There’s an interesting article in the New York Times about ethnic music in China, and the difficulties China’s 100 million minorities face. Colorful, traditional performances are usually okay, even embraced by authorities, but songs that threaten the status quo can create difficulties for performers.
“About 80 percent of my songs are about hardship,” said Aojie a Ge, a Beijing-based musician from the Yi minority of southwest China. “But can I perform these songs? Of course not. I still need to survive.”
And I quite liked this part of the story:
The son of a cow herder and member of the tiny Buyi minority, Xiao Budian left home on his 19th birthday, spending his high school tuition fees on a one-way train ticket to Beijing. “I wanted to see what was on the other side of the mountain,” he said.
Mr. Xiao initially lived with his older brother, a rock musician who had amassed a collection of foreign music and movies during his years in the capital. One day, Mr. Xiao heard Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a documentary about World War II. “It was so simple, just a voice, a guitar and a harmonica,” he said. “But its power was tremendous. It was like an atom bomb.”
Xiao’s story reminds me of Hahn Daesoo and the other Korean rockers of the 1970s who tried to use music to fight against the authoritarian government of the day. It’s funny how something so seemingly unimportant as music can hack off the powers that be so effectively and so often. I tend to be rather pessimistic about China, but stories like that one gives me hope.
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