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▣ Before I could sing any of what followed, I used to howl the opening lines, "Two thousand and two, the first snow has come…" The song was already dated by the time I found it. It was never fashionable, anyway. As a critic wrote about Misora Hibari in the postwar years, Dao Lang gave off the aroma of the farm, of trainloads of men transported to the city to work. I kept howling that line because it would provoke groans or laughter. It was unsophisticated and crude. Stoic tears, butterflies, and snow. I learned the rest of the lyrics when I left the city. I heard people singing it on slow trains to Shanghai and Guangzhou, humming it while they smoked in the space between cars. I could still sing it now. The first snow of the year was later than usual. The Number Two from Balou Station carried away the last yellow leaves of the season. He longs for a woman of Ürümqi. There is not much more. ▣ ▣

▣ Popular music flowed in another direction. His records sold, but he was never going to be a darling of the industry. His peers came out to criticize him. ▣ ▣ Dao Lang was a relic of the past. He was from a tradition built by Wang Luobin, the musicologist that collected songs while breaking bricks in Xinjiang labor camps from 1949 to 1979, who launched “The Girl from Dabancheng” as an ethnically-flavored pop hit in the ‘80s. Dao Lang sang those songs, drawing on the borderlands for authenticity. He was born in Sichuan but was identified with the mythology of the restless western wastes and the hard, romantic people that lived there. ▣ ▣ ▣ He was from a tradition of the Reform and Opening troubadour, the urban cowboy, selling songs in Beijing but tied to boozy dives. His struggle and the struggle of the men on the slow trains was similar enough. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ He was a patriot when that became countercultural. He sang red songs for the aging 1950s generation with whom he had sojourned on Hainan in the years when it boomed. He sang songs about cultural unity under the Communist Party even as bloody riots swept Xinjiang. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ It’s not that popular music had no room for an artist like Dao Lang. Even if the last decade has seen the rise of the talent show and the coarsening of tastes, platforms have accommodated the fringes and nurtured unique talents. He was bucked off. He following was built through VCDs and radio and state broadcasting and men on trains. He wasn’t online. He disappeared. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣

▣ His return is unexpected. "Demons and Mirages" is the name of the song that has returned him to the public eye. It’s from an album that draw on Pu Songling's Qing dynasty collection, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. ▣ ▣ "The Lo-ch'a Country and the Sea Market" is how Herbert A. Giles' renders the title of the original story. It begins like this:

Once upon a time there was a young man, named Ma Chün, who was also known as Lung-mei. He was the son of a trader, and a youth of unsurpassing beauty. His manners were courteous, and he loved nothing better than singing and playing. He used to associate with actors, and with an embroidered handkerchief round his head the effect was that of a beautiful woman. Hence he acquired the sobriquet of the Beauty. At fourteen years of age he graduated and began to make a name for himself; but his father, who was growing old and wished to retire from business, said to him, "My boy, book-learning will never fill your belly or put a coat on your back; you had much better stick to the old thing." Accordingly, Ma from that time occupied himself with scales and weights, with principal and interest, and such matters.

Lung-mei takes a voyage by sea and finds himself swept to a strange land. They are ugly and poor. When he asks the reason, one of them answers:

"You see, in our country everything depends, not on literary talent, but on beauty. The most beautiful are made ministers of state; the next handsomest are made judges and magistrates; and the third class in looks are employed in the palace of the king. Thus they are enabled out of their pay to provide for their wives and families. But we, from our very birth, are regarded by our parents as inauspicious, and are left to perish, some of us being occasionally preserved by more humane parents to prevent the extinction of the country."

When Lung-mei finally arrives in the city that houses the beautiful people, he finds them grotesque. They are demons, essentially, a colony of the Raksha of Indian mythology. ▣ ▣ ▣ The story might be an attack on the intellectual elite that commanded the Chinese bureaucracy in imperial times, but it has been read by critics as an attack by Dao Lang on entertainment circles. The lyrics tell the story of a young man from China that voyages to the land of the Raksha. There, he lingers in a place called the Gougou Fortress which is run by two local tyrants called Ma Hu and You Niao. The nature of this place is unclear to me, but it seems to be a brothel and entertainment venue. The hypocrisy and ugliness of Ma Hu and You Niao are catalogued. Despite the intervention of the Chinese adventurer, they support each other and elevate their most hideous charges. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ All of this has been thoroughly dissected. Na Ying is You Niao, perhaps. She criticized him. It’s likely that Ma Hu is Yang Kun. He dismissed Dao Lang’s music. These are grudges that have been simmering for two decades. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ Dao Lang’s song fits perfectly with the mood of these years, when the music industry is undergoing official and popular criticism. He has returned at the time right. His unfashionable music, coming from an archaic counterculture even twenty years ago, is an antidote to the control of talent shows and the algorithms. This is my explanation. His identification with Xinjiang and folk traditions made him unmarketable a decade ago but perfect for a time of increased suspicion of the global. And there must be some nostalgia involved, too. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣

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