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This entire album (with one exception) is in the key of Eb at A440, which leads me to think Mongolians tune their instruments a half-step lower (the way Western musicians have during certain periods of history) and that they are playing in what they would consider E. The “folk” aesthetic of the band would seem to suggest the use of pentatonic scales, but this is not the case. Only two songs can be said to be pentatonic: “Wolf Totem” and “The Legend of Mother Swan.” “Wolf Totem” isn’t so much pentatonic as it is brutally direct; besides some horsehead fiddle soloing (most notably in the introduction) and a variation of the main riff at the end, the mostly percussive fight song contains only three tones: 1, 3 and 4. Of the nine songs on the album, five are major and four are minor, with some caveats. The Hu does not use the raised seventh in the minor mode and actually lowers the seventh in the major, which means there are no leading tones. The home key is established by droning the tonic, on various instruments and via throat singing, more or less throughout the album. In a couple places a shortened or hexatonic scale seems to be implied. “The Great Chinggis Khaan,” in Eb minor, contains no seconds except as a passing tone during the bridge. Except for the fiddle solos, “The Same” lands on a second in only one part of the verse and utilizes a lowered second in a phrasing variation in the bridge. “Shireg Shireg,” in Eb major, uses a lowered seventh only as a suspension between verses. The use of the lowered seventh in the major mode gives those songs a certain modal indeterminacy—a lowered seventh is a minor third above the dominant. In at least one example, “Yuve Yuve Yu,” there is an instance of a raised sixth played on the guitar in the second half of the bridge. “Shoog Shoog” is the only song on the album in which the bassline is in constant motion and the Eb tonic is not droned in the background. The song utilizes the same Eb natural minor scale as the other minor key songs on the album, but is not tethered to the Eb tonic and seems to want to resolve on the third, i.e. it is actually in the relative major of Eb minor, Gb major.
From a strictly musical point of view, the most interesting thing about Gereg is its careful instrumental layering. All of the songs on the album are built from a small number of simple parts; several of the songs contain no more than a single melody or progression. The album (which is almost fifty minutes in length) holds the listener’s attention by varying the layers of instruments and vocals, and by a very subtle crafting of intros, interludes, bridges, and outros. The role of the individual instruments in the band and of the vocals is less defined, less partitioned, than in conventional rock music. The horsehead fiddle can serve as a droning texture in the background, a base pattern like a rhythm guitar, a complement to the vocal line, or a true “solo” lead used as often in the introduction as the bridge. The Mongolian guitar (I do not know the actual names of any of these instruments so I will use common names), without electronic augmentation and thus one of the least prominent instruments in the mix, is most often used to carry the basic progression, but is sometimes called upon to add a melodic flair at the end of a verse or other transition. Vocal duties are shared throughout the band. It seems most of the time the vocal line is sung by co-leads. But chanting by both the leads and the full band plays a large part in several of the songs, and the throat singing may be the biggest contribution here to the tradition of rock music—at once an expression of inner tranquility and a declaration of war, the best part of every song is the part where the throat singing comes in. “Yuve Yuve Yu” contains a bridge where the melody of the verse is sung in a falsetto with the syllable “doo” and “Song of Women” contains a female co-lead vocal track. Often, the modern drum kit enters only after the mood has been set by traditional Mongolian percussion.
But the music may simply be amplifying what is the most fascinating thing about the band: its anti-modern stance in the form of a specific, and quite notorious, ethnic nationalism. Their first video, “Yuve Yuve Yu,” begins with a thirty-five second long introduction in which the band members are depicted coasting through life in the modern world—texting in a restaurant, playing video games, eating junk food while watching TV, sleeping in—when they each open their door or turn to their screen and see an untouched Mongolian landscape. If the message here isn’t clear enough, the lyrics are sure to drive the point home (quotes are from the booklet; the video translation is in many ways better. Improper use of language is actually quite poetic):
It has been so long eating and drinking being merry / how strange how strange
Why the valuable ethics of ancestors become worthless?
