Tibetan Covers: Gorillaz, Roots and Gaga!

It’s always fun when you hear a contemporary Tibetan pop song and recognise the tune from elsewhere. Like when I was watching Made in Tibet by Shapaley and my friend recognised the plinky plonky piano part being from the film “Amelie”. The word on the street now is that there is a Shapaley remix going round that takes a sample from “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” by Eve featuring Gwen Stefani, want to hear that!

I just wanted to share a few songs from Tibet that I’ve come across that sample some cool tunes!

1. Acha Tsendep’s song “Tibetan Girl” samples “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz

2. Someone sent me this song by Lhasa’s Tibetan Mastiff Crew a while back and it samples “You Got Me” by The Roots featuring Erykah Badu! I can’t find a video or anything for this song so I’ve uploaded the mp3, the lyrics in Tibetan (and English) are pretty nasty, there’s also a little bit in Chinese.

3. This last one is a straight-up cover of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” but with Tibetan lyrics and a rather, er, unique singing style. I’ve put this up on my blog before but I’m not really sure that people liked it, at least most of my friends don’t seem to! Anyway here it is again!

Does anyone know any more covers or Tibetan songs that sample contemporary pop music? Let me know!

“Laundry Song” By Sonam Wangmo

The first blogpost on Tibetan “Red Songs” is finally up on High Peaks Pure Earth! I want to make it a series, could be fun!

Anyway I thought I’d post here the music video by Sonam Wangmo that I have a soft spot for, it’s just so catchy (!)

The Tibet Connection Radio Programme Covers The Shapale Phenomenon

I was interviewed by Rebecca Novick of the Tibet Connection about the Shapale Rap video, a video I had blogged about here at the end of April.

Here is a link where you can listen to the feature: http://tibetconnection.org/2011/06/meat-pastry-rap-song-threatens-chinas-security and you can also see the Shapale video.

I mention at the end that I’m excited about Tibetan hip hop, I’ll write more on that later at some point!

More Tibetan Simulation Fonts!!!

Hopefully not a new trend but following on from my post about Alan Dawa Dolma and the Tibetan simulation fonts I have now found yet another music video using these fonts for the subtitles. Take a look at the new video from wildly popular in PRC 3-piece girl band called Acha:

I have been receiving new photos of these fonts so will update my online gallery collection soon! Note to self, must actually start posting good music on my blog. You can always go read my old post about Cowboy Junkies in China.

On Mastiffs, Typography and the Taming of Tibet

"The Call" By Alan Dawa Dolma: Single Cover

After last week’s Shapale excitement, I’m going to write about a music video that is most definitely not banned in China, in fact quite the opposite. It’s the music video called “The Call” and it’s for a new animated feature film “Tibetan Mastiff Dorje”, set for cinema release in China this year on June 28. The singer is Alan Dawa Dolma.

According to Chinese state media, “Tibet Mastiff Dorje” is the debut cooperation film between China and Japan on animation, which explains why Alan Dawa Dolma is singing the theme song. For those of you down with contemporary Tibetan pop culture, you’ll know that Dartsedo born Alan Dawa Dolma is a bit of a pop sensation in Japan. She is also properly famous, having done the theme songs for John Woo’s two episode film “Red Cliff” back in 2008. If anyone can explain why she calls herself Alan though, I’d be interested in knowing that!

I’m sorry I made you watch the video and listen to the music but there are a couple of things here that are worth a closer look I think. First of all, there’s the matter of the mastiff, according to this news article,

“Tibetan Mastiff Dorje” is adapted from a best-selling novel, which described the story of Tian Jin, a ten-year-old boy and a mastiff he saved on the plateau in southwest China’s Tibet.

Given the huge appetite nouveau riche Chinese people seem to have for Tibetan mastiffs, both in real life and in cultural matters related to Tibet, it makes sense for a major animation film to feature a Tibetan mastiff! Hardly a month seems to go by without some kind of headline describing how a rich Chinese business person paid an obscene amount of money for a Tibetan mastiff, they are really obsessed with mastiffs as a status symbol. I think the most recent news story was last month, a Chinese coal baron paid $1.5 million for a Red Tibetan Mastiff.

