Thursday, January 7, 2010

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.

1 comment:

  1. While I agree that Mountain Eagle has the sound and swagger of a Chinese Duran Duran, I think that we could consider their foreign influence on Han pop as closer to Nena, the german musicians who brought 99 luftbaloons to american 80's nights.

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