Abstract
Hip-hop culture has evolved into a global phenomenon, attracting extensive academic research on its adaptation and localization in different societies. However, most studies have either neglected the influence of political economic power on hybridization or have overestimated the rationality of the artists in hip-hop culture. This study adopted critical transculturalism theory to shed light on the agency and power relations involved in the localization and mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop music from both longitudinal and comparative perspectives. The findings, which are based on qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis of news articles published in the three golden years (2008, 2010, and 2017) of the development of Chinese hip-hop music, suggest that whereas cultural and political factors were influential on both the localization and mainstream emergence processes, economic factors played a greater role in mainstream emergence. The enhancement of literacy in professional knowledge aroused public interest, and the use of symbolic hybridity created a role model for underground rappers and attracted social attention. Both these factors helped Chinese hip-hop music enter the mainstream industry. The idea of symbolic hybridity proposed in this study, which provides a mesolevel perspective, is worth further research.
Hip-hop culture, which originated from African American culture half a century ago, has now evolved into a global phenomenon attracting extensive academic research on its adaptation and localization in different regions and societies (Androutsopoulos and Scholz, 2003; Barrett, 2012; Bennett, 1999a, 1999b; Bramwell and Butterworth, 2019; Eberhardt and Freeman, 2015; Flew et al., 2019; Kerr, 2015, 2020; Zambon and Uca, 2016). Its globalization has been considered a new type of universality, because its development is rooted in ‘the local and the temporal’ and is about ‘where I’m from’ (Potter, 1995: 146). This has been proven by empirical research, which has mostly used cultural pluralism or consumerism to explore the glocalization of hip-hop. Whereas the former approach may have neglected the influence of material structure, that is, political economic power, the latter may have overestimated consumers’ agency and overlooked the influence of increasingly prominent communication technologies on current culture.
To fill this gap in the literature, this study adopts the framework of critical transculturalism, which focuses on ‘power in intercultural relations by integrating both agency and structure’ in analysis (Kraidy, 2005: 149) in order to explore the dialectical relations between the cultural and the political economy perspectives, as well as the role of media communication in the hybridization of hip-hop culture. Our approach considers that culture is essentially hybrid with agency located in social practice, that is, the reproduction of material structure. Media communication is crucial in the reproduction process where different human agencies are empowered unevenly, resulting in the production of cultural hybridization. This helps explain the diversity of agencies and hybridity outcomes of hip-hop in different societies (Flew et al., 2019; Kraidy, 2005).
Hip-hop music, an important component of hip-hop culture, has become extremely popular in mainland China. Chinese hip-hop music has developed into a cultural hybridity distinct from African American hip-hop music (Sullivan and Zhao, 2019; Flew et al., 2019). However, Chinese hip-hop was marginalized for nearly two decades until 2017 when a competition-based reality show called ‘The Rap of China’ emerged. The show was produced by a popular online streaming platform iQIYI and gained over 100 million views within 4 hours of the official release of its first episode (iQIYI, 2017). When the show gained popularity, hip-hop culture successfully entered the mainstream (Sullivan and Zhao, 2019; Flew et al., 2019), but it is curious why that did not occur over the previous two decades.
This study argues that hip-hop music in mainland China cannot be oversimplified into a discursive and textual combination of African American and Chinese cultures. Instead, it is a form of hybridity that deals with power relations between African American, place-based local, and Chinese underground and mainstream hip-hop. The mainstream emergence of hip-hop in mainland China was influenced by mediated material power that selectively empowered certain human agencies to dominate others. This study conducts qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis on news articles about hip-hop published in three golden years of the genre (2008, 2010, and 2017), focusing on its localization process in mainland China through both longitudinal and comparative perspectives. The findings reveal the power relations embedded in the transnationality and translocality of the mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop hybridity.
Glocalization and critical transculturalism of the hip-hop nation
In the early 1970s, hip-hop was created as a means of self-expression by African Americans who lived in divested neighborhoods in New York (Flew et al., 2019; Osumare, 2007). Hip-hop is a multi-layered culture that includes music, breakdancing, DJ’s beat mixing, MC’s rapping, fashion, and graffiti art (Alim, 2004; Flew et al., 2019). Hip-hop music, the main focus of this study, is mediated by language and technology including ‘musical rhythms, beats and the vocal delivery of rhyme and street vernacular by a rapper or MC’ (Flew et al., 2019: 96).
