Uyghur Pop
'Amubap nakhshisi'
The urban sound-space
in Xinjiang's regional capital Ürümchi clearly signals the
ethnic divide. Taped music delimits ethnic territory. The Uyghur heartland,
Erdaoqiao bazaar and the surrounding ramshackle collection of restaurants,
shops, and mosques, with its teeming, brightly coloured bustle and air
of poverty, is permanently awash with Uyghur pop and folk music. Each
shop contributes another stereo system to the din. A cassette recorder
is an essential ingredient for clothing shops and small restaurants.
Each food stall selling noodles, kebabs, or other local delicacies such
as boiled sheep's heads has its own source of music.
* By RACHEL HARRIS
Music dominates the complex of stalls which
make up the heart of Erdaoqiao, where dress materials from Uzbekistan
and household ornaments and henna dye from Pakistan jostle with local
goods, hand-crafted knives and hand-woven carpets. The bazaar is
the place to hear popular music in Xinjiang, since private
listening is severely restricted in the often crowded context of the
family home. The bazaar functions as a kind of unofficial chart: the
density of advertising posters and the number of shops and restaurants
playing a particular cassette provide a reliable guide to the latest
hit.
Omarjam in his shop
in the southern oasis town of Tarkan,
running off a copy of a cassette for me.
RACHEL HARRIS
In contrast, in the Han shopping areas to the north of Ürümchi
a new high-rise department store seems to open every week, and the
latest wave of Sichuan immigrants crowd its shiny steps, peddling
cheap plastic wares. These parts of town are filled with the more
anodyne sounds of Cantonese pop.
The independent pop music industry in Xinjiang arose in
the early 1980s with the easing of state controls on cultural and economic
life which followed Deng Xiaoping's policies of economic reform and
opening China to foreign markets. Cassette recorders becamae available
in the shops for the first time. Independent producers were able to
duplicate and market their own cassette tapes, although early production
was a back room affair. Basic equipment was used to record live performances,
and entrepreneurs made copies, five at a time, in their homes. From
these primitive beginnings, the Xinjiang pop industry has raced ahead
in the technology game.
The advent of cheap digital technology in the late 1990s
brought a small revolution to the Xinjiang popular music world. Video
CDs (VCDs) have become the medium of choice. At under US$100, VCD players
are sufficiently cheap for most town dwellers to afford, while cassettes
still cater for the lower end of the market. The Uyghur metal band
Täklimakan now have their own website, and when I visited
one Uyghur pop composer in the summer of 2001, he was busy installing
software for MP3 files, CD burning, and composing music on his newly
upgraded computer. Black market copies of foreign films and audio CDs
are everywhere. In one shop in Ürümchi's main bazaar I found
the Sex Pistols' Never Mind
the Bollocks alongside Turkish pop and the latest Hindi film
songs. One friend boasted that the most recent Hollywood films appear
here before they reach American cinemas.
The synthesizer is the basis for most Uyghur pop music,
with perhaps the addition of one or more traditional instruments to
accompany the young 'star' singers. Uyghur pop is influenced by the
music of other parts of Central Asia and Turkey where there are large
Uyghur communities, as well as by Chinese rock music. A few Uyghur pop
bands from across the border are popular in Ürümchi, like
Därwish from Kazakhstan. New musical styles impact on
the Uyghur pop scene in a rather unpredictable way; a reggae version
of the Khotan folksong Katlama,
released by Shireli in 1995, made an amusing addition to the global
mix.
Rock and heavy metal have made some inroads into the urban
youth market in recent years with the bands
Täklimakan and
Riwäyat; this kind of sound typically arrives in Xinjiang
via Beijing. Popular flamenco guitar, introduced into Xinjiang largely
through the music of the Gypsy Kings, has been in vogue during the last
few years, and is now being incorporated into Uyghur popular styles.