Tibetan mastiffs have also been voraciously consumed in Chinese language fiction, over the last few years there have been several bestselling novels focusing on mastiffs, am posting the covers of two below, the book on the left is “The Tibet Code” by He Ma and on the right we have “Tibetan Mastiff” by Yang Zhijun on which the animation is based. “The Tibet Code” series of books already runs into 8 or 9 volumes and every single one has been a huge bestseller since the first volume was published in March 2008 (somewhat ironically!). I have only read the first one but basically the whole plot centres around a mythical Tibetan mastiff creature which the protagonists spend the whole novel searching for…

My personal favourite Tibetan mastiff cultural treat is the two-part 2009 graphic novel called “Tibetan Rock Dog” written by a Chinese rock star called Zheng Jun who had a huge hit in the 1980s with a song called “Return to Lhasa”.

The story is about a Tibetan mastiff called Metal who grows up in a monastery in Tibet and is then taken off to Beijing by a “Tibet Drifter” type rocker where he forms a rock band! All pretty silly stuff but I find it quite cute and it also leads me nicely into the next thing I want to take a closer look at – FONTS!

Take another look at the fonts on the book covers above, “Tibetan Mastiff” and “Tibetan Rock Dog” are good examples of the Chinese font that is trying to look like Tibetan script! There is a term in typography for one style of writing trying to imitate the stereotypical letter forms of another language: simulation fonts. Here is a link to a font called Al-Andalus, an Arabic simulation font.

Over the years I have been obsessively saving any of this kind of font I have come across so am excited now that the collection can be viewed here below:

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The only thing I have found written specifically about Chinese and Tibetan is this 2007 post from Danwei.Org, they call it Tibetan-style Chinese. It’s widespread in the PRC and you can see it from book covers to food packaging to album covers, basically for anything packaged as “Tibetan”. This brings me back to the Alan Dawa Dolma video as it’s the first time that I have seen an entire music video subtitled in this font. The font is fascinating, as is her singing in Chinese, Tibetan and English. Alan Dawa Dolma fan forums also suggest that there is a Japanese version of the song somewhere.

The mastiff, the singer, the music and the simulation fonts are all connected – they all exoticise Tibet and Tibetans. From being amused by the things I have mentioned above, I am going to move to a more scholarly interpretation… The traditional Chinese image of Tibet is of wild and cultureless natives so this exoticisation in a way neutralises and pacifies Tibetans. Even the font turns Tibetan script into nothing more than a novelty. This is also a way in which uncomfortable politics can be evaded. The backward natives have now been turned into exotic natives – could this be the taming of Tibet!?

 

The Tibetan Shapale Goes Viral!

April 28, 2011 *IMPORTANT UPDATE*

Sorry to have somehow missed this before but a friend who follows China blogs closely just told me that the PRC State Council Information Office BANNED the Shapale Video on April 2, 2011, according to China Digital Times! Here is what CDT wrote below:

I wish I’d known this yesterday when I was writing my post but anyway, it’s good to have noted! It doesn’t really explain how come the Shapale video is still easily accessible on the Chinese language video hosting sites but who really understands Chinese internet!?

OK I have left the original posting from yesterday unchanged below.

 

The Tibetan Shapale Goes Viral!

It’s been incredible following the journey of a YouTube video made by young Tibetans in Switzerland spreading like wildfire through the interwebs. I might be going out on a limb but I’d go as far as to call the “Shapale Song” the first truly viral Tibetan video!

I remember seeing it come out of nowhere, it was literally all over my Facebook from one moment to the next back in March, Tibetans everywhere posting it all over each other’s walls with smileys and <3s and expressions of enthusiasm. For those of you who haven’t seen the video, here it is on YouTube, at the last count it had racked up over 29,542 views!