The commercialization and transnationalism of hip-hop began in the early 2000s, and four periods of development followed (Bradley and Dubois, 2010). It eventually emerged as a global phenomenon that was both localized in different societies worldwide and promoted by transnational businesses, resulting in diverse cultural outcomes (Androutsopoulos and Scholz, 2003; Bramwell and Butterworth, 2019; Kerr, 2015; Solomon, 2009; Zambon and Uca, 2016). Emerging from an underground cultural form, hip-hop culture has deep roots in rebellion and negotiates marginalization. Underserved African American communities used hip-hop to express their anger at oppression and lost opportunities. The ideological content of rap often includes opposition, resistance, confrontation, and social critique that empowers subaltern communities to establish their explicit and/or implicit counter-hegemonic discourse (Martinez, 1997; Rose, 1994; Zou, 2019). As a result, rap music has been criticized for decades for containing antisocial views and promoting controversial things like drugs, violence, misogyny, and life in ghettos, all of which have played a symbolic role in rebellious expression (Flew et al., 2019; Gan et al., 1997; Miranda and Claes, 2004). Communities that share the experience of being marginalized in culture, class, race, and history, consider hip-hop a weapon of resistance (Sullivan and Zhao, 2019; Osumare, 2001). Zambon and Uca (2016), for instance, found that minority groups such as immigrants in Germany considered performing hip-hop to be a reflective action to show staged citizenship because of the disparity between their ideal views of democracy and ‘failed promises of citizenship in its legal and cultural forms’ (Zambon and Uca, 2016: 727). Alim (2004) proposed the term ‘hip-hop nation’ to describe these dispersed communities the world over, whose members consume and produce hip-hop music and live hip-hop lifestyles (Eberhardt and Freeman, 2015).
Studies on the glocalization and hybridization of hip-hop follow two approaches: cultural pluralism and consumerism. The former considers cultures to be separate entities and hybridity to be a mix of different cultures. Studies espousing cultural pluralism have shown how hip-hop culture is textually or discursively integrated with local cultures into hybridities different from the original African American tradition. For instance, Condry (2000) analyzed how Japanese rappers appropriated American hip-hop culture into their local culture musically, linguistically, and stylistically. However, the cultural pluralism approach neglects the influence of material structures related to politics and economy on the hybridization of hip-hop. This is affected by corporate multiculturalism, which suggests that global media capital seeks to promote hybridized cultural forms to meet diverse cultural needs. Moreover, studies have found that hip-hop hybridization can be affected by economic and political forces at a national or regional level (Zambon and Uca, 2016; Zou, 2019). Therefore, there is a need to explore hip-hop hybridity from both cultural and material perspectives. Studies that follow the second approach, consumerism, have focused on the active engagement of various human agencies in creating hip-hop hybridities and commodifying them to fulfill their contextual needs. Kerr (2015), for instance, suggested that the symbolic styles, postures, gestures, and clothing of hip-hop culture was consumed by rappers in Tanzania in order to fashion themselves. However, this approach assumes rational action and human agency and does not consider the influence of media communication on cultural hybridity. According to Castells (2009: 357), culture is mediated, enacted, and transformed by communication. Thus, there is a need to investigate how hip-hop culture is mediated through communication practices during its hybridization.
Critical transculturalism was proposed by Kraidy (2005) to solve theoretical problems involving two dominant theoretical frameworks in international communication: cultural imperialism and pluralism. Whereas the former suggests that nations with greater political and economic power will determine the value of culture and construct a global culture that dominates the world through international media, leading to inequality among different cultures (Schiller, 1971), the latter considers culture a battleground of ideology in the modern world and recognizes the activeness and autonomy of local individuals and/or communities in resisting or adapting external cultures (Kraidy, 2005; Wallerstein, 1990). While both cultural imperialism and pluralism adopt bipolar views on the conception of culture, global culture, agency, media effects, and relations between structure and agency in the understanding of cultural hybridity, critical transculturalism considers these issues from a lopsided perspective.
