Hip-Hop Now Made in China too

Hip-Hop Now Made in China too

Lila Babb

A group of rappers and their audience at the Shelter, a nightclub in Shanghai.

By JIMMY WANG

Published: January 23, 2009

BEIJING — A week before Americans tune in to the Super Bowl, another televised mega-event will kick off on the other side of the globe. On Sunday more than half a billion people here are expected to watch the annual Chinese Lunar New Year gala. Organized by the state-owned China Central Television, the marathon event showcases the country’s musical diversity with an extensive lineup of Chinese pop stars performing hit songs. But one genre audiences are unlikely to see is Chinese hip-hop, despite its growing popularity among the country’s urban youth.

YinEnt

Zhong Cheng, a founding member of the group Yin Ts’ang, one of the pioneers of Chinese rap music.

Over the last decade many students and working-class Chinese have been writing rap as a form of self-expression. Rougher and more rebellious than the well-scrubbed pop that floods the airwaves here, this kind of hip-hop is not sanctioned by broadcast media producers or state censors but has managed to attract a grass-roots fan base.

“Hip-hop is free, like rock ’n’ roll — we can talk about our lives, what we’re thinking about, what we feel,” said Wang Liang, 25, a popular hip-hop D.J. in China who is known as Wordy. “The Chinese education system doesn’t encourage you to express your own character. They feed you stale rules developed from books passed down over thousands of years. There’s not much opportunity for personal expression or thought; difference is discouraged.”

While American rappers like and Q-Tip have been popular in China since the 1990s, home-grown rap didn’t start gaining momentum until a decade later. The group Yin Ts’ang (its name means “hidden”), one of the pioneers of Chinese rap, is made up of global nomads: a Beijinger, a Chinese-Canadian and two Americans.

“The big change was when rappers started writing verse in Chinese, so people could understand,” said Zhong Cheng, 27, a member of the group who was raised in Canada but born in Beijing, where he returned in 1997. “Before that, kids listened to hip-hop in English but maybe less than 1 percent could actually begin to understand.”

Yin Ts’ang’s first hit was “In Beijing,” from the band’s 2003 debut album, “Serve the People” (Scream Records); the title is a twist on an old political slogan. It sets a melody played on a thousand-year-old Chinese fiddle called the Erhu against a hip-hop beat that brings Run D.M.C. to mind. The song, an insider’s look at Beijing’s sights and sounds, took the underground music scene by storm, finding its way into karaoke parlors, the Internet and even the playlist of a radio station in Beijing.

“There’s a lot of cats that can rap back home,” said Jeremy Johnston, a member of the group and the son of a captain. “But there’s not a lot of cats that can rap in Chinese.” Mr. Johnston, 33, moved to Beijing in the late ’90s because, he said, it was “the thing nobody else was doing.”

Since “In Beijing,” the Chinese hip-hop scene has quickly grown. Hiphop.cn, a Web site listing events and links to songs, started with just a few hundred members in 2007; in 2008 it received millions of views, according to one of the site’s directors.

Dozens of hip-hop clubs have opened up in cities across the country, and thousands of raps and music videos by Chinese M.C.’s are spreading over the Internet. But making Chinese hip-hop is still a relatively profitless — and often subversive — activity. Some Chinese rappers address what they see as the country’s most glaring injustices. As Wong Li, a 24-year-old from Dongbei, says in one of his freestyle raps:

If you don’t have a nice car or cash

You won’t get no honeys

Don’t you know China is only a heaven for rich old men

You know this world is full of corruption

Babies die from drinking milk.

He often performs in a downtown Beijing nightclub and uses Chinese proverbs in his lyrics to create social commentary.

Mr. Wong, who became interested in hip-hop when he heard in the mid-’90s, said rapping helps him deal with bitterness that comes with realizing he is one of the millions left out of China’s economic boom.