Maqie gives sage advice, Ma Yulong defies my expectations, and Jiugu sings Paul Simon

Last Friday, Maqie, A Ge's successor in Mountain Eagle, called me up for a pre-dinner chat at a teahouse north of the Forbidden City. He was finishing up an interview with a pudgy, nervous-looking journalist from the "Nationality Pictorial," a glossy periodical with a photo of Wen Jiabao on the inside cover. Their conversation felt like hard labor -- the journalist asked Maqie the same questions that journalists have been asking him since the 90's, and naturally, Maqie answered them by rote. "I want to/I think it's important to/Our appeal lies in that we combine popular music and ethnic minority music." Bam. To wrap things up, the reporter asked Maqie if he had any advice for young, aspiring musicians in Liangshan. "Stop forming boy bands," he said. "Every time I go home, there are thirty or forty new boy bands asking me what to do next. Do something different. Form a real band. Learn to play guitar."

Be more like Ma Yulong.

If Beijing's Liangshan Yi are connected like Beijing's hutong alleyways, then Ma Yulong is the Third Ring Road. He eats the fastest, drinks to get drunk and always foots the bill. His friends call him "Ma Laoshi," or Teacher Ma, though no one can explain how he got the title. In the late 1990's, Teacher Ma got a free ride out of the Sichuanese back country as a founding member of Yirenzhizao, the second most popular band in Yi history. But like A Ge before him, he decided that politi-pop wasn't the be all and end all of his musical existence, and in 2001 he amiably backed out. Unlike A Ge, however, Ma Yulong decided to try his hand at something more extreme, especially in the early 00's. Within a year, his new underground rock band, Sound Fragment, had established a small but loyal following. They've since released three LP's on Modern Sky, Beijing's flagship indie label. They sound like early Radiohead.

Here is Ma Yulong accompanying Maqie at a banquet. Note Maqie's uncanny resemblance to Bono.

The first time I met these guys, I was seated at a dinner between Ma Yulong and Laobai, The current front man of Yirenzhizao. Like any decent Chinese pop star, Lao Bai was wearing a bowler hat and suit jacket. Our conversation quickly fell into ruin. I told him I liked his music. He ran off a list of his government accolades. I asked him about his songwriting process.

"Life. Life is my songwriting process," he said.
"What?"
"Life."

Unlike Maqie, Laobai doesn't look enough like Bono to pull off the immortal rock star shtick, even if his music video features a really expensive looking horse. I couldn't settle on an appropriate response, so instead, I turned and introduced myself to the bearish guy on my left.

"Where are you from?" asked Ma Yulong.
"America."
"Oh, America! Bob Dylan!"

And thus, Ma completely defied my expectations, even if he didn't stray far from the script. For a more common opening exchange in China, replace the icon's name with "NBA!" "Obama!" or "do you have a gun?"

Ever since, my relationship with Ma has been largely defined by conversations that disintegrate into "have you ever heard of band X? what do you think of artist Y?" back-and-forth volleys. I try to disentangle English words from his Sichuanese-inflected Mandarin, which usually ends in a gratifying moment of clarity. For someone who had never heard Western music until his late teens, Ma has extraordinarily sophisticated taste. He's particularly fond of Brad Mehldau, Ali Farka Toure and John Cage. One time, he picked up the guitar at a party and sang through a mumbled, but immediately recognizable piece by the Tuvan experimental singer Sainkho Namtchylak. It was beautiful. But Ma is an island. As I sat and listened, spellbound, Taiyangbuluo (3:00) shrugged and went back to their wine.

Being in a Chinese rock band, even one as successful as Sound Fragment, is far from lucrative, so Ma supplements his income with stints as a hired songwriter and studio musician. Occasionally, he'll fly down to Yunnan to help his synth-pop buddies with side projects that always seem to be underwritten by the Ministry of Something Unintelligible. One time, I spotted Ma as an extra in a song-and-dance video about the pretty people of Liangshan, grinning sheepishly in Yi regalia, arms reaching towards the sun. "If that guy listens to John Cage," I thought to myself, "then anything is possible."