Critical transculturalism considers all cultures to be essentially hybrid rather than globally holistic, as suggested by cultural imperialism, or pluralistic, as suggested by cultural pluralism. The key concepts of critical transculturalism rely on power and agency; it explores power relations between cultures from translocal (‘local-to-local’) and intertextual perspectives. Applying the translocal perspective is not meant to deflect attention toward Western power, but to ‘pave the way for the construction of alternative perspectives on hybridity and locality that are not confined to global-to-local links that reinscribe dependency’ (Kraidy, 2005: 155). Analyses of translocality have focused on, for instance, how hip-hop culture in different countries in Europe was created by mutual interactions between nations (Androutsopoulos and Scholz, 2003), or how hip-hop in London and Bristol helped young people construct place-based and alternative English identities in the UK (Bramwell and Butterworth, 2019). The intertextual perspective refers to the mutual constitution of text and context. It is a constitutive and constituting force generated from, for instance, identities, practices, and effects, which enables them to be practices, identities, or effects (Kraidy, 2005; Slack et al., 1996). In critical transculturalism, cultural hybridity has always been permeated by the dominating power. Nevertheless, critical transculturalism differs from cultural imperialism because while cultural imperialism only considers nations with great material power as having agency, critical transculturalism takes a more inclusive view that recognizes more forms of agency.
Critical transculturalism defines agency as social agents that enable or disable the implementation of power to achieve cultural hybridization, that is, changing the components of a culture including ‘meanings, ways of action, and ways to evaluate the value of actions in a society’ (Kraidy, 2005: 151). It is worth examining whether individuals and communities are empowered to affect cultural hybridity. Media communication, an important site of agency, helps construct cultural hybridity by selectively using languages, signs, and images, and purposively guiding the audience to perceive culture in certain ways. The dynamic relationships between production, message/text, and reception in the media reproduction process of culture are emphasized by critical transculturalism. Kraidy (2005), for example, examined how the creation of the children’s television series Tele Chobis in Mexico, a hybrid media text adapted from Teletubbies in the UK, was influenced by history, economy, technology, and cultural forces by conducting textual and symbolic analysis.
Glocalization of hip-hop music in China: development with global influence
The development of hip-hop music in China, which started in the early 2000s, was influenced by various global factors, including individual American rappers, communication technology, the financial market, and the entertainment industry. Although some scholars have suggested that a Chinese style of rap has existed for centuries, including spoken-type music performed as story-singing following a beat created by a wooden clapper, and Chinese cross-talk, which features back-and-forth interactions along the lines of MC battles, this study does not consider these cultural formats as origins of Chinese hip-hop or parts of the hip-hop musical format, because the concept of hip-hop emphasizes its African American roots and its cross-cultural attributes (Sullivan and Zhao, 2019). Nevertheless, these cultural formats may be integrated into the hybridity of Chinese hip-hop.
The development of Chinese hip-hop music began after Dana Burton (a.k.a. Shotyme), an American rapper and one of the ‘godfathers of Chinese hip-hop’ (Barrett, 2012: 251), traveled to Shanghai in 1999. He observed that Chinese people at that time sang popular American hip-hop songs through karaoke and were fascinated by the fast beats. Nevertheless, hip-hop fans in China did not consider the possibility of developing Chinese hip-hop nor did they believe that the Chinese language was suitable for rapping. Burton decided to live in Shanghai and became a hip-hop promoter who engaged in the localization process of Chinese hip-hop music for decades, organizing an annual nationwide rap battle (Foreign Policy, 2007).
The Bulletin Board System (BBS), an online forum, played a crucial role in this experimental period of Chinese hip-hop transculturalism when social media was under-developed and the Internet was not as widely used as it is today. BBS was a place where most of the Chinese rappers, producers, musical critics, cultural promoters, and hip-hop supporters gathered and exchanged hip-hop knowledge. Members of the BBS hip-hop communities gained hip-hop knowledge from the Original Gangsters (OG) who owned CDs of foreign hip-hop music or lived abroad. One BBS still in operation is 51555.net (The City of Hip-hop), established in 2000 (UDIG, 2017). However, there were very few Chinese rappers and still fewer audiences in mainland China. In the mid-2000s, the first generation of Chinese rappers or pioneers in Chinese hip-hop development became wealthier and more famous nationwide; most of them formed groups and lived in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. Although most groups gradually disappeared for reasons such as lack financial support, these cities remain important bases for Chinese rappers (Townson, 2018; UDIG, 2017).
