'It's harvest season for me'
Of the latest crop of Chinese stars, Sa Dingding stands highest. Will
the world bite?
Robin Denselow
Friday March 28, 2008
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2268360,00.html
The Guardian
As the Beijing Olympics draw near, the western media are obsessed with
anything Chinese. Right on cue, here comes a young Chinese contender
for global stardom, a woman who ticks so many boxes that her record
label surely cannot believe their luck.
Sa Dingding is 24. She writes her own songs and produces her own
records, on which she mixes electronica with traditional folk
influences and instruments from across China and beyond, while singing
in a variety of languages, from Sanskrit to Mandarin, from Tibetan to
one she invented herself. Her following in China, Dingding says,
includes "many old people and many young people. It's the combination
of ancient Chinese culture and the modern electronic thing: the youth
listen to the music and the older people like the culture behind the
music." The fact she is remarkably good-looking and dresses in exotic,
self-designed clothes has no doubt helped.
Now Dingding is coming to Britain, hoping to win over yet another
audience. She has been nominated for a BBC Radio 3 award for world
music, and the fact that she has decided to fly from Beijing to the
mysteriously low-key awards ceremony clearly suggests she is in with a
very big chance. Dingding has already received deserved praise for her
electronic-folk fusion album, Alive, and will be appearing in the
summer at the Womad festival.
So how does she feel about being promoted as a world music star? Her
response is surprisingly cor****ate: "My music is marketed as Sa
Dingding music, not some special musical style. To me, the music is
only Sa Dingding."
Her father is Chinese and her mother Mongolian; for the first six
years of her life, Dingding spent the summer travelling across
Mongolia as a nomad with her grandmother. "We were living in the
grasslands," she recalls. "I heard people singing every day, and it
told me that music means freedom."
Later, she moved to eastern and then central China with her parents,
before settling in Beijing, where she attended university "after
deciding at the age of 10 that I wanted to be a musician". Dingding
became fascinated with electronic music, and by 18 was hailed as the
best dance singer in China. "But at that time I was singing songs by
other people, not expressing my own feelings," she says. So she
started using electronica to "help me explore my imagination and my
thoughts about music", while also studying folk instruments, learning
to play the ancient Chinese zheng (zither) and making use of the
Mongolian horse-hair fiddle.
If her music is unexpected, then so, too, is the way Dingding makes
use of different languages and influences in her songs. Lagu Lagu was
inspired by a visit to the remote Lagu people of southern China, whose
language is fast approaching extinction. "They are farmers living in a
deep valley, and there's only one village for the whole Lagu race.
There are many people like that who don't get noticed, and I hope that
through my music I can introduce these people to the world," she says.
Dingding doesn't speak Lagu, so she made up her own language for the
song; she used the same technique on an emotional song in memory of
her Mongolian grandmother. "I searched deep in my memory for the
language my grandmother used to talk to me while I was still a baby.
The people in the studio were in tears. I think people know how to
sing before they know how to speak a language. I believe that everyone
experiences this self-created language."
There are more surprises in her use of Sanskrit and Buddhist texts.
"Buddhism is an im****tant part of the inspiration for me to create the
music," she says. "It can enlighten my soul and help me find a good
way to express my deep spirit." So would she describe herself as a
Buddhist? "No, that's not right. But Buddhism is part of the oriental
culture and it's part of my life and part of my blood. In my free
time, I also read the Bible and other texts ... I care about every
kind of spiritual wisdom."
Which led, inevitably, to the subject of Tibet. One song on the album,
Holy Incense, is credited as the "Tibet version", but Dingding says
she had not even been there when it was recorded. "But after I
finished the album I went to Tibet four times, and they thought I was
Tibetan." She makes no mention of the recent Tibet protests, so I ask
instead about Björk, who upset the Chinese authorities earlier this
month when she sang Declare Independence and shouted "Tibet, Tibet" at
a concert in Beijing. "I didn't know," she says, "because I didn't go
to the concert." When I repeat the question, she adds: "Thanks for the
information. I must check out the details and see what happened."
She seems happier talking about her life in Beijing, where she has won
so many awards this year that "it's harvest season for me". In fact,
the young writer Cai Jun has made her the heroine of his latest
serialised thriller, "which has sold 800,000 copies already", and is
apparently cult reading among college students. And there's still the
Olympics to come. Dingding and her record company are planning a major
event in Beijing just before the games start, "and my idea is to
introduce artists from abroad". Who would she invite? "Well, my
personal thinking is Andrea Bocelli and Robbie Williams." Robbie
Williams? She laughed. "Yes, I like him."
· Alive is out now on Wrasse.
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