The New Dominion

You may have flipped through a taxi magazine in the back of a Beijing or Shanghai taxi. You are likely to have noticed regional variations in taxi color and configuration. You are quite certain to have marveled at just how near to death you felt under the care of a particular cabbie. You may not be aware, however, that Ürümchi has its very own radio station just for taxi drivers. Most of what the station plays is popular music for the over-20 crowd to accompany the crackle of the dispatch radio. But, its programming also includes talk shows about taxi life, where drivers call in to complain or shoot the breeze and passengers air their grievances, raise their concerns, and, with remarkable frequency, praise the work of a particular cabbie.

It should be no surprise, then, that, in 2007, this station, a member of Xinjiang People’s Broadcasting Station, held a contest to find and promote “The Song of the Taxi Gentleman” (的士之歌). The winner, by a teacher named Liu Jun (刘君), was “Camel of the City” (城市骆驼), a song now recorded by new Ürümchi-based pop singer Camel Hadron (骆驼强子 – yes, that’s how he translates it), known otherwise as Wang Aqiang (王阿强).

A play on Camel Xiangzi? Nah. “Camel of the City” is the title track of his first CD, the release party for which, held on 15 March at City Island Coffee (西提岛咖啡), I had the opportunity to attend in my private capacity. (You can find a rather embellished press review here at Tianshan.net.)

Camel Hadron’s apparently popular on the Web, and you can find several of his songs on this page (only works in Internet Explorer). I’ll stick with his release party, though, and you can make your mind up about the rest. Between endless speeches, some lasting up to twenty minutes, and an entertaining comedy act, Camel Hadron performed three songs from his CD: “Love’s Eyes” 爱之眼, “Camel of the City” 城市骆驼, and “Olympic Beijing” 奥林匹克北京 First off, Camel Hadron, himself, has a very good voice, which sometimes dips into classical intonation. He is clearly well-trained, able to bounce around on stage while maintaining his vocal quality. The emotion with which he sings drifts frequently into melodrama, but it is a precise, recognizable melodrama. In these respects, Camel Hadron makes a nice, plain, normal singer, entirely inoffensive, yet mildly impressive. The remarkable thing about Camel Hadron, as he showed later on during the event, is his ability to sing entirely convincingly in both a high male and a high female voice. He sang a duet with himself. Bravo!

Now the songs. I honestly couldn’t tell “Love’s Eyes” apart from anything else I’d ever heard in China. Everyone I was with, foreign and native included, had the distinct feeling they’d heard the song before, but they weren’t sure where. “Love’s Eyes”, like Hadron’s other songs, is marked apart from run-of-the-mill Han Chinese song you’ll hear a million times by its conservative and cautious use of the piece of sound symbolism that makes a piece of music most recognizably minzu: a sudden jump up to a long, sustained note with just a hint of shahaltai, the tightening of the throat found in certain varieties of throat singing. It’s supposed to symbolize the wide open spaces of the steppe. I think Tengger did it first, but I could be wrong. (Hadron adapts something similar, but cooler, for another of his songs, “Return East” 东归.) “Camel of the City”, despite being billed as a gritty song, close to life, was really more of the same. For all his praise of cab drivers male and female, I felt none of the bustle of the city, nor did my fellow audience members seem especially moved. The song simply isn’t Ürümchi. It’s too big, too plodding. If anything, it’s the feeling of being stuck in a Beijing traffic jam in the late afternoon. This was the buzz of 2007? The last song, by the same author, was “Olympic Beijing”. I’m still humming “Olympic Beijing”. Lyrically, it’s a cookie-cutter piece of trite Olympic propaganda, but the simple chorus and the backbeat (which Hadron doesn’t seem aware of as he sings on the CD) make it rather infectious.

The CD is 城市骆驼 by 骆驼强子.