2008 was the first significant year for Chinese hip-hop mainly because of the emergence of Myspace (the first social networking website in the world) and Hiphop.cn (one of the earliest hip-hop websites in China), which helped increase communication among rappers. Hiphop.cn was founded by a Swiss businessman, Martin Spinnler, who had worked in mainland China for 9 years. He believed hip-hop could be a superb form of self-expression for young Chinese people gradually creating their own views and styles. By establishing the website, he hoped to provide young Chinese people with a channel to access the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN) (Alim, 2004). Unlike BBS, where hip-hop supporters had to extract useful information themselves, Hiphop.cn employed rappers and actively provided professional information in various formats including news, music, interviews, and performances (Song, 2007; UDIG, 2017). Hiphop.cn shut down after it lost funding in the 2008 financial break. Some former team members established their own websites to continue contributing to the development of Chinese hip-hop on the mainland. Several of these websites, such as StreetVoice.cn, UDIG, and ourden.net, are still in operation. One of the mainstream online media platforms from mainland China, Sohu.com, established a hip-hop channel and encouraged hip-hop supporters to write articles.
In 2010, Keyso (Junchao Shou), a rapper from Shanghai, participated in the first series of ‘China’s Got Talent’, a reality talent competition show produced by Shanghai Dragon Television that was part of the global Got Talent franchise. This was one of the first instances when the Chinese public was exposed to hip-hop (UDIG, 2017). In the first-round competition, Keyso performed not only his prepared hip-hop but also freestyle rapping, that is, improvisational rapping without prepared lyrics. He sang hip-hop using the Shanghai dialect as well. The novel musical style of hip-hop and rapping in the Shanghai dialect successfully sparked interest among both the audience and judges. After that, record labels in mainland China featuring both Chinese hip-hop at the national level and place-based hip-hop at the local level proliferated, although they were underground and not industrialized. Hip-hop was still considered a marginalized culture without potential or a profitable market (Shao and Meng, 2017).
The third golden year and final mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop was in 2017 when the reality show ‘The Rap of China’ aired. The show was produced by and broadcast on a Chinese online streaming platform, iQIYI. The show was not expected to succeed, but it tremendously increased national attention on and discussion about hip-hop music, as it earned over three billion views by the end of its first season (Flew et al., 2019; Shao and Meng, 2017). After that, hip-hop music successfully became part of mainstream culture and appeared in all kinds of social and cultural activities. Although the show was a mediator between underground hip-hop and mainstream culture, it was also a cultural product of the two-decade hybridization process. Factors other than the show facilitated the localization of global influences and enabled mainstream emergence to be successful. Drawing on the framework of critical transculturalism, this study proposes the following research questions:
RQ1: How have power and agency functioned in the hybridization and mainstream emergence process of Chinese hip-hop music?
RQ2: How did the news media portray that power and agency?
Methods
This study conducted qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) on news articles about hip-hop music published in mainland China in 2008, 2010, and 2017, years that marked turning points in the development of Chinese hip-hop music. Longitudinal and comparative perspectives were adopted. Temporal comparisons – comparing a phenomenon over discrete and successive rather than continuous temporal units of time (Stanyer and Mihelj, 2016) – were conducted to explore differences in transculturalism at important turning points.
Data were collected from the WiseNews database; four keywords, including the English word ‘rap’, the Chinese translation of hip-hop (‘嘻哈’), and two forms of the Chinese translation of rap (‘说唱’ and ‘饶舌’), were used to search for news articles. All news articles that contained at least one of the four keywords were collected (283 articles from 2008, 332 from 2009, and 323 from 2017). Purposive sampling was conducted to identify news articles in which hip-hop music was the main topic; irrelevant topics like Chinese cross-talk, street dancing, and hip-hop graffiti were excluded. The final sample included 153 news articles from 2008, 173 from 2010, and 245 from 2017.
Qualitative content analysis, ‘the process of making sense out of the data. . .consolidating, reducing, and interpreting what people have said and what the researcher has seen and read. . .the process of making meaning’ (Merriam, 1998: 178), helps classify themes and sentiments embedded within content through systematic categorization (Bhattacherjee, 2012). Following the coding guidelines proposed by Strauss and Corbin (1990), this study coded the news articles in three steps: (1) open coding, the initial process when categories (e.g. types of social agents) were extracted; (2) axial coding, an iterative process that analyzed category patterns, such as frequency and similarity; and (3) selective coding, which developed themes integrating the categories and validated the relationship between the categories (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). A qualitative data analysis software Nvivo was used. Themes developed from the analysis are displayed in Figure 1.
