The eclectic, anti-mainstream, surprisingly popular music of Dao Lang

Veteran Chinese pop singer Dāo Láng’s 刀郎 purported comeback, signaled by the release of the new album There Are Few Folk Songs (山歌寥哉 shāngē liáo zāi) in July, has created a huge sensation on the Chinese internet. In particular, fans have claimed that the strange song “Luochahai City” has broken the Guinness Book of World Records’ record for impressions for a music video, because the aggregate number of clicks on Chinese social media platforms (8.5 billion) has far surpassed the record held by “Despacito” on YouTube (5 billion impressions). Regardless of whether that’s true, Dao Lang’s immense popularity indicates a deep sympathy for the artist among listeners, and identification with the satire apparently embedded in the song’s lyrics.

The album’s Chinese title phonetically suggests the title of Pu Songling’s Qing-dynasty short story collection Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊斋志异 liáozhāi zhì yì). The titles of all the songs are titles of Pu’s stories, and like much of Dao’s music ever since his breakout hits of almost 20 years ago, there is a mixture of traditional Chinese elements and an eclectic take on contemporary Western music.

After a jazzy instrumental overture, “Luochahai City” is the first song on the album, with a Western musical aspect that dominates throughout. “Luochahai City” is framed in a recognizably reggae style, with chords sounding on the heavy backbeats, but the time signature is 7/4, which may be unprecedented in reggae music. (Notable exceptions are songs by non-reggae bands using 7/4 with a “reggae feel,” such as Pink Floyd’s “Money” and The Grateful Dead’s “Estimated Prophet.”) With the exception of 3/4, odd time signatures give a song a backward-moving feel, and make it harder to dance to. The instrumentation is classic rhythm and blues — bass, guitar, drums, and synthesizer — but at midpoint there is a suona (a double-reed Central Asian instrument akin to the oboe) solo, which remains until the end, embellishing the verses and refrains.

Dao Lang has been an immensely popular singer among Chinese listeners in the P.R.C. and around the world ever since his breakout debut album, The First Snow of 2002 (2002年的第一场雪 nián de dì yī chǎng xuě) in 2004, and his popularity is resented by the Beijing-based pop music power brokers whose record sales Dao exceeded with his first album, which sold 2.7 million copies.

Ever since the early 2010s, mainstream pop singers like Nà Yīng 那英, Wāng Fēng 汪峰, Yáng Kūn 杨坤, and Gāo Xiǎosōng 高晓松 have criticized Dao’s music as having low artistic quality, even while giants of Hong Kong and Taiwan pop music like Andy Lau, Luo Dayou, Jonathan Li, and Alan Tam sing Dao Lang’s praises. In 2010, Na Ying publicly stated, “If Dao Lang is invited to sing on the Chinese New Year Gala, I’ll break my TV,” and vetoed Dao’s inclusion among candidates for the Top 10 Influential Artists of the Past 10 Years, saying, “He has no aesthetic sense at all.” Nevertheless, Dao got a boost in 2004 when director Zhāng Yìmóu 张艺谋 invited him to perform at the premiere of his film House of Flying Daggers (which provoked the above-mentioned Yang Kun to quip, “Is that Dao Lang stuff even music?”).

Whether for reasons related to these controversies or not, Dao temporarily ended his recording and performing career in 2013, and only reappeared in 2020. There Are Few Folk Songs is the fourth album he has released since then. The previous three did not attract media attention, but it is because of the perceived derision aimed at mainstream pop stars in “Luochahai City” that this latest album has exploded in popularity.

There is plenty of wordplay, including splitting Chinese characters into separate parts and rejoining them to form added meanings. For example, in the line “That ‘you’ bird doesn’t know it’s a chicken,” the Chinese word for “that” is also Na Ying’s surname, which “chicken” is slang for “prostitute.” A series of terms appear in a fantastical description of Ma Hu’s place of origin, playing on idioms for “shamelessly seek personal gain,” “jackals from the same lair,” and “a pile of shit.” Ma Hu is described as “thinking he is a chicken all his life”; he “loves to listen to the ‘you’ bird’s music.” He is also described as a chā gǎn’r 叉杆儿, a slang for “pimp” that appears in Chinese fiction. The song ends at a high pitch with the statement, “That Ma Hu and ‘you’ bird / are the fundamental question of humanity!”

When questioned, Dao offered no comment. To be sure, there is a lot more going on in “Luochahai City” that suggests it’s not so much about personal grievances as about the superficiality of cultural and social life, which might explain why, in the last stanza, Dao throws in an unexpected reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein: “In the West, there was a boss of a European steel mill, who had a son named Wittgenstein.” Dao’s lyrics veer into the absurd from there.

Dao Lang’s real name is Luó Lín 罗林. Born in 1971 in Luoquan township in southeastern Sichuan Province, he developed an interest in popular music in the early phase of the reform and opening-up period that began in 1978, dropping out of high school at 16 and going to the nearby town of Neijiang to learn how to play keyboards. According to a 2004 interview, two years later, he bar-hopped as a musician for four years in Chengdu, Chongqing, Tibet, and Xi’an.

