What's Your Sign?: Sa Dingding and "Capricorn"

What's your sign? That phrase is often satirized as a pickup line. I never felt comfortable with my sign. I'm a Capricorn, and I was always bored by my horoscope. Whenever I read my horoscope, and got to Capricorn, it always seemed that a Capricorn was the most boring person on earth! It seemed like all we were interested in was business. While it seemed like all the other signs were getting their groove on, finding love and getting involved in intrigue, all the Caps were interested in was the stock market, or the financial pages. I concluded that if I was a Capricorn, I was a very unlikely one. The only horoscope page I could read about Capricorns was Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology, which seemed a little more...I don't know...open and esoteric about astrological signs.

Sa Dingding makes you feel anything but businesslike. Beautiful and with a haunting voice, and appearing in a gorgeous video, it makes one feel like being Capricorn is sexy and exotic. A singer-songwriter of mixed Chinese Han and Mongolian ancestry, she was influenced early in her life by the folk music of the ethnic minorities of Mongolia and China, and she became interested in Buddhism and learned to speak many languages, including Mandarin, Sanskrit and Tibetan. She also created her own language to bring out her songs' emotions. Dingding released her first album at 18, and in 2008 she won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for the Asia-Pacific region. That award gave her the chance to perform for a western audience for the first time. She co-wrote a song in 2008 with Eric Moquet of Deep Forest to raise funds for the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake relief, and she has recently performed at WOMAD and at the UK's Harrogate Festival. She has also announced plans for a European tour. Capricorn can be found on her 2012 CD The Coming Ones.