Overview of the percentage of nodes in content analysis.
Qualitative content analysis, however, fails to recognize how themes are discursively constructed and how power relations are implemented in cultural hybridization, for which reason we used CDA, which focuses on ‘the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance’ (van Dijk, 1993: 249). CDA addresses the social use of power and is consistent with the framework of critical transculturalism. It pays attention to (1) the privileged access to socially valued resources; in this study, news media communication; (2) social cognition, or ‘societal arrangements, groups and relations, as well as mental operations such as interpretation, thinking and arguing, inferencing and learning’ (van Dijk, 1993: 257) that are shared within society or culture; and (3) discourse structure, or ways of enacting or exhibiting power in discourse (Kraidy, 2005).
Findings
Unacclimatized? African American traditions and Chinese culture
Two socio-cultural powers (African American traditions of hip-hop vs Chinese culture) were found to be in tension during the evolvement of Chinese hip-hop music: in the early phase of the development, Chinese news outlets denounced the superficial adoption of African American traditions by Chinese rappers, which might have led to misconceptions of African American rap music by the Chinese public. Later, the mainstream media and public criticized those who brought in African American rapping culture to China without embracing local Chinese culture. Following is a discussion of the collision of the two cultures.
In the early days of Chinese hip-hop music development, Chinese rappers tended to superficially adopt African American hip-hop traditions in their own music, and regarded stylistic elements only as the semiotics of hip-hop music. As suggested by news articles, ‘[h]ip-hop is not just a pair of fat-leg pants and a cap, but a diverse culture originating from a social environment and cultural background. However, in many cases, we [only] superficially “learn” from it’ (Liu, 2008). Chinese rappers mainly imitated the ways of strong beats, cursing, costume, as well as worshiping wealth and fame that were observable in African American hip-hop music without understanding the socio-cultural meanings of the music (Li, 2008a, 2008b; Liu, 2008). Consequently, Chinese hip-hop music at that time appeared to be in a hip-hop ‘style’, but the contents especially the lyrics were bland and vacuous (Li, 2008a). This might be one of the reasons why the Chinese public failed to fully comprehend hip-hop culture, and mainly focused on the stylistic elements of the music. For instance, the Chinese public were aware of the strong beats in hip-hop music but were not used to it. When rap was adopted in the theme music of a television series broadcast on China Network Television (CCTV), some audiences said that ‘[The rap part] sounds nondescript. The contrast is too large [between rap and other parts]. [It is] a little bit far-fetched and [feels like an] excessive pursuit of fashion. The ambiance of the music is significantly reduced [by the rap part]’ (Xuan, 2008). The significant difference between this newly introduced musical style and the musical style to which the Chinese public was accustomed led to a controversy in mainstream Chinese society.
The relationship between African American traditions and Chinese culture in Chinese hip-hop music continued to be an important issue from 2008 to 2017. Its long-lasting significance is evident in the news reports about a Chinese American rapper (see example 1), MC Jin (Jin Au-Yeung). MC Jin was the first Asian American rapper to sign with a major record label in the US, but his music career there was not successful. In 2007 he released his first all-Cantonese language album in Hong Kong. In an early news article (Murongxiaochong, 2008), MC Jin, who is ethnically Chinese, was ironically labeled as a ‘Banana Man’, a derogative term used to denote a person who has ‘yellow’ skin but a ‘white’ heart, that is, someone of Chinese descent who embraces Western ideology and values rather than Chinese culture (Wren, 2016). The reporter was impressed by MC Jin’s hip-hop tactics and his use of Hong Kong slang words in his music, noting that MC Jin had grown up in the US and could not read or write Chinese. The reporter said that ‘MC Jin still knows little about Chinese culture, especially Hong Kong culture, so it is inevitable that his music is limited and narrow’ (Murongxiaochong, 2008). Similar statements appeared in other news reports (e.g. Li, 2010).