I don’t know how to measure what a huge sum almost getting 30,000 views in a month is… I tried to look on YouTube for an equivalent but couldn’t really come up with anything. So just to compare really roughly, a song that I think is pretty popular and well known amongst Tibetans in exile is Chag Sum Tsel by Phurbu T Namgyal, arguably the most popular singer around (very generally!). His Chag Sum Tsel video on the super popular YouTube channel kept by Jigdo has had 28,563 views – but it has been online 4 years to amass that figure!

Back to the song… along with momo, shapale is THE favourite food of Tibetans, particularly kids love it as it’s oily and yummy. When grown-ups hit naughty kids on the bum, that’s also called giving a shapale, so this song is super fun and funny for Tibetans (yes, it’s Tibetan humour!). Amongst the wordplay, fun visuals and fun lyrics in the Shapale Song, there is an underlying important message in the rap: “Even if you live in the west / Don’t forget that Tibet is where you come from / speak Tibetan and write Tibetan / Be proud to be Tibetan.”

The whole rap is delivered in impeccable Lhasa Tibetan complete with honourifics! The overall message of the rap picks up on the pride in Tibetanness that upsurged last year in all sorts of ways, we wrote about it on High Peaks Pure Earth but I feel that the Shapale Rap has most in common with the pride and confidence displayed by Yudrug in their rap video New Generation.

The interesting thing for me was to then see the Shapale Rap suddenly appear on Chinese language video-hosting sites (YouTube is banned in China), shared amongst Tibetan netizens within PRC, the Shapale video had found its way to sites such as Tudou, 56.com and also the MicroBlog site by Sina called Weibo. On Tudou, at last count the video was at 35,333 views. In Chinese the song has an extra Chinese title 肉饼 (roubing, literally meat bread, like in Tibetan!). The screenshot below shows a Baidu search for the video and all the video-hosting sites it’s on:

The comments on the Chinese language sites have been very enthusiastic, praising the video for its originality and fun side! The small update on Weibo below encourages Tibetan rap and wonders about the ethnicity of the singer, speculating he is half-Tibetan!

Tibetan language blogs have also picked up the video! On March 27, 2011, the Tudou video was embedded into a blog in Tibet for a Tibetan reading audience:

It’s been just over a month now that the video has been online and it’s already a classic. I really can’t think of any other video that has done that. The shapale theme also fits in well with the idea of Tibetan identity assertion taking place through food at the moment that we wrote also wrote about on High Peaks Pure Earth but maybe now I’m reading too much into it. I’m just happy to see a smart, clever and funny video made by young Tibetans strike a chord with Tibetans all over the world!

Tashi Dhondup

How great to hear that Tashi Dhondup is out of the labour camp and back at home. There are still quite a few tracks from his album “Torture Without Trace” that need to be subtitled in English but for now, here is “Waiting With Hope”, a simple and moving song.

Does The Road to Heaven Sound Like This?

On a typically cold, grey January evening in central London, Tibetans and supporters gathered opposite the Royal Courts of Justice to protest against the Chinese Vice-Premier Li Keqiang’s visit. As usual, Chinese “welcomers” were given pole position with their drums, megaphones and flags.

Photo via SFT UK

There wasn’t much unusual about this protest really but one thing I noticed was that the Chinese party seemed to take great pleasure out of blasting Chinese pop songs about Tibet at us! Maybe I just hadn’t really noticed if they had done it before in the past but when the tune started to ring a bell I realised they were playing the official song that commemorated the opening of the railway to Tibet in 2006. The song was called “Tian Lu” and it was sung by Han Hong, I’ve seen Tian Lu translated in different ways, I guess it could be Sky Road or Heavenly Road.

 

I remember seeing the song performed at official functions in Beijing. My main abiding memory of it though is that one of the security officials involved in my deportation operation had the song as his ringtone!!

