Quotes of the Day
Sa Dingding has made a tremendous impression on the West. It could be the 24-year-old Chinese singer's florid costumes. Perhaps it's her music videos, which feature psychedelic graphics and monks striding to fashionable breakbeats. Or maybe it's her songs, which incorporate Buddhist mantras, traditional Chinese instruments and electronica. At any rate, the U.K.'s Sunday Times has anointed her "the Asian Björk." The Guardian gave her debut album, Alive, four stars upon its U.K. release last October, adding, "Sa Dingding deserves to be the first Chinese singer-songwriter to become a celebrity in the West." In April, she flew to London to receive a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music. And in late July, Alive got its U.S. release. Her record company naturally expects great things. "It's taken something unique to crack the world market and we believe Sa Dingding is that unique article," says Iain Snodgrass, international marketing director for Universal Music.
If Universal's best talent scouts and marketing execs had locked themselves in a boardroom to brainstorm the next world-music star, they would have been high-fiving each other for coming up with something even half as marketable as the strikingly beautiful Sa — or Zhou Peng, as she was known before making a stage name out of her mother's Mongolian surname and a childhood nickname. With troubles in Tibet and Xinjiang generating plenty of international interest in China's ethnic minorities, her origins are perfectly calibrated to appeal to the liberal, middle-aged and mostly Western buyers that make up world music's fan base. Born to a Han-Chinese father and Mongolian-Chinese mother, Sa was raised as a real-life nomad on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. There, she learned how to sing and play the guzheng (zither) and the horse-headed fiddle, as well as speak Mongolian.
Today, she not only sings in Mandarin and Mongolian but also Tibetan, Sanskrit and a language of her own invention — the latter being a terrible affectation or a delight, depending on your point of view. Sa's look will engender the same kind of polarized response. She frequently poses like the Buddha in promotional photos, even though she is not actually a Buddhist. "Buddhism is a big part of Chinese culture," she says by way of explanation. "I'm interested in learning about it."
You might have thought that many Chinese would be unimpressed by the improbable package that is Sa, and denounce her ethnic borrowings and musical contrivances — but there's not a bit of it. Her big break came in 2000, when she won a singing contest on state-run China Central Television, aged 16. CCTV has been a supporter ever since, broadcasting her to hundreds of millions at a time. "As long as you don't express politically incorrect messages, from the government's point of view these kinds of artists are a very positive phenomenon," says Nimrod Baranovitch, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel and the author of China's New Voices, an authoritative survey of Chinese popular music from 1978 to 1997. "They help the Chinese state show that China is multiethnic and that China does not oppress minority cultures."
Sa is not the first Chinese pop performer to garner world-music acclaim. The Guangzhou-born Zhu Zheqin, better known by her Tibetan name Dadawa, was hailed (by a Western media obsessed with drawing parallels) as the "Chinese Enya" when her debut album Sister Drum was released by Warner Music in 1995. But interestingly, neither she nor Sa have presented themselves as mainstream Chinese. "To a Western ear, mainstream Chinese pop is too sweet — it sounds trivial," explains Baranovitch. "Minority artists offer something different and refreshing. There's a sense of primitiveness, spirituality and exoticism — it sells."
Or so Universal is hoping. But it is of course too early to tell whether or not Sa will break out of her rarified niche and garner mainstream appeal. She appears to approach the subject philosophically. "I don't mind people misunderstanding my music," she says. "Others really understand it." All that Buddhist chanting must be teaching her a thing or two about detachment.
- Ling Woo Liu