Chengdu – In 2018, censors who oversee media in China issued a directive to the country's entertainment industry not to feature artists with tattoos or artists representing hip-hop and other subcultures.
Shortly after, the famous rapper GAI missed out on the Inkigayo contest gig despite his successful first appearance. Speculation was rife, with fans worried that this was the end of hip-hop in China. Some media labeled it banned.
The genre just had a banner year, with the hit competition-style TV show discovering new stars and introducing them to a country of 1.4 billion people. The rapper, who was used to working with little money and performing in small bars, became famous. The censor's announcement came at the height of the frenzy. Silence ensued, with the rapper not appearing on dozens of variety shows and singing contests on Chinese television for several months.
But by the end of that year, everything was back in full swing. “Hip-hop has become too popular,” said Nathanel Amar, a researcher on Chinese pop culture at France's Center for Contemporary Chinese Studies. “They couldn't censor an entire genre.”
What looked like the end of Chinese hip-hop was only the beginning.
Roots in the western city of Chengdu
Since then, hip-hop's explosive growth in China has only continued. They've done this by carving out their own space, avoiding government red lines and balancing authentic creative expression with palatableness in a country with strong censorship. .
Today, musicians say they are looking forward to a golden age.
Much of the energy is found in Chengdu, a city in southwestern China's Sichuan province. Some of the most famous artists in China today are from Sichuan. Wang Ytai, Higher Brothers, and Vava are just a few names who have brought Mandarin rap to the mainstream by performing in a combination of Mandarin and Sichuan dialects. Chengdu hip-hop began with the very heavy sounds of trap, but its mainstreaming has seen artists expand their range to lighter sounds, from R&B to the trendy Afrobeat rhythms popularized by Beyoncé.
Chinese rap has operated underground for decades in cities such as Beijing, but Sichuan, a region known internationally for its spicy cuisine, panda sanctuaries, and the birthplace of the late leader Deng Xiaoping, is taking the lead. began to take control.
“Rap has a lot of rhymes. And we've been exposed to rhyme-heavy languages from an early age. And we feel like we're the origin of that,” said the Sichuan native, who recently joined the city. says Moom Shan, who attended a rap concert held inside.
Kidway, a 25-year-old rapper from a town on the outskirts of Chengdu, says the dialect is better for rapping because it's softer and has more rhymes than Mandarin. “Consider the word “gang'' in English. “In Sichuan, the words 'fang, san, zhuang' have a lot of rhymes, and the rhymes are already there,” he says.
Chengdu is welcoming to outsiders, says Heixen Chen, a 24-year-old rapper. He moved from Hong Kong to Chengdu in 2021 to pursue music activities, and moved to Chengdu at the invitation of Harikiri, a British producer who has contributed to the formation of the scene. With Chengdu's biggest artists.
Part of the city's hip-hop lore revolves around a collective called Chengdu Rap House (CDC). Chengdu Rap House (CDC) was founded by a rapper called Boss This city has embraced rap. Its founders, like Boss At Boss X's performance in March, his fans cheered and sang along in Sichuan. The energy was contagious, even though standing spectators are prohibited at all stadium performances in China.
“When I came to mainland China, they showed me more love than they showed me in three or four months in Hong Kong,” Chen said. He ended up collaborating with Higher Brothers, one of the few Chinese rap groups that also has global recognition. “People here actually want each other to succeed.”
But at the cost of becoming mainstream, the underground scene disappeared. Chengdu was once known for its underground rap battles. That no longer happens, as freestyles typically include profanity and other content that authorities deem unacceptable. Rappers say the last time there was a rap battle in the city, authorities quickly showed up and shut it down. It's all digital these days, and people are uploading short clips of their music to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to get attention.
Kidway says he learned how to rap by participating in these battles and competing with rappers of his own age. He used to work for a remodeling company, but left to pursue rapping full-time.
But even though rap battles are gone, there are more rappers in the field than ever before. That's good. “The more players there are, the more interesting it is,” he says.
The TV show that created the genre
Rarely can a single cultural product be said to be the origin of an entire musical genre. However, the talent competition/reality show “The Rap of China” has played a huge role in building China's rap industry.
