Uyghur Pop

Some wonderfully cheesy Uyghur pop

Consonant Please Carol

Part ii of Layman's Linguistics.

Cantonese mong (as in Hong Kong's Mong Kok) becomes wang in Mandarin (Mong Kok = Wang Jiao)

[Cantonese is supposed to be closer to older forms of Chinese.]

I'd always thought this was a strange consonant mutation until the parallel dawned on me:

Old English mid becomes with in Modern English.

While this is presumbably blindingly obvious to anyone who has studied linguistics, I find it quite exciting.

Worn-out Shoes and Exile

Reading a translation of the Chinese social anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo, an analysis of the foundations of Chinese society, I came across his discussion of the different conceptions of justice and morality in the West and China. In it he quoted the following extract of Mencius:

Tao Ying asked, “When Shun was emperor and Gaoyao was the judge, if Shun’s father had killed a man, what should have happened?” Mencius said, “Gaoyao would have arrested him.” “In that case, would Shun not have tried to stop
it?”
“How could Shun have stopped it? Gaoyao would have had the authority to deal with the matter.” “Then what would Shun have done?” “Shun would have regarded abandoning the empire as throwing away a worn-out shoe. He would have secretly carried the old man on his back and fled to the edge of the sea. He would have lived there all his life happily and forgotten all about the empire.”

Fei’s focus is the precedence in China of the personal relationship over the public one. But I think this passage also contains a wonderful image of the casting-off of power, with its echoes of Aeneas carrying Anchises on his back from the ruins of their city state. Shun will live on the margin, the margin of the sea and land; beyond the reach of the state, beyond the idea of a state. We are very used to the idea of a universal justice, even when its mechanisms, in The Hague for example, are somewhat faulty. The light of justice must shine in all the dark corners of the world. The idea that one could avoid the state’s pursuit of justice by removing oneself to a watery, marginal place at the edge of that state, after which the state would leave you in peace, is now very foreign to us.

The entire world, save perhaps Antarctica, is now locked in to the map lines of states. True exile is now impossible. Of course, the vagaries of extradition laws mean that you could probably find a country which wouldn’t send you back, but you would still be bound by the state. What Mencius’ piece suggests is the existence of liminal, state-less areas: marshes, seas, mountains, with which the state does not concern itself. Only there would an exile from power, responsibility, and the state, be truly free.

IZ

Last night I went to see IZ, a band from Xinjiang, performing in London. Their songs are sung in Kazakh and the group appears to be made up of three Kazakhs and one Han Chinese drummer. My friend had earlier suggested they sounded like an even more boring Beta Band; I think in this respect they may have been victims of Myspace misrepresentation. Online they sound rather overproduced, indeed rather like a middle of the road indie band with a few ‘ethnic’ touches. Live, though, their sound is much more raw; the deep, layered vocals much more resonant.

They make great use of the dombra, a type of traditional, long-necked lute. Its delicate strings allow for a flicking action which produces a shower of notes. Then there is the kobyz, a bowed instrument which is pitched rather like a viola. And of course there is the traditional electric bass guitar which gives the music the requisite drive.

I can’t say anything about how ‘authentic’ this all was, if indeed that is something we should even worry about. The Men’s Urinal school of musical criticism opined that it was ‘quite aboriginal’. I think this particular critic really was detecting notes of the didgeridoo rather than making a political statement regarding the disputed indigenous status of Turkic tribes in Xinjiang. I’ve often worried that many people have a tendency to see ‘World Music’ as a genre of music, like ‘Indie’ or ‘Dubstep’. It’s all just funny foreign people playing funny foreign instruments and sounding ‘atmospheric’.

I don't think it helps that non-Kazakh and non-Chinese speakers at the gig, in other words almost everyone, would have been unaware of the intimations of China's complicated linguistic politics. The songs were sung in Kazakh by the front man, Mamer, with two others accompanying him. However, Mamer introduced the band and the songs in Chinese, which was then translated by the drummer into English (I suppose that he could not speak Kazakh). It reminded me very slightly of ethnic minority performances on CCTV which are introduced, 'framed' as it were, in Chinese: minority languages are for performance, Chinese for the official stuff. Mamer probably learned Kazakh and Chinese at school and didn't get the chance to learn English. If you're educated in your native minority language in Xinjiang you learn Chinese as your second language and don't study English; this is why many ambitious parents choose to send their children to Chinese-medium schools, where they are not taught in their mother tongue.

When the multitude of types of music from around the world are reduced to 'World Music', and the word 'aboriginal' is bandied about, we lose much of the nuance and subtlety of the musical experience . We have to reestablish the context of the music and its performance, which the World Music vacuum does so much to negate.