Mongolian folk rockers hanggai in their urban grassland
A few years ago, Ilchi was a young Beijinger who played in a local rock band and worked as a mechanic at the capital airport. Now, he and his new band are known for donning traditional Mongolian tunics, picking up horse-hair fiddles and traveling all over the world to perform Mongolian throat singing fused with Radiohead-influenced rock and roll.
It began when Ilchi the rocker heard that a Mongolian throat singing teacher was coming to Hohhot to teach. Curious, he went for a three-week class. He was ethnic Mongolian himself but his schooling was all in Mandarin, so he wasn’t able to communicate with the teacher, who spoke only Mongolian, except through the music. As a child, he never heard the traditional throat singing music of the Mongolian people. He learned that this teacher had begun learning throat singing at age 5, and his father before him had been a throat singer. But there was a time when this singing was forbidden in Mongolia because of its connection to Lamaism. Now, Ilchi says he and a handful of other students who studied under his teachers are the only ones still singing this music. Early in his career with Hanggai, the band he formed to give this tradition new life by fusing it with rocking guitars and amps, he wrote this on his website: “Do the Mongolians growing up in the city miss their grassland? In fact, this question belongs to all modern people, those children beginning to miss their root.”
The band is interesting for many reasons, the most important being that the music is really good! But it also shows the way different Chinese traditions and ethnic cultures are fitting in today. Ilchi’s teacher was forbidden from singing this music, but now the Chinese Ministry of Culture sends Hanggai abroad to give concerts as part of cultural exchange and diplomacy events. Music like this could potentially increase China’s soft power by spreading Chinese music while also undoing some of the damage done to China’s traditional cultures by the Cultural Revolution and the unstoppable push towards modernization.
Beijingology 