For the yellow-skinned ‘Banana Man’ MC Jing, recording an all-Cantonese album was certainly full of difficulties, not to mention all the lyrics of the album, which was simply a fantasy. Because of this, MC Jin used Freestyle to pop out the lyrics with the rhythm in the recording studio, completely without pen or paper. If you doubt the sincerity and standard of this album because of the short [production] time, you are wrong. The music part of the album was all completed by Far East [Movement], a local hip-hop group in the United States. The downbeat is not too strong, and the beat is cheerful and lively. MC Jin’s performance in the lyrics also surprised [the listeners]. He self-proclaimed to be “ABC (American Born Chinese)”, and often ridiculed his identity as “Jook-sing man”. Although [he] emphasizes that [he] “can speak but not read [Chinese]”, his lyrics about Hong Kong [mention] “Police Cadet ‘84”, “Ivan Ho Sau Sun”, “Minutes to Fame”, “Queen’s Pier”, “Lan Kwai Fong” as if he is very familiar with these. The album is full of Cantonese slang terms such as “sik sak mai”, “kei nei”, “jau gam kiu”, “jam daam caa”. Although [his] pronunciation is a bit strange, it is still impressive. However, the flaws of this album are still obvious. Because MC Jin’s Cantonese Rap is still in the running-in period, it will inevitably affect [his] flow. In addition, MC Jin still has a little knowledge of Chinese culture, especially Hong Kong culture, and his lyrics contents are inevitably limited and narrow.
In the audition stage, Kris Wu called Hip-hop Man the ‘old hand’, and other rappers also regarded him as the ‘great enemy’, saying ‘I can’t touch this atomic bomb’. However, the mysterious Hip-hop Man was unexpectedly questioned by the judge MC Hotdog after his performance: ‘There are too many [lyrics] in English’.
MC Jin was respected and reluctant by everyone when he was eliminated. He is still the legendary Chinese rapper with the most outstanding achievements.
MC Jin, who participated in the show as a Hip-hop Man from the beginning, has brought infinite surprises to other rappers along the way. As a collective idol of Chinese rappers, MC Jing gave up the old hip-hop halo, started from a new starting point, and learned to rap in [Mandarin] Chinese from scratch, which brought great encouragement to the rappers. By abandoning the opportunity for resurrection, MC Jin is undoubtedly hoping to provide the new generation of Chinese rappers with more room to grow.
MC Jin’s public image was very different when he competed in ‘The Rap of China’ in 2017. He wore a face mask and used the name ‘Hip-Hop Man’ to conceal his real identity, hoping to ‘make everyone forget who he was and to not pay attention to his name, but rather focus on his performance’ on stage (Huang, 2017b). Since then, he is no longer called the Banana Man but is seen as a distinguished rapper who proved to the world that Chinese people can rap well (e.g. Huang, 2017a). However, he did not win ‘The Rap of China’ and only made it to the top 12 because most of his lyrics were in English and not Mandarin Chinese or its dialects. The judges believed that Chinese language plays a crucial and necessary part in Chinese hip-hop music and that MC Jin’s music did not reflect Chinese culture, although he did have the best techniques in rapping among all the participants. In spite of the tension between African American hip-hop traditions and Chinese culture, viewing them together is necessary in order to understand the development of Chinese hip-hop music. MC Jin’s music failed to achieve that integration.
Place-based local cultures have also played a role in hip-hop hybridization. Cities like Chongqing, Xi’an, Changsha, and Guangzhou were important bases for Chinese rappers to develop their careers since the early 2000s, giving rise to the use of dialects for rappers to talk about their local cultures through music. Moreover, reporters on ‘The Rap of China’ often mentioned where rappers came from, such as ‘Tizzy T from Guangdong, GAI who raps in Chongqing dialect . . . . . . Guibian from Chongqing’ as reported by the Yangcheng Evening News (Gong, 2017). Integrating hip-hop music and local culture is a hybrid approach that helps alleviate the confronting relationship between African American traditions and Chinese culture. The stylistic elements of African American tradition, the Chinese language, and the place-based local culture in China have acted as important semiotics of Chinese hip-hop music during the collision of the two cultures. Relevant news articles about them have demonstrated how the relationships between the two socio-cultural powers have changed over the past two decades.
Cursing and ‘positive energy’: bottom-up social norms, top-down regulations
The deprecation of cursing and swear words is an important element of social cognition in the hybridization of Chinese hip-hop music, driven both by bottom-up social norms rooted in the etiquette of Chinese traditional culture and by top-down governmental prohibitions implemented by official regulations (see example 2). When localization began, using Chinese or English swear words in lyrics to express a rebellious attitude was one way to imitate African American hip-hop traditions. However, this aroused dissatisfaction among the public, especially the older generation. The mother of Jingdong Li, a Shanghai rapper, told news reporters that the music of her generation was beautiful, ‘But now, the “hip-hop music” sung by young people is about cursing [and is thus, not beautiful]’ (Yu, 2017). This bottom-up social norm in Chinese society suggests that cursing is uncivilized and impolite and deserves prohibition, which puts social pressure on Chinese rappers to self-censor out of self-discipline and respect for older generations.
