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At the ripe age of 25, Sa Dingding is on a renegade mission. While many of her peers in China and on the Asian continent seem content to churn out sugar-coated formulaic pop tunes, Dingding won’t settle for anything short of music that bridges cultural and generational gaps and penetrates the spiritual psyches of listeners from all backgrounds.
So far, so good. She recently won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for the Asia-Pacific Region. This followed a handful of other milestones: her debut album, released when she was 18, earned her the title of “Best Dance Music Singer” in China two years later, she won a CCTV singing contest. Her alluring, ethereal voice, coupled with melodies drawn from Chinese folk music and Western electronica, has drawn in audiences young and old. Her latest album, Alive, is her U.S. debut and features songs rendered in an array of languages— Sanskrit, Mandarin, Tibetan, and even her own invented tongue.
Her music aptly reflects her own enigmatic outlook on life. “I have two interests,” she says through an interpreter on the phone from Beijing. “One is music, because I’m a modern young person living in this world. I’m very interested in all kinds of modern music—especially electronic music and electronic techniques. On the other hand, I’m also very interested in ancient Chinese culture, and all the ancient cultures around the world.
“Since I was born to a Mongolian mother and a Han Chinese father,” she continues, “I have this kind of minority blood in my body, so I’m very interested in minority culture in China and around the world.” It was when she realized she could somehow mesh her knowledge of the modern world with the ancient histories of the cultures she was so immersed in that Dingding’s music started to take form. As a result, young audiences, she finds, are particularly drawn to the electronic elements in her music, while older listeners find the stories she tells empathetic and reflective of their own pasts.
One of the most pertinent aspects of Dingding’s musical philosophy stems from her studies of Buddhism. Spirituality was ever-present during her childhood in the grasslands of Mongolia, where she lived with her grandmother for several years. “From the grasslands I saw without any interference of tall buildings,” she recalls. “I could see very far and I could hear very faraway voices. So my eyesight and listening were enlarged, and in that way, my emotions have been enlarged by this kind of life.
“People singing in the grasslands are very free and true,” she adds. “They taught me that music should be free. If we express ourselves and our feelings freely, it can become very beautiful music.” Dingding accentuates her point with an anecdote about the treatment her grandmother would seek if she ever fell ill instead of resorting to hospitals or professional healthcare, she would go to the temple along with other members of the Mongolian community. Their faith in Buddha was enough to restore their strength.
“When I first moved back to the city, I couldn’t get used to it because of the big differences between the grasslands and the city,” Dingding recalls. “I could see that Buddhism had made me a spiritually strong person. For me, nowadays, a lot of people would like to see the world through their own eyes, but for me I’d like to see myself through other people’s eyes. And this is a very important part of the Buddhist culture, so that has become my way of living.”
Aspects of Buddhism flow through many of the lyrics on Alive. “Flickering With Blossoms” delves into the perpetual coming and going of living things: A man encounters a bird who asks him if he wants to fly away to Heaven, while a flower asks itself whether it would be best to leave the physical world or remain in it. Inevitably, the flower continues to ponder the question— and eventually, it turns to sand because it was too busy wondering what was beyond the physical world. Dingding’s soft whispers and careful pacing furthers this notion of life’s fragility.
Similarly, “Holy Incense” follows the course of nature throughout the seasons: An eagle flies past two fish that are swimming in the salty ocean water the water itself comes from the spring rains and falls on the people below finally, the eagle dies and its ashes scatter over the earth, and the cycle of existence is left to start all over again. The track served as the theme song for the 2006 film Prince Of The Himalayas, which is a Tibetan retelling of Hamlet.
Spirituality aside, Dingding is also an avid believer in the power of intuition to create her music. “I like to do things very instinctively,” she says. “Like my singing—I just want to sing in one take. Whatever I am feeling, I just sing it from the very beginning to the end.” In experimenting with synthesizers to create her electronic sound, she would always find that her first efforts were the most effective. “My sound engineers were always very surprised at how I could choose the right sounds to mix together. At first they might feel weird, but they would always turn out to work well for the song.”
She employs the same mindset in her self-created language, stressing the importance of expressing one’s emotions in the most unadulterated way possible. “My self-created language is something I’m very proud of because it’s one of my artistic points of view,” she explains. “For me, my language only goes along with my music it cannot stand alone. And I think everybody has experienced this kind of period before they can speak. When we’re still babies, we don’t know how to speak any language, but we can express our feelings. I feel like that period is the most real period for us as human beings we can just let loose with our truest emotions. Music should be more direct and close to your heart.”
The plethora of languages Dingding uses in her music isn’t meant to baffle or intimidate on the contrary, it’s meant to convey the relativity of cultural differences and to unify her listeners: “I use all these different languages because I believe that music itself has emotion,” she insists. “It can carry not only music itself but a lot of things—a culture or a language or anything else. No matter what I sing in— Mandarin, English, Sanskrit or even my self-created language—what I want to do is break up the bindings of different languages and share only the same emotions with people around the world.”
Dingding plans on attending many events to celebrate the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, including a show in San Francisco. For now, she is lending her time and effort to helping to rebuild Southwest China in the wake of the disastrous earthquake that struck the area in May.
Dingding’s sound and style often prompt comparisons to Björk in the West, and while she acknowledges the compliment, she also warns against being painted into any corner. “When I came out, maybe Western people thought that my music was very special,” she says, “so they might have wanted to find an existing icon to compare me to, and they came up with Björk. That’s fine, but I believe once I have a chance to do live shows in the U.S., you will see. If you listen only to my music, you will not know the complete Sa Dingding. I want people to say that my music is Sa Dingding’s music—Sa Dingding’s own unmistakable trademark.”
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