by?ANTHONY KUHN,NPR -
When?Guns N? Roses?released the album?Chinese Democracy?five years ago, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman commented that, questions of politics aside, the GNR sound just wasn?t most Chinese folks? cup of tea.
?According to my knowledge,? he said, ?a lot of people don?t like this kind of music because it?s too noisy and too loud.?
That may be so. The country?s airwaves are full of syrupy pop tunes and prissy patriotic odes. But generalizing about musical tastes is risky business, especially in a country of 1.3 billion pairs of ears.
To find a homegrown musical alternative to conventional musical tastes, just travel to the edge of northwest China?s Shaanxi province, on the middle reaches of the Yellow River, on the southern edge of a vast plateau of dusty badlands.
By the standards of wealthier southern China, the area is poor, dry and coarse.
On a recent afternoon, local musician Zhang Junmin joins his fellow band members on a hill behind his village. They?re there to perform a style of music called Lao Qiang, which is roughly translatable as ?Old Tune.? Zhang says it?s been passed down in his family for centuries.
If you didn?t know better, you might think you were hearing the hard-knock life story of a Mississippi Delta bluesman.
Zhang says his father was close to illiterate. Zhang himself was too poor to attend school. He farmed the land part of the time, and played music the rest. He says he learned his art the traditional way.
?If I couldn?t pick up a tune on my instrument, my papa would get mad,? Zhang recalls in a raspy voice. ?He?d come over and slap me upside the head. That slap would wake me up, and then I?d get it. If he didn?t slap me, I wouldn?t concentrate. And I wouldn?t get it.?
Traditionally, Lao Qiang musicians would accompany a puppeteer, who would tell stories from behind a screen. It wasn?t until a couple of decades ago that the musicians came out from behind that screen and performed on their own, in full view of the audience.
The origin of Lao Qiang music is a matter of some dispute, but Zhang says the most plausible explanation he?s heard is that it is descended from the chanteys of boatmen on the Yellow River (lots of ?hey?s? and ?ho?s?) as they rowed barges laden with grain to the imperial capital at Chang?an during the Western Han dynasty, roughly 2,000 years ago. More?
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