You’re born in ancestor’s fate, yet sleeping deeply can’t be awakened
But this flag-waving leaps over an almost bewildering amount of history. Genghis Khan lived for sixty-four or sixty-five years from 1162 (or 1163) to 1227. He was proclaimed sole ruler of the Mongols, or great khan, by a council of Mongol chiefs called a “kurultai” in 1206, at the age of forty-three. Problems over succession would develop almost immediately with the first transfer of power (although they did not blow open until later): Genghis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi, and second eldest, Chagatai, disputed over Jochi’s perceived weaknesses in military tactics and doubts about his paternity (Genghis Khan’s wife was abducted for several months by a rival tribe after their marriage). Although tradition favored Jochi as the first-born to succeed, Genghis Khan made the two agree to accept his third-born, Ögedei, as successor, with his three other sons receiving khanates within the empire. Ögedei ruled the empire successfully until his death in 1241, but a decade of instability followed. As tradition dictated, Ögedei’s widow Töregene took over until a kurultai could elect a new great khan and she campaigned successfully to have Ögedei’s son Güyük elected by the council. But Jochi’s son Batu refused to come to the kurultai to finalize the succession until Genghis Khan’s youngest brother Temüge threatened to seize the throne. Batu eventually sent a delegation and Güyük was elected by the council in 1246. After taking many steps to consolidate the empire, Güyük raised an army and began marching west in 1248 to confront his cousin Batu but died—possibly of poisoning—before the two could settle their differences. Batu then called his own kurultai on his territory in 1250 and nominated Möngke, the son of Genghis Khan’s fourth son Tolui, to rule over the empire.
With Möngke’s ascent, power within the Mongol Empire shifted permanently to the descendants of Tolui. But despite an attempt to call a more formal kurultai at Karakorum, the capitol, the Ögedeid and Chagataid factions did not recognize Möngke as the legitimate great khan. One of Ögedei’s grandsons Shiremun attempted to oust Möngke in a coup but was caught. Möngke held trials throughout the empire, purged several hundred Mongolian aristocrats and confiscated Ögedeid and Chagataid family estates. Möngke appointed his brothers Hulagu to rule over Persia and Kublai to rule over North China, and led expansionist efforts in both regions, most notably sacking Baghdad in 1258. He died in 1259 in southern China, with no historical consensus on the cause. When Kublai did not immediately return to Mongolia, being preoccupied with his campaign in southern China, his younger brother Ariq Böke engineered his own election at the kurultai at Karakorum. Upon learning of this news, Kublai held his own kurultai at Kaiping in 1260, in Guangdong, and secured support from the aristocracy of North China and Manchuria, which set off the Toluid Civil War between Kublai and Ariq Böke. Their allies, Hulagu and Berke, fought a separate war simultaneously in the Caucuses. Ariq Böke surrendered to Kublai in 1264, but the western khanates never recognized Kublai as the great khan and the empire would never be centrally unified again. Kublai succeeded in conquering southern China in 1276 when the Song imperial family surrendered to him, founding the Sinicized Yuan Dynasty. Kublai died in 1294 and was succeeded by his grandson Temür. A Chagataid ruler initiated a proposal for peace leading to a treaty in 1304 in which the western khanates recognized Temür as the nominal supreme ruler but operated independently. By mid-century, all four khanates had entered into a political decline that was severely complicated by the Black Death pandemic that spread across the Eurasian continent at the same time (Mongols contributed to the spread of the disease but were not the sole cause). In China, the Mongols fled to their homeland in 1368 after a long period of economic crises, natural disasters, mismanagement, and political infighting that would allow the Ming Dynasty to emerge from the widespread popular rebellions that rose up against the Yuan.
It is possible to say that the Mongol Empire was the world’s first form of globalization. The Mongols created a vast network of trade and commerce that allowed money, goods, technology, art, culture, and ideas to flow across the known world with unprecedented freedom. A mail relay system known as the Yam (“örtöö” in Mongolian) conveyed information faster than the Pony Express service that ran for eighteen months in the US between 1860-61. The system was preserved by Tsarist Russia after the fall of the Golden Horde khanate. Kurultais in the Mongolian capital were attended by an array of dignitaries from within and without the empire, including Rome. The capital Karakorum contained what we must assume were state-funded examples of Chinese, Persian, and European architecture by the most respected artisans and craftsmen. This interconnectedness allowed knowledge to be transferred from the two most advanced civilizations of the time: the Islamic Caliphate and Song Dynasty China. Thus, China during the Mongol occupation (Yuan Dynasty) learned from the Islamic world (especially mathematics and astronomy) and Chinese technology was spread to the edges of the Pax Mongolica. Jared Diamond’s guns, germs, and steel were bequeathed to Western Europe via the Mongol Empire.