***

Ma told me once that starting Sound Fragment felt "surprisingly natural" given his background in ethnic boy-pop. I'm somehow unsurprised. Rock isn't too far from the blues, which these Yi guys all seem to have a serious knack for, even if they've never heard of Robert Johnson or B.B. King. HERE are Ma Yulong and Taiyangbuluo improvising a very short, and (at one point) very sweet little tune at a band mate's birthday party. That's me on guitar.

And in roughly the same vein, HERE is Jiugu, another former member of Yirenzhizao, singing Scarborough Fair in his local dialect. Try to ignore the background noise.

An Yi pop star is born

A Ge's father was a barefoot doctor who, in his spare time, whittled Jew's harps out of bamboo. He was the only one in his village with the technical know-how, and also possessing a bit of an entrepreneurial flare, trekked out to market each month to trade them for bags of rice. Customers would play his Jew harps at festivals and small parties. This was the music industry in 1980's Zhaojue County.

The village didn't have a television or a radio, and thus, Jew's harp and mountain songs were the only music that baby A Ge ever heard. But it was clear that he had talent, and his father would bring him all over to sing for friends, relatives, and even patients. At eight, when A Ge packed off for boarding school in the county town, a teacher picked up where his father left off and entered him in a school singing competition. He won first place.

It was at boarding school that A Ge was first exposed to Greater China. Half of his classes were in Mandarin, which he mastered with remarkable speed. His school had a television, and he fell head over heels in love with Taiwanese pop music. He began to harbor ambitions of going to high school, and then eventually maybe even to college. But there was pressure on him to attend teacher training school instead, so he could return home and work instead of "blowing the family savings" on tuition. His father cut him a deal -- college, or a second hand acoustic guitar. A Ge caved.

About a year later, there was an explosion of cassette tapes in Zhaojue. While they mostly consisted of pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan, there was some Western music as well, including a bootleg copy of Edelweiss. Slugging his way through Edelweiss, chord by chord, A Ge taught himself how to play.

In early 1992, A Ge organized all of his musical friends from the teacher training school into his first band, a nine-person acoustic guitar orchestra. (By this point, the guitar had taken a serious foothold in Zhaojue county. I asked A Ge if he had any recordings. He didn't). A Ge's Guitar Army was invited to perform a Taiwanese song in an all county singing competition, and obviously came in first. But A Ge was more impressed by two of the other contestants -- Jigequbu and Waqiyihe -- than he was with himself. He liked their style. They traded phone numbers, and began playing music on the weekends. Something clicked. Eventually they moved to Xichang, the capital of Sichuan's Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, where they rented an apartment, and started work on an album. Mountain Eagle was born.

Three years and three albums later, it was as if no other music existed in Liangshan.

Here is A Ge teaching me one of his songs at Beijing's only Yi restaurant:

Mountain Eagle was hailed as China's first ethnic minority pop band. They sold 3,000,000 copies of their first cassette, sung entirely in Yi. That's triple platinum in Sichuan and Yunnan, without as much as a whisper in the States. Welcome to China.

In order to truly appreciate the crazy, mixed-up genius of Mountain Eagle, you need to hear it for yourself. HERE is "Leaving Da Liangshan," the title track off of their third album. I should warn you that to the Western ear, this is really weird stuff. Like some sort of back-country Chinese "Eye of the Tiger."

Skip to the rap breakdown at 2:20.

While it might be easy for us to laugh this off, a little bit of cultural perspective will allow you to see how it could make a serious impact in mid-90's Yi Sichuan. HERE is a (face-meltingly awesome) video of an Yi shaman reciting (spittin') sacred texts. It was recorded this past summer by a professor at my university, and shows that rap-like music may have quite a history in Liangshan. Han pop songs, on the other hand, with their synth, set rhythm and music videos, were new and exciting, but still felt prohibitively foreign. Just as The Beatles brought Indian Raga to Rock & Roll and Paul Simon brought Ladysmith Black Mambazo to the top of the charts, Mountain Eagle brought Han pop music to the Yi.