Ayal Komod: ‘Now [I’m] old, and [I] don’t want to be angry anymore. [It’s] so tired. When you’re young, it doesn’t matter if you say swear words; but now if [I] say swear words, [I] will look naive. Now [celebrities in] the entire entertainment industry pay attention to [public] image. Though our company doesn’t care about us and let us to be ourselves, this is risky. Fortunately, we know where the boundary is. We try not to make others feel uncomfortable, but we are not that kind of seriousness, like sitting seriously in front of interviewers and saying: ‘Hello. Shall we start now?’ We don’t have that kind of personality. Casualness is a double-sided thing. Some people like it, some don’t. For us, living freely is the best thing’.
The dynamic career change of the Taiwanese rap group G.U.T.S. shows how the two driving forces (bottom-up vs top-down) operate. The group hails from Taiwan, but the development of their career in mainland China reveals the localization of Chinese hip-hop music owing to their popularity and their strong connections with the mainland music market. They held their first concert in 2015 and one leg of their world tour in 2017 in Guangzhou, a major city in China, before ‘The Rap of China’ began. The 2017 concert was the largest hip-hop concert held in Guangzhou up to that point, with an audience of 20,000. Two G.U.T.S. members, Ayal Komod and MC Hotdog, were judges on ‘The Rap of China’.
In 2017, in a Yangcheng Evening News (National Edition) interview (Zhang, 2017b), three members of G.U.T.S., Ayal Komod, E-SO, and MC Hotdog, spoke about expressing anger through hip-hop music. They revealed two levels of linguistic boundaries (social-level politeness and industrial-level language safety), consistent with two social factors (norms and regulations). From their bottom-up perspective, band members observed two types of social norms, maturity and politeness. For instance, Ayal Komod described cursing by an older rapper as important but also ‘naïve’. E-SO and MC Hotdog indicated that their ways of expressing anger had shifted from swearing to more subtle modes as they became older. Ayal Komod suggested that not using swear words was common in the entertainment industry and that cursing may destroy celebrities’ public image. The band members try not to make others feel uncomfortable, reflecting the general norm of politeness in the larger social context of mainland China.
The band also considered the political/top-down take on swearing, using the term ‘risky’ to describe their company’s disregard for cursing, an industrial boundary closely connected with governmental regulations launched by China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) in the early 2000s prohibiting vulgar culture, including cursing, in television programs and by celebrities. On the flip side, promoting socialist and positive values such as social harmony through cultural products has always been an important activity undertaken by the Chinese government. Hip-hop music has been used to promote ‘positive energy’, a notion proposed by the Chinese government in 2014 (Sullivan and Zhao, 2019), by rapping about public servants such as the police, taxi drivers, volunteers, and teachers (see Figure 1). Hip-hop music produced by or made for public servants has had considerable news coverage since 2010. For instance, the police in Chengdu use rap music to ‘promote the police system and stay close to the [Chinese] public’ (Zhang and Cheng, 2010).
Authenticity: public resonance and grassroots struggles
The localization of Chinese hip-hop music involves combining the ideology of authenticity with everyday struggles at the grassroots level. This can be manifested in two programs, a reality television show and an online streaming program, acting as a discursive agency for attracting target audiences from two different generations, the 1980s and the 1990s respectively. The incorporation of daily life struggles in hip-hop music has been well recognized and widely accepted by the public, providing symbolic resonance that demonstrate the localization of authenticity.
Chinese grassroots culture should form the core of Chinese hip-hop music, as it does in the US; hip-hop in the US developed without any intervention from the music industry in its first 10 years (Yuan, 2008), which made it more easily accepted by US mainstream society later. One major legislative difference between the US and China, however, created a major topical difference in the two countries’ rap music: in mainland China, drug use and firearms have been legally banned since 1950 (Andreas, 2020) and 1996, respectively (Zhang and Zhu, 2012). There is no tolerance in China for the performance focus on guns and drugs, which are some of the main themes rapped about in the US (Flew et al., 2019; Gan et al., 1997; Miranda and Claes, 2004).
