We Were Born with Global Ambition

The success that the Mongolian heavy metal band The Hu has achieved following the release of its first music videos in 2018 has been extraordinary. This chapter seeks to explore why it was so successful when previous generations of Mongolian artists were not. Analysis of the band's music and imagery suggests clear continuities with Mongolian popular music of the past. But beyond this, the band has shown a keen ability to read and react to the shifting global popular music landscape. It has created musical products and marketed them in ways ideally suited to the transnational character of new financial and media technologies and the global metal community. In short, I argue that The Hu fashioned a syncretic product that was designed from the start to “go viral” and thus bypass the hegemonic mediators of traditional media corporations that had so limited the music of previous generations of Mongolian popular artists.