Of course, this was well over ten years ago. Whenever I tell my Han friends that I've been hanging out with Mountain Eagle, they usually perk up and ask, "wow, what happened to them?" It's like if your Chinese foreign exchange buddy told you he'd just come back from dinner with the Gin Blossoms.

My hands-down favorite thing about Mountain Eagle is just how many other Yi musicians they've pulled into their orbit. Yirenzhizao are particularly notable. Current band members, former band members, and current members of bands of former band members all come together a few times a month for rowdy dinners that almost always end in orgiastic acoustic guitar sing-alongs.

This is what they look like:

But anyways, back to the story. In 1996, A Ge had a falling out with Waqiyihe and shocked the Yi world by going solo. He openly admits that he's at odds with the system -- the minute I switched my voice recorder off, he unleashed a hearty diatribe on artistic oppression, Han prejudice, etc.. He's aware that most of these songs sound ridiculous, but feels like he's circumstantially barred from producing anything better.

Though at the end of the day, things don't seem to be going so poorly for old A Ge. Within the past few years, he's founded his own song and dance troupe, written lucrative songs for Han pop stars, and single-handedly launched his kid brother A Hei's boy band Taiyangbuluo (Sun Tribe) to regional fame. Although the Tribe's first album essentially flopped, they've been living quite well off of random spots on Chinese television.

Here is a picture of Taiyangbuluo singing at an Yi New Year banquet sometime in November:

And HERE is the mp3. Admittedly, it's really not that great -- the Sun Tribe is melodramatic, off-key, and obviously wasted. However, I'm strangely drawn to that soaring harmony that comes in after about 20 seconds. There's something refreshingly organic about it, something that breaks away from the cookie-cutter timbre underwriting their televised existence. It's a faint, yet unmistakable whiff of the songs these guys grew up with.

A friend of mine once said that Han pop music sounded to him like a frozen TV dinner. There exist all sorts of different flavors and combinations, but they're only to distract you from the fact that you're eating a load of mass-produced garbage. Yi pop music may be just as frozen, but there's something about it that even the assembly line can't destroy... maybe replace the tater tots with a side of wild mushrooms. No matter how long they've been in the freezer, they've still got a serious one-up on plain old tots.

I think A Ge would agree, despite his misgivings.

The Joys of Baidu Baike

Baidu is billed as a home-grown Chinese Google, and given that Google here is almost laughably prone to sudden, mid-query failure, it is by and large the search engine of choice for China's savvy young Netizens. For me at least, their most noticeable difference is that while Google often pulls up Wikipedia within its top 5-10 search results, Baidu summons its own (mostly) user-edited reference work called Baidu Baike.

Recently, I used Baidu Baike to find a Chinese perspective on the music of the Qiang people. Living primarily in northwestern Sichuan, the Qiang lost over 10% of their population in the earthquake last May, which has, according to state media, spurred a massive, government-funded cultural preservation effort.

No mention of preservation, but I did find this:

"Called "Lana" or "Lasuo" in the Qiang language, [Qiang mountain songs] are mostly sung during manual labor and in mountain fields, with relatively free rhythm... Their traditional lyrics used to express much hardship, reflecting the bitter lives of Qiang people in their old society. After 1949 [the founding of the PRC], the Qiang people rewrote many of their songs so they could sing new mountain songs for their new lives." (My own shoddy translation).

There's something wrong here. Claiming that the Qiang rewrote their songs after 1949 strikes me as heavy-handed, as if someone were to unequivocally claim that American slaves rewrote their songs after Lincoln. The way I'd like to see it, 1) when people are sad, they sing sad songs; when they're happy, they sing happy songs; and 2) in most musical traditions, songs exist for both occasions, which is why we don't have to rewrite them every time the wind turns.

Of course, the communists engaged in a lot of minority folk song collecting/rewriting themselves... but the Netizens must not have been informed.