This article continues our series exploring different ways of working with sound across creative and cultural contexts.
“ХИЙМЭЛ ОЮУН” (khii-mel o-yun) — or “XO” for short — is the Mongolian term for AI. For CPinMongolia.com we designed this XO logo to identify articles about research and creative practices that explore how imaginative minds are engaging with AI not as a replacement, but as a co-creator in their artistic and inter-cultural expression.
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Song Lyrics (Eng. trans.)
When I remember
those innocent childhood days,
filled with simple, carefree thoughts,
amid the twists and hardships of life,
my first thought is always to seek out my friend.
My friend,
who cares for others
and forgets himself,
whose heart is gentle and generous.
With your sweet and tender voice,
we have shared life’s ordinary days together.
My companion,
who brought light to the passing years.
Our spirited friendship
surged like a flooding river,
wild and overflowing.
My friend,
who came to cherish,
deep within your heart,
the wisdom of loving father and mother.
When the birds
take wing and return,
when the world
is left filled with tears,
along life’s changing, fading road,
our friendship—
yours and mine—
has never grown old
or been tarnished.
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Friendship, Masculinity and Memory
What struck me most about the lyrics in this AI reinterpretation of the song My Friend (Миний найз), originally performed by the popular Mongolian singer Javkhlan, is that they present a form of male friendship that is emotionally expressive without becoming romantic.
This is not unique to Mongolia, but it is articulated here in a way that feels culturally distinctive. Rather than constructing masculinity around independence, the song appears to associate being a good man with loyalty, relational commitment, and continued availability to others. It does not celebrate self-sufficiency or individual achievement. Instead, the speaker’s first instinct in times of difficulty is to seek out his friend. Friendship is therefore placed at the centre of adult life.
This interpretation resonates with anthropological accounts that question the assumption that Mongolian social life is organised primarily around autonomous individuals. Although autonomy remains an important value in some Mongolian contexts, it coexists with extensive practices of mutual dependence, hospitality, assistance, and obligation (Hamayon 2020; Sneath 2019). Relationships are sustained through repeated acts of giving, visiting, sharing, and responding to others’ needs. Friendship in the song can therefore be understood not merely as private affection between two individuals but as an enduring ethical relationship enacted through mutual presence.
The friend is praised not for physical strength, wealth, or status, but for selflessness: he is someone who cares for others. In many contemporary Western contexts, this quality might be described as altruism. In a Mongolian context, however, it may also resonate with local ideals of reciprocity, hospitality, mutual obligation, and enduring social ties. Everyday hospitality is not simply spontaneous generosity but a socially meaningful practice through which relationships and obligations are continually created and renewed (Sneath 2019). Likewise, cooperation among Mongolian pastoralists suggests that survival and moral responsibility are often understood through interdependence rather than radical self-reliance (Ericksen 2014). The “good man,” in this reading, is one who gives of himself and remains responsive to the people around him.
Perhaps the most striking line, however, is “the wisdom of loving father and mother.” From a gendered perspective, this is significant because maturity is not measured principally by dominance, status, or individual success, but by filial affection. The song suggests that becoming a good person—specifically, a good person in a man’s body—involves learning to honour, remember, and care for one’s parents. Masculinity is thus located within kinship rather than outside it.
This emphasis is consistent with anthropological understandings of Mongolian personhood, memory, and relatedness. Persons are constituted through relations with kin, places, possessions, memories, and practices of separation and connection; personhood is therefore not imagined as entirely self-contained (Empson 2011). Mongolian relatedness is likewise actively produced and maintained rather than simply inherited as a biological fact (Empson 2007). The lyric about loving one’s parents can therefore be read as more than a statement of private emotion. It associates moral maturity with the capacity to sustain the relationships through which a person has been formed.
The emotional register is also notable. The lyrics speak openly of longing, tears, memory, tenderness, and lifelong affection. Yet there is no embarrassment or defensiveness surrounding these emotions. The friendship is emotionally intimate without needing to be qualified. This differs from many contemporary Anglophone representations of male friendship, in which emotional openness is sometimes hedged through humour, irony, or demonstrations of heterosexual masculinity.
At the same time, it would be too broad to claim that Mongolian men are inherently more emotionally expressive than Anglophone men. The more defensible observation is that these particular lyrics make male tenderness publicly intelligible by connecting it to culturally valued relationships: friendship, loyalty, mutual assistance, memory, and filial devotion. Emotion is not represented as an inward confession detached from social life. It is expressed through attachment and obligation. Favours in post-socialist settings demonstrate how personal relations can acquire moral force through acts of assistance that cannot be reduced to immediate or contractual exchange (Humphrey 2012). Likewise, the moral economy of rural eastern Mongolia suggests that generosity and reciprocal economic relations may carry ethical and spiritual significance extending well beyond individual benefit (Waters 2022).