But the Mongol Empire is remembered negatively by every civilization it invaded. The Mongols laid waste to hundreds of cities and towns. They killed so many people they changed the demographics of the world. The amount of destruction they caused may actually be found in the geological record as forest regrew over previously inhabited land, altering global CO2 levels. Many settlements voluntarily submitted to Mongol rule to escape wholesale slaughter. Victorious Mongolian soldiers systematically raped women and young girls by the thousands as a matter of policy. They used forms of biological warfare and they burned farmland to starve local inhabitants. In at least one instance, the Mongols returned to a city several days after razing it to catch any returnees. The populations of Kievan Rus’ (the precursor to most modern-day Slavic states) and of China may have been halved during the conquest of those areas (there is a debate as to how much of the population loss was due to direct military action and how much to other factors such as disease and census inconsistencies). The Iranian plateau may have lost up to three-quarters of its population from the invasions and from the subsequent famines and disease. The sacking of Baghdad in 1258 is considered one of the most catastrophic events in Islamic history. The irony of The Hu’s music is that they are vying for and have in many ways succeeded in gaining a form of cultural influence or soft power that the empire they sing about never had.
There are four songs, though, that base themselves in some form of folk wisdom or folk mythology.
In an ironic twist to the rock tradition, “Shireg Shireg” portrays elderly parents offering advice to a (presumably) male child as he prepares to leave home. The song is structurally one of the simplest on the album, consisting of five four-line verse stanzas broken up by an instrumental suspension on a lowered seventh. The tempo is slowed and a quarter-note bass drum pulses throughout the song—the snare never assumes its standard rock placement on the second and fourth beat of the measure. The first and second stanzas remind the listener to “remember the kindness of your old and grey father” and “remember the compassion of your old and caring mother” as the father offers what is perhaps one of the greatest opening lines in the history of rock music: “Water your red horse with the piebald mane without the gag-bit.” The middle two stanzas (second verse) cover slightly less immediate areas of concern, concluding: “Have the intuition to see the evil / Have the strength to endure barriers.” There is a subtlety to the composition that adds depth to the prosaic well-wishing. The musical backdrop to these lyrics captures the strange emotional tension between the anticipation of adventure abroad and the warmth and security of home.
“Song of Women” is the closest thing on this album to a ballad. The first two-thirds of the song is performed over a slow-rocking 6/8 rhythm, with some of the best kit drumming on the album entering on the second stanza. (The pulse rhythm is almost identical to the greatest compound meter pop song ever made, “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal; “The Great Chinggis Khaan” is also in 6/8.) The meter changes dramatically to 4/4 in the middle of the second half of the song in a shift that feels double-time. The song is structurally very open. After the introduction it begins with three long-phrased stanzas comparing women to various natural phenomena: “The palm tree grows and flowers / As she sings softly my soul retains / Honorable lady / Compassionate and delicate.” A sprawling instrumental break spaces out the second and third stanzas. Mid-way, the song transforms into a long B section in which the remainder of the vocals are chanted and the lyrical voice modulates from homage to petition. In another paternalistic turn, the speaker exhorts the women of Mongolia collectively (not individually, as is typical in the rock tradition) to respect their parents, love their country, and to “have a fighter spirit in your body,” drawing comparisons to medieval weaponry. This song may be the purest example of the Hu’s use of simple repetition as a form of beauty. No other song contains as much chanted text as “Song of Women”; it also begins with a simple chant. This tendency seems to derive from the pre-modern roots of music itself, where simple repetition was the first way humans organized the chaos of the natural world around them. It makes sense that the strongest use of repetition on the album would come in a song addressing and praising the mystery of femininity.