The first season aired on the web streaming platform IQiyi, bringing rap and hip-hop culture into homes across the country. According to Chinese media reports, the 12 episodes of the first season have been viewed 2.5 billion times online.
In its first season, the show relied on the star power of its judges to draw audiences. That person was Kris Wu, a Chinese-Canadian singer and former member of the popular K-pop group EXO. At the time, Wu was at the height of his fame, and his comments as a judge that season even became an internet meme. “Will there be a freestyle?” he asked the contestants in episode one, with a serious look on his face. This moment remained Internet infamy as people questioned Wu's rapping credentials.
The first season produced two winners: GAI and PG One. Immediately after the victory, the Internet was flooded with rumors about his less than perfect behavior in the personal life of PG One. The Communist Youth League also criticized one of his older songs, which appeared to be about cocaine use, a major violation of one of the censors' red lines.
And at a conference in 2018, censors warned TV stations about who could not appear on their shows – people representing hip-hop. PG One found that his attempts to release new music were quickly blocked by the platform. The platform IQiyi even temporarily took down the entire first season.
However, by the end of summer 2018, fans were excited to hear that they could expect a second season of “The Wrap of China,” albeit with a rebrand. The name in English remained the same, but in Chinese it took a new direction. The name of the program was changed from “China has hip-hop'' to “China has 'Shuochang.'' This term also refers to traditional forms of storytelling.
Regulators gave hip-hop the green light to continue growing, but it had to toe the line set by government censors. Hip-hop has now become Shuochang and a symbol of youth culture. Mention of drugs and sex had to be avoided. However, if not, you may proceed.
“It was a success for the Chinese regulators. … They were really successful in bringing in hip-hop artists,” Amar says. “It's like a contract. If you want to be popular, if you want to be on a TV show, you have to respect the lines that you don't cross.”
Find Chinese audio
Due to strict censorship of the entertainment industry and banning references to drugs and sex in lyrics, artists responded in two ways. They either wholeheartedly embrace expressions of patriotism and nationalism, or they avoid the topic.
Some organizations, like GAI, have fully embraced the government's role in mainstreaming hip-hop. He won “The Rap of China” award for the song “Not Friendly,” in which he disparaged other rappers, who he did not name, in classic hip-hop fashion. “I am not friendly. I may break your pen at any moment. Crush your fancy words. … Enemies, you had better pray that it ends well for you.”
Just a few years later, Gai sang about China's glorious history on CCTV's Lunar New Year celebration broadcast. The broadcast is a strictly scripted entertainment show featuring comedy skits, songs and dance performances for families to watch while celebrating the Lunar New Year.
“Five thousand years of history are slipping away like quicksand. I'm proud to have been born in Cathay,” he sings, wearing a Qing Dynasty-style Tang jacket.
The red line also encouraged artists to be more creative. For Chinese rap to flourish, artists need to find their original voices, they say. Furai, a 32-year-old rapper, describes his music as chill rap, or “bedroom music.” Not in a euphemistic sense, but the type of music you listen to while lying in bed. His next album, he says, will be about mundane events like fights with his wife and washing the dishes.
Still, Hooray says he often talks about sex in his lyrics. Chinese is a language with countless proverbs and a strong poetic tradition. “There’s nothing you can’t touch, you just have to use it wisely,” he says.
The development of an authentic Chinese wrap brand is still in progress. Hip-hop began in New York's Brooklyn and Bronx boroughs, where rappers made music through difficult circumstances, from gunfights to crime and illegal drug deals. In China, the challenge is to find something that fits the situation. Shootouts are rare in a country where guns are banned and penalties for drug use are heavy.
Rap crews in Chongqing, another huge city in Sichuan province, reflected the tastes of gang culture in their music, with artists writing about fights and vows of brotherhood. But most of today's big artists don't rap about subjects like knife-ing someone or drug use.
Wang Ytai, a former member of the Chengdu rap collective CDC, is currently one of China's most popular rappers. His style influenced mainstream pop sounds.
“We're all trying hard to make songs that not only sound good, but also have themes that are perfect for China,” Wang says. “I think the spirit of hip-hop has always been about original creation and always about your own story.”
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