Finally, the closing image is quietly powerful: “our friendship . . . has never grown old or been tarnished.” Everything else changes—life, seasons, circumstances, even the world itself—but friendship endures. Its permanence may be interpreted as one of the constants against which the instability of individual life is measured. Relationships persist not because they remain unchanged, but because they are repeatedly recalled, enacted, and incorporated into people’s understandings of themselves (Empson 2011). The song therefore presents friendship as both an emotional refuge and a form of continuity. The friend is not simply someone the speaker once knew; he is part of the relational structure through which the speaker remembers the past, confronts difficulty, and understands what it means to live well.
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This interpretation should not, however, make the song’s audience appear exclusively pastoral, traditional, or culturally isolated. For many young listeners, particularly those living in Ulaanbaatar, friendship is experienced within a highly urbanised and digitally connected social world. Contemporary Mongolian youth culture is shaped by apartment life, universities, nightlife, migration, popular music, social media, English and other transnational languages, and continuous exposure to global styles. Young people do not simply choose between “traditional Mongolia” and “the West.” They selectively combine local forms of belonging with globally circulating cultural resources (Dovchin 2017a; Dovchin 2018).
Mongolian popular music provides one of the principal arenas in which young urban Mongolians experiment with identity. Ulaanbaatar’s popular-music culture has been described as a “linguascape” in which Mongolian, English, African American cultural references, local slang, visual imagery, and digital media are creatively recombined (Dovchin 2017a). Such borrowing does not necessarily represent simple Westernisation. Global forms are “relocalised”: they are adapted to express specifically Mongolian experiences, affiliations, and social concerns (Dovchin 2018). A song about enduring male friendship can therefore be culturally distinctive without being culturally sealed off from global youth culture.
This urban perspective also complicates the song’s presentation of masculinity. Studies of Mongolian hip-hop and social-media language show that some young men perform recognisably global forms of masculine confidence through toughness, verbal aggression, competitive self-presentation, fashionable consumption, and the language of crews, brothers, and gangs. Yet these performances are also deeply relational. Masculine identity is frequently produced in interaction with male peers and through declarations of loyalty, shared style, mutual recognition, and belonging to a group (Dovchin, Pennycook, and Sultana 2017; Dovchin 2021). Even apparently individualistic displays of confidence are sustained by collective affiliation.
Against that background, the emotional openness of these lyrics becomes especially interesting. The song does not reject contemporary masculine peer culture; rather, it expands its emotional possibilities. The friend is still a brother-like figure, but the relationship is defined not by bravado alone. It includes longing, memory, tears, gratitude, and care. The song therefore permits young men to recognise emotional dependence as compatible with masculine dignity. Friendship becomes a socially acceptable language through which vulnerability can be expressed.
The lyrics may consequently speak to a tension within contemporary urban masculinity. Young men are encouraged to appear modern, mobile, stylish, competitive, and self-confident, yet they also inhabit conditions of economic uncertainty, rapid social change, migration, and unstable employment. Identities are formed across multiple spaces—local neighbourhoods, universities, popular-music scenes, online networks, and imagined global communities—rather than within a single stable cultural environment (Dovchin 2011; Sultana and Dovchin 2021). In such circumstances, the enduring friend may function as a source of emotional and biographical continuity.
The closing statement that friendship “has never grown old or been tarnished” can thus be read in both kinship-oriented and metropolitan terms. At one level, it resonates with longer-standing values of reciprocity, mutual assistance, and durable relatedness. At another, it addresses young urban listeners whose lives are shaped by rapid transformation and competing expectations. The friend is one of the few figures who connects different versions of the self: the child who learned to love his parents, the young man moving through contemporary city life, and the adult who remembers shared hardship. Friendship becomes a form of stability not outside modernity, but within it.
This perspective also prevents us from treating emotional expressiveness as evidence of an unchanged or essentially “traditional” Mongolian masculinity. The song can instead be understood as participating in the active production of contemporary masculinity. It draws on inherited moral ideas about kinship, loyalty, and care while addressing an audience familiar with global popular music and digitally mediated forms of male bonding. Its cultural distinctiveness lies not in remaining untouched by cosmopolitan influences, but in the particular way it brings those influences into conversation with Mongolian relational values.