This is some video I took last night of the Chinese party enjoying the music they brought along to welcome their Vice-Premier with but I’ll upload the real song as well:

I found various videos of the song on YouTube, one version uploaded by ikhamo also carries the translation of the song so I am copying it below, enjoy (!) …

Tian Lu (Heavenly Road)

At dawn, I stand upon the green grassland
I see a magical eagle bathed in ruddy light
Like an auspicious cloud soaring through the blue sky
Bringing good luck to the Tibetan people

At dusk, I stand atop the tall mountain peak
I see the railway built to my hometown
A colossal dragon soaring through the mountains
Bringing prosperity to the snowy plateau

That is a magical Heaven’s Road
Bringing the motherland’s warmth to borderlands
Mountains are no longer high, journeys are no longer long
All ethnic groups unite as one

At dusk, I stand atop the tall mountain peak
I see the railway built to my hometown
A colossal dragon soaring through the mountains
Bringing prosperity to the snowy plateau

That is a magical Heaven Road
Bringing us to paradise on earth
Barley beer and butter tea will taste more sweet
Joyful songs echo in all directions

That is a magical Heaven Road
Bringing us to paradise on earth
Barley beer and butter tea will taste more sweet
Joyful songs echo in all directions

Joyful songs echo in all directions

Cowboy Junkies in China

I was fascinated to read recently that Michael Timmins of Cowboy Junkies spent three months in late 2008 in the small town of Jingjiang in China – the result of which is reflected in the Cowboy Junkies album that came out in June, “Renmin Park”. Apparently two of his three adopted children are Chinese, I am just getting this from their record label’s site, I really didn’t know much about the band before, except that they’ve been around forever. I’m also bit slow on this one as I only got round to listening to the album last week!

Of course anyone who has been to China, or even a basic grasp of Chinese, would be familiar with “Renmin” 人民meaning People – as in 中华人民共和国 People’s Republic of China or 人民日报 People’s Daily… Most towns have a People’s Park and it’s the place for all kinds of wholesome communal activities. I was curious to see, or hear, what this and the whole China experience meant for the album.

Clearly three months is not enough time for anyone to get their head round a country like China. And I have to say, the blurb on their site about the town welcoming them with open arms and China being such a friendly place blah blah was grating, yes Chinese people love foreigners and cute little kids but let’s not get into that here…

The album is good! There are all kinds of everyday sounds from the park and also Chinese instruments all throughout the 14 tracks. On their label’s site Timmins writes:

I’d spend hours in the park walking around and recording music and conversations, exercise classes and badminton games; in the streets I’d record the intense sound of the traffic; at the school I’d wander the halls and sit in on some classes and record the students chanting their lessons, or capture them at their morning exercise where the entire school of three thousand students would do their calisthenics. Even drifting by our apartment window were the calls of various hawkers, selling everything from vegetables to propane. I recorded it all.

The highlight for me has been discovering their cover of and collaborations with Chinese rock guru Zuoxiao Zuzhou. Zuoxiao Zuzhou has been around making music since 1993 and is an unconventional character in Chinese contemporary culture, he is also an artist and very good friends with Ai Weiwei! His most recent album was titled “OST For Ai Weiwei Works No.1″. In this interview with the ChinaBeat blog he talks about meeting Ai Weiwei and Han Han together:

Han Han and I have admired each other for a long time now but we never actually met until last summer. I introduced him to Ai Weiwei that day, and they admire each other’s work too. I thought I should let them do most of the talking. Han Han and Weiwei spoke mostly of social problems. I spoke with Han Han largely about domestic life and interests. We could have gone on forever.

I don’t have the Cowboy Junkies cover of his song “I Cannot Sleep Sadly By Your Side” to upload here (and I’d probably be breaking all kinds of copyright laws) but “Renmin Park” is available to listen to on Spotify. However I just found the Cowboy Junkies cover on YouTube so I’ll embed it at the bottom of this post.

Here is the original song 《我不能悲伤地坐在你身旁》 by Zuoxiao Zuzhou, for some reason I am finding it quite festive even though it’s not festive at all! Enjoy and happy holidays!