The flood of Hong Kong and Taiwanese popular music that began to freely circulate in the P.R.C. around this time was like a soundtrack to the era. In this, Dao was part of a nationwide trend of local rock scenes, the largest of which was developing in Beijing, which was taking on the role of a rock capital in China. To my knowledge, Luo Lin did not work in the Beijing music scene. Years of itinerant bar gigs gave Luo a solid foundation in rock and roll, blues, and jazz, but he was also singing and adapting perennially popular “red songs” as well as the urbane, more globalized popular music coming out of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

He was still touring in 1995 when he met Zhū Méi 朱梅, his second wife, in Hainan. She was Han Chinese but hailed from Urumqi, and the two moved back there together. Over the next few years, Luo Lin struggled with music-making in Xinjiang, compiling collections of old songs about the western regions, including socialist-period “red songs” with revolutionary/socialist themes — songs such as “Tuoling” (Camel bell) and “Yakexi” (a Uyghur word for “excellent”) — and Western regional folk songs, singing them himself, as he couldn’t afford to hire singers. These early recordings didn’t sell well, but he received praise for his singing, which encouraged him to write and sing more.

He reportedly traveled around Uyghur communities of southern Xinjiang, learning about their music and lives, and wrote a great number of his own songs. The first product of this new phase was his 2004 album, The First Snow of 2002, under his new moniker, “Dao Lang,” which caused an immediate sensation, outselling every artist in the Mandarin-language market, both within and beyond China. It was during the first five years of his sojourn in Urumqi that Luo Lin formed his unique musical identity: Dao Lang found his voice in Xinjiang.

He incorporated multiethnic musical elements, including recognizably Central Asian instruments like the suona and duduk (double-reed variations on the oboe), the guitar-like Uyghur instruments dutar (with two strings) and rawap (seven strings), the Chinese pipa lute, the bowed erhu and similar Chinese fiddles, and, as it happens, an accordion. Not just the musical instruments, but also the folk songs and musical traditions of the Western border regions became central to his compositions, and were braided together with rhythms and chord changes of Euro-American (global) popular music.

They are not “Westernized” in the sense that they have lost their original character, but strands of jazz, R&B, reggae, and other styles are all discernible in Dao’s unique compositions. On listening repeatedly, in fact, I have found it frustrating to try to tease out what one might call the “foreign elements” from the “authentic” ones. Many songs, “Luochahai City” included, seem to not have a “chord progression” in the sense of the 12-bar blues so much as a fluid sequence of chords that are applied to an already existing melody line. In some cases, the result is continuous riffing on one chord, or alternating between two, while in others, we encounter what might seem to be “unexpected” chord changes that meander with the melody until the song returns to the beginning. Dao’s voice is often described as “husky,” but this doesn’t convey how smooth it can sound, especially as it reaches into higher registers without falsetto. Yet some of these songs also break into power ballad mode or insert energetic electric guitar solos, and Dao also often switches his voice into a more vigorous, masculine mode.

Although there were a few years after 2013 in which he was less active, and then the pandemic no doubt impacted his work, Dao recorded at least four albums since 2020: Songs and Tales (弹词话本 táncí huà běn), like There Are Few Folk Songs, a tribute to traditional Chinese fiction; Thus I Have Heard (如是我闻 rúshì wǒ wén), Dao’s realization of a 20-year ambition to put the Buddhist Diamond Sutra to music, published under his real name, Luo Lin; and Everybody in the World (世间的每一个人 shìjiān de měi yīgè rén), which features further explorations of Uyghur and other Central Asian musical traditions and instruments. All three of these other albums were released within a period of six months, and more than two years before There Are Few Folk Songs.

In terms of musical approach and cultural markers, Dao’s four most recent albums all have a great deal in common, so it is inaccurate to view the latest album as a “comeback” after a long silence; the difference is that the new album has a song that made the public take notice immediately. But it is also important to emphasize that all four of these albums — and to some extent, all the work that Dao Lang has been doing since his emergence 19 years ago — also engage deeply with Chinese literary and religious traditions, in a way less common in contemporary popular music, with the notable exception of some of the music of Jay Chou (周杰伦 Zhōu Jiélún), one of Taiwan’s most popular singers.

When we put these things together, we begin to understand how a phenomenon arises that is larger than Dao Lang. When we watch independent documentaries by Wú Wénguāng 吴文光, Xú Tóng 徐童, Jiǎn Yì 简艺, Chén Wèijūn 陈为军, and others, we see numerous additional examples of ordinary people, both urban and rural, who are alienated by globalization as well as the concentration of cultural and economic elites in China’s megalopolises such as Beijing and Shanghai. The subjects of these films strongly identify with elements of traditional Chinese culture like folk tales, Buddhism, and the lunar calendar, and deploy this identification as a kind of resistance against the global urbanity that is more commonly celebrated in mainstream popular music and film.

Dao Lang’s talent and charisma are undeniable. But the later development of his career, following his deep encounter with Xinjiang cultures beginning in 1995, embraces a broad variety of traditional and marginal cultural strands. The popularity of his cryptic song “Luochahai City” has given new life to these rich alternative perspectives, and for the moment has put the narrow cultural imagination of the kingmakers of contemporary popular music in its place.