Probably the most ominous song on the album is “The Same.” Another song in five verse stanzas with no proper chorus (only a refrain similar to blues music), “The Same” seems to be a kind of shamanistic ontology of human nature in the natural world. Each stanza compares two types of beings, one high and one low, and finds a commonality in their underlying motivations. The pairs themselves are ordered from higher to lower: king in heaven/king on earth; buddhist recluse/enlightened civilian; henchman on earth/henchman in heaven; people “striving” for material gain/animals in the forest; theif/wolf. What is interesting about these comparisons is that there are no real moral judgements; the full range of human passions—from highest to lowest, from “happiness and affection” to a “desire to kill and devour”—is presented as a fact of nature, the way one might describe the seasons or the ocean tide. Most of the dominant religions today are urban in origin. The system of ethics they abide by developed in densely populated sedentary cultures with a division of labor and a layer of insulation against natural forces. The Hu seems to have located a form of religious truth that precedes these ethics and that clears away the clutter of modernism that is the by-product of them: we sometimes forget that we are, in fact, merely animals. “The Same” also has what may arguably be the most compelling melodic line on the album—each stanza is one long, segmented phrase, with each segment of the phrase building off of the previous segment to a clear and direct resolution.
It would be easy to dismiss the fourth track on the album, “The Legend of Mother Swan,” as filler. The song does not stand out musically and, of course, the lyrics are in a foreign language. Made up of three long verse stanzas plus a chanted portion at the end and (again) no chorus, the lack of musical events in the writing may have been necessary to accommodate what is the only true narrative on the album—“The Legend of Mother Swan” contains a complete folk mythos. Taking place at a “bottomless blue lake at the end of the world” (Lake Baikal, by volume the largest and deepest lake in the world, is just north of Mongolia in Southern Siberia), the Legend tells the story of a female swan who returns to the lake in the spring but cannot find her “lover.” She finds him in the middle of summer, “they loved each other as nothing else matters,” and she becomes pregnant and bears seven cygnets—“How beautiful was life / How tasty was happiness.” Summer ends and it is time for the swans to migrate south—but her cygnets are too young to fly. The lake freezes, the swan tries to save her babies “with half-grown feathers” by taking them “under her wings,” but dies.
The first figure the average Westerner will recognize here is that of the Mother-Hero. The swan, an elegant and beautiful bird, sacrifices her life out of pure maternal love for her children. But this doesn’t explain the emphasis in the legend on her suffering as she freezes to death, the fact that she is ultimately not able to save her babies from also freezing, or the peculiarity of the plot of finding a mate too late in the season to migrate. Given the overall pre-modern, shamanistic nature-worship of the album, one interpretation of the legend may be of the powerlessness of the individual against the natural order. The Romantic hero that emerged from the European Enlightenment wants to believe that his fate lies in his own hands. What began as a rejection of social caste has since expanded to include all manner of human conditions that are only partially defined by society, including the familiar drum of race, gender, and sexuality. But the Romantic spirit grew out of a society that had begun to master nature itself with the Industrial Revolution and primarily oriented itself to that society, in many ways imbuing nature with its own optimism. As the contemporary descendants of the Romantic individual fight for what they perceive as “justice” at every turn, "The Legend of Mother Swan" reminds us that nature itself is inherently unjust. The Mother Swan figure is there to remove the question of intentionality from the equation completely: it does not matter how pure your intentions are, how righteous your cause, or how moral your justification. The Mother Swan is out-of-sync with nature. If you deny nature, you may be successful for a time, but ultimately you will die tragically trying to protect what you love:
As the fire of her eyes quenched her tears stayed pouring
As the last breath left her body her heartache was still there
Died in her tears for half-grown feathers the Mother Swan
Departed in lullubying between sleeping and awake the Mother Swan
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In a word, impressed
The first time my husband heard The Hu, he HAD to hear more! We were unable to get tickets to see them when they came to town in concert, but when I saw that I could get this CD for him, I immediately bought it. Probably the best purchase I have made recently! Everyone who hears it wants it! And he is one very happy husband! For anyone who enjoys a wide variety of music, this is a must have.