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This recent reinterpretation (22 June 2026) by Ai Cassette also invites reflection on the people learning to work creatively with generative AI. I have followed the channel since it began publishing music videos in 2025 and subscribe to several Mongolian music channels where new releases regularly appear. What began as curiosity gradually became sustained observation. I found myself returning not because every production was equally compelling, but because, over time, I could hear increasing subtlety in pacing, vocal expression, arrangement, and musical balance. The difference seemed to lie less in the software itself than in the growing skill of the people using it.
This version of My Friend illustrates that process particularly well. The emotional centre of the original song remains intact while the arrangement is reimagined through a contemporary musical language. One moment especially caught my attention: the transition from a male to a female voice near the end of the performance. Whether this reflects an artistic decision, an exploration of generative AI’s possibilities, or both, the effect is surprisingly understated. Rather than calling attention to the technology, it subtly reshapes the listening experience without altering the song’s essential character. Listen for it . .
After watching each of Ai Cassette’s one hundred music videos, in full or in part, as it was uploaded to YouTube, I am left with the impression not of a machine becoming more creative, but of the musician-producer-video maker—or makers—behind the channel becoming increasingly accomplished in working with new creative tools. Every production still depends upon countless human decisions: which song to reinterpret, how faithfully to preserve its emotional character, how voices should be presented, how visual imagery should support rather than distract from the music, and ultimately when a work is considered complete. Those decisions are refined through repetition, experimentation, and experience. The finished videos may appear effortless, but they embody the gradual accumulation of artistic judgement. For me, that is the most compelling aspect of Ai Cassette’s work. Across the channel, one can hear not only familiar songs, but also the quiet emergence of a distinctive creative practice.
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About this Letter
A Letter from Mongolia is neither an academic paper nor a personal reflection. It begins with something observed—a song, a place, an object, a conversation, or an everyday cultural practice—and asks what it might reveal when placed in conversation with relevant scholarship. If readers come away noticing something they had not seen, heard, or understood before, then this letter has achieved its purpose.
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IN THIS SERIES (AI)
Letter from Mongolia 21: Home’s Distant Outline
Letter from Mongolia 20: Woven Sonic Fabric
Letter from Mongolia 19: Udgan Tenger
Letter from Mongolia 14: Chandmani Erdene
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FURTHER READING
Dovchin, Sender. 2011. “Performing Identity through Language: The Local Practices of Urban Youth Populations in Post-Socialist Mongolia.” Inner Asia 13 (2): 315–333.
Dovchin, Sender. 2017a. “The Ordinariness of Youth Linguascapes in Mongolia.” International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (2).
Dovchin, Sender. 2017b. “Translocal English in the Linguascape of Mongolian Popular Music.” World Englishes 36 (1).
Dovchin, Sender. 2018. Language, Media and Globalization in the Periphery: The Linguascapes of Popular Music in Mongolia. New York: Routledge.
Dovchin, Sender. 2021. “Language, Identity, and Relocalization: Social Media Users in Post-Socialist Mongolia.” In Socialist and Post-Socialist Mongolia: Nation, Identity, and Culture, edited by Simon Wickhamsmith and Phillip P. Marzluf. New York: Routledge.
Dovchin, Sender, Alastair Pennycook, and Shaila Sultana. 2017. Popular Culture, Voice and Linguistic Diversity: Young Adults On- and Offline. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Empson, Rebecca. 2007. “Separating and Containing People and Things in Mongolia.” In Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, 113–140. London: Routledge.
Empson, Rebecca M. 2011. Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory and Place in Mongolia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ericksen, Andrew. 2014. “Depend on Each Other and Don’t Just Sit: The Socialist Legacy, Responsibility, and Winter Risk among Mongolian Herders.” Human Organization 73 (1): 38–49.
Hamayon, Roberte N. 2020. “The Inherited Culture of Autonomy among the ‘Forest Peoples’ of the Baikal Region.” L’Homme 236: 45–66.
Humphrey, Caroline. 2012. “Favors and ‘Normal Heroes’: The Case of Postsocialist Higher Education.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2).
Sneath, David. 2019. “Everyday Hospitality in Mongolia: Obligation, Enaction and Projects of Governance.” L’Homme.
Sultana, Shaila, and Sender Dovchin. 2021. “Relocalization in Digital Language Practices of University Students in Asian Peripheries: Critical Awareness in a Language Classroom.” Linguistics and Education 62.
Waters, Hedwig A. 2022. “Building Merit: The Moral Economy of the Illegal Wildlife Trade in Rural, Post-Socialist Eastern Mongolia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Please refer to the INDEX for other music and articles that may be of interest.
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© 2013-2026. CP in Mongolia. “Letter from Mongolia 28: Friendship, Masculinity & Memory” is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. Posted: 24 July 2026. Last updated: 24 July 2026.