Uyghur Pop

Pop Musicin Asia 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 M usic 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. *     Dr Rachel Harris is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Music, SOAS. Rachel completed her PhD on Sibe music in Xinjiang in 1998 and has published articles on popular and traditional music in Xinjiang. E-mail: rh@soas.ac.uk