Month: March 2007

Two weeks ago was the funeral of Murat Nasirov, Kazakhstani Uyghur pop singer in Russia. He died on January 19th when he plummeted from his apartment balcony. There are conflicting stories as to how he died. Officially, it was ruled a suicide. One report in the Russian media claimed that he had been at a nightclub, where one of his friends spiked their drinks with LSD, which led to Murat to behave erratically. His wife, meanwhile, insists he would never commit suicide and was poisoned. In an interview (blocked) with RFA’s Uyghur language broadcast, Natalia Nasirov said that Murat had plans to release a new album and was a proud Uyghur nationalist.

Nasirov’s fans within Xinjiang have remarked on his death as well. On the Uyghur language BBS forum Diyarim, a few threads have opened about him, as does the Xabnam BBS (also in Uyghur Arabic script). Some Uyghur bloggers (blogging in Chinese and Latin alphabet Uyghur) have videos from YouTube and Tudou. And an entire page devoted to mourning the singer appears to have been set up at 163888.net (Chinese, with long written sections in Uyghur posted as images).

The largest thread on Diyarim has one very interesting post on Page 3: an essay by Nebijan Tursun titled “Murat Nasirof and I”. I am not fluent enough to tell you anything about the essay’s content, but I can tell you who Dr. Nabijan Tursun is: he was one of the contributors to the book Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, probably the most comprehensive collaborative work on Xinjiang. Together with James Millward, he co-wrote a chapter on the history of Xinjiang provocatively titled “Political History and Strategies of Control, 1884-1978”. Reportedly both authors have since been denied visas to China, and one contributor once told me they had heard a rumor that the book was angrily condemned within Zhongnanhai, and banned as subversive.

Murat Nasirov recorded one album of songs in the Uyghur language, Qaldim Yalghuz, a compendium of nakshisi (traditional folk songs), with a Russian pop twist. You can download them, using a proxy if you are in China, here. It is not clear how long these links will last.

Finally, here’s a video of a Russian song by Murat, which appears to be an upbeat pop song sang on a soundstage made to look like the dead Aral Sea, with cameos by members of the Addams Family.

China finally has a TV superhero with a cape.

While I’m waiting for China’s answer to the Matrix to come out, I look forward to seeing China’s “first fantasy” TV show, Magic Cellphone (魔幻手机). The hero gets his powers from his cellphone “robot” (3G?), according to Shanghaiist, which “travels through a time tunnel … and arrives in ancient times, where she meets characters from Chinese mythology such as Monkey King. Then she is brought back to 2006.”

Yeah, but the real question is when does he fight Hiro Nakamura from NBCs Heroes?

I have to agree with Shanghaiist – how they call this the “first” fantasy TV series is beyond me, especially since it will feature the Monkey King, who really has gotten enough TV shows already. Seriously. Stop it.

See more pics at Shanghaiist or their Flickr page.

China Digital Times has the links for five videos from the Crazed Migrant Workers (民工也疯狂), a trio of performers who lip sync to songs like Hotel California (加州旅馆) and Fearless (霍元甲). But my favorite has to be Curse of Golden Flowers (黄金甲) because of the guy in drag with balloons substituting for Gong Li’s cleavage. The video ends with the players, which include a real live migrant worker, introducing themselves.

Claymation daoban (盗版) – pirate CD vendor.

Chinese rock legend and blogger Kaiser Kuo posted “What have you always wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about the Chinese music industry?” and I peppered him with questions. The first one I asked was “Are there any podcasts or blogs that are genre themed or programmed? Does that have any big potential?” I then realized that, hey, I have the internetz, I can type some Chinese, and I feel like avoiding my responsibilities – why don’t I try and answer that?

Lo and behold, I find Lifepop, a Chinese website for user-generated podcasts. While one of the top shows is apparently a 61 year old guy in Xi’an telling jokes, there are music podcasts as well. One that caught my eye was Punkcity by a guy calling himself Jackass. He’s got a band called Flipside, and they’ve even got a MySpace page. Like other Chinese rock bands, they sing in English. But unlike many others, they are making their own stop-motion music video, which I’ll attempt to paste here but otherwise you can see it at Jackass’s page or the MySpace link or see it at fullscreen here. There’s some pics of the props he’s hand making on the site as well. The video is only about half done, as the animation only last for about a minute and a half and then the rest of the song is subtitles over a black screen. But check it out – its been continuously made and reposted. But I warn you in advance: Flipside listens to emo. Proceed with caution.

Also on Lifepop is what appears to be a podcast by Nu Metal band Twisted Machine, who also have a MySpace page.

As for podcasting in China overall, I found this article from the Wharton School of Business last year. Lifepop founder Wang Xiaobo has these comments:

“China now has between 20 and 30 podcasting sites, with three or four leading the way. And there are about 1 million of users of podcasting.” (Lifepop, last March, had 200,000 of those)

Where are these other sites?

“Currently, the few large blogging sites are competing to burn the money they got from venture capitalists and to define their areas. Even if there are only one or two sites that manage to break even now, that is a miracle. There are few podcasting sites that are big enough, and everybody is in no hurry to turn a profit due to marketing needs and other reasons. So the majority of podcasting sites are not profitable.” But he predicts that “in the next few years, coupled with the development of the 3G technology, there will be an explosive growth in the number of podcasting users. Meanwhile, podcasting will become more integrated with other multi-media applications.”

Hmmm… whither the telecoms?