is part of a newly minted cohort of Xinjiang capitalists: the Xinjiang 8 (or 9) nouveau riche, who have taken advantage of Chinese-Central Asian market development and the post-Reform oil and gas economy. His Wild Horses Corporation brings in an annual income of $700 million selling Chinese-made women’s underwear and TVs in Russia and Kazakhstan. Yet, unlike some other Xinjiang elites, Chen has reinvested his wealth in Xinjiang. As a trained artist himself, he is renowned for his support of a multiethnic crew of young Xinjiang artists. With his prominently displayed black Hummer standing sentinel in front of his Wild Horse Hotel compound on Kunming Road just down the street from the Kazakhstan Visa Office/Embassy, Chen has become a Xinjianger’s Xinjianger. Although he was born in Hubei and came to Xinjiang as the result of a military assignment in 1981, Chen has taken on the cultural genealogy of Xinjiang history with a fierce amount bravado and …

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 …