The best known Uyghur singer outside Xinjiang, Äskär (with
his band Grey Wolf),
returned to Ürümchi in the summer of 2001 to promote his latest
release Blessing
(Tiläg). The
album is a mixture of rock and flamenco guitar with a few touches of
exotic Uyghur musical sounds thrown in for good measure. Äskär,
aiming at the wider Chinese market, sings in both Chinese and Uyghur,
but this means he receives a mixed reception amongst young Uyghurs.
Nonetheless, when he performed back in Ürümchi, clearly pleased
that one of their own had achieved a measure of fame on the national
stage, there were insistent shouts from the audience: 'Sing it in Uyghur!'
In contrast, most Xinjiang-based Uyghur popular composers
strive to maintain some local flavour in their songs. Continuity with
tradition lies in the maintenance of traditional rhythms (though the
drum machine renders these somewhat inflexible) and the use of traditional
instruments alongside the synthesizer. Sometimes, specific folk melodies
are adapted, and the singing style and its communication of emotion
specifically links back to the past. One musician commented to me: 'Uyghur
singing style stresses slight tone shifts, ornamentation. This is free
and according to the singer's sense. A people who have long been dominated
by others have soft hearts, they are easily shattered. There is much
in their hearts that is unsaid ... But this is not the whole story,
the Uyghurs also have lively music, there are two kinds, yes, two extremes'.
Themes of popular music range from passionate and tragic
love songs that form the vast majority of releases to expression of
current social concerns. The latter describe the imposition of corvée-style
labour on peasants in southern Xinjiang, or the serious problem of heroin
addiction amongst Uyghur youth. Drugs are the concern of
Secret Mist (Sirliq
Tuman), a song sung by Ürümchi's leading pop singer,
Abdulla Abdurehim:
While mother
was sleeping I crept out of the door
And entered
into that secret mist
I breathed in
deep and flew up to heaven.
Must my mother
and father suffer for this?
Must their hopes
of a lifetime be shattered because of this?
Oh my mother,
take me back to your breast
Save me from
the secret mist.
Abdulla Abdurehim's
album A Mother's Sacrifice.
Secret Mist
was written by one of Ürümchi's most popular composers,
Yasin Mukhpul, and is a typically didactic piece. For its melodic
material it draws on the
munajät, the ritual songs of the
büwi Sufi women, which are locally considered to be
very moving. Songs like this indicate the respected position that
many popular composers and singers occupy in the Uyghur community,
a position of moral leadership that is quite the obverse of the Western
notion of the rebel rock star.
Another strong presence in the bazaar, and the best-sellers
on the cassette market, are more traditional-style solo singers, who
accompany themselves on the
dutar two-stringed lute. It is most common in these songs
that, with lyrics usually taken from contemporary Uyghur poetry, a social
agenda tips over into political comments expressed in veiled allusions
and allegories. Well-known singers in this genre include Qurash Qusän,
now exiled to Kirgizstan, the dutar virtuoso Abdurehim Heyit of Kashgar,
and the very popular Ömärjan Alim from the Ili valley. A friend
commented on Ömärjan:
'Ömärjan has caught the heart of the Uyghur peasants. He
is popular because his words are direct, easily understood. He uses
peasant language, proverbs. There's a double meaning in every word
... it's not necessarily political, but it's usually read that way'.
One of Ömärjan's more controversial songs is
The Guest (Mehman):
I invited a
guest into my home
Asked him to
sit in the place
of honour
But my guest
never left
Now he's made
my home his own.
At the other end of the Uyghur popular music spectrum
lies the unlikely phenomenon of Äytälän, a young woman
from the southern oasis town of Khotan, a Madonna wannabe who emerged
on the scene in 1998. With its synthesised accompaniment and Western
style melodies, Äytälän's music typifies the 'Western
road'. One of her more eye-catching videos, with an English title taken
from its refrain Bad
Boy , has Äytälän alternately clad in
leather catsuit and tiger-skin hot pants, dancing and acting with an
assertiveness and vigour rarely seen in China's major cities let alone
in distant and normally conservative Xinjiang. I was firmly told, however,
that it was completely impossible for Uyghur young girls to adopt Äytälän
as a role model. 'Older people think she's some sort of devil', said
one friend. *
in
Asia