Chinese hip-hop focuses on the troubles and worries of everyday life (see example 3), as found in Chinese rapper Keyso’s ‘Wake Up 80s’ performed on ‘China’s Got Talent’. Keyso’s lyrics express his contempt for an era that valued wealth over everything else. ‘There are no radical words in the lyrics. [His song] gently expresses his views on the current social and cultural phenomena [related to the identity of the 80s]’ (Wang and Huang, 2010). In several interviews, he mentioned that he was typical of the 1980s generation and was a little conceited. ‘I always believe that my music is trendy, but no one listens to it’, he said. He joined the show because he hoped it would make his music more popular (Wang and Huang, 2010). He achieved his goal and was featured on the cover of Xinmin Weekly, one of the most important and popular comprehensive weekly magazines in mainland China. Participating in televised talent shows like ‘China’s Got Talent’ was an effective way for underground rappers in China to gain public exposure. Their target audience in 2010 were mostly the generation of the 1980s, which may have been why Keyso’s ‘Wake Up 80s’ became popular. Listening to his music helped his audiences share their negative emotions about their daily lives, which reflects the ideology of hip-hop music, that is, truly and freely expressing oneself.
[Chinese hip-hop culture] emphasizes the catchphrase of every rapper ‘Keep it real’. In this era, the “real” that the younger generation in China believes in is the self. “This is a view of consumerism, the pursuit of material, and the yearning for materialized life.”. . . . . .Some people say that China does not have the cultural foundation of hip-hop. Hongjie Li asked, “Why can Japan and South Korea embrace hip-hop, but China can’t? Hip-hop was invented by black Americans. It used to be the CNN of black Americans that expresses demands for ordinary people. But now the times have changed and hip-hop is no longer combative. It can be a kaleidoscope that has many facets. Today’s hip-hop is just a part of the entertainment industry”. Of course, Chinese hip-hop music does not sound like the African-American one. The African Americans living in the divested neighborhoods see guns and drugs when opening their eyes every day. This is their “real”. The young Chinese in this era expressed another kind of “real”. In the words of rapper Lu1, “[When we] wake up [in the morning], we notice troubles and trivial things in our daily lives. The hip-hop spirit helps me express my experiences, emotions, and feelings through words and music”. This may also explain why young people in this era need hip-hop music more than 15 years ago.
The attention to authentic everyday life struggles is found in the ‘The Rap of China’ 2017 broadcasts. Initially, many rappers strongly suspected that the show had secrets and unclear rules, so they wrote rap to criticize the program and shared the lyrics online. ‘This is exactly why these rappers are charming’, commented Che Che, the show’s director. ‘Most competitors in other television reality shows are slippery [because] they have experiences in a number of reality show [and have been familiar with the rules]. Usually, they dare not offend the program crew. However, rappers are not like that because they rarely participate in these programs’. (Liu, 2017). Junyi Cen, the show’s screenplay writer, said, ‘I have heard those songs, and they are pretty good. [Battle] is a normal thing in the field of hip-hop’ (Qianjiang Evening News, 2017). With more than a decade of competition-based reality shows in mainland China, the public has become accustomed to some common plots, including harmonious relationships among competitors and moving stories. However, ‘The Rap of China’ showed confrontations between rappers as commonplace. ‘These rappers are not the same as what we used to see on stage before. They are trendy and dare to challenge the established rules’, said Chinese music critic Erdi (Zhang, 2017a).
Whereas the major audience for television programs around 2010 comprised people born in the 1980s, the major audience for online streaming programs around 2017 were people born in the 1990s. For the younger generation, authenticity – being oneself – is paramount. ‘The 1990s form the majority audience that accepts hip-hop music because they are more self-centered. [Thus], the rappers’ confidence is attractive to them’ (Zhang, 2017a). Compared to African American hip-hop music, the ideology of authenticity has been implemented in a different context but concentrates on the same topic of everyday struggles. As rapper Lu1 said: ‘[When we] wake up [in the morning], we notice troubles and trivial things in our daily lives. The hip-hop spirit helps me express my experiences, emotions, and feelings through words and music’ (Wu and Ge, 2017).
The mainstream: symbolic hybridity and public hip-hop literacy
Two contrasting agencies significantly contributed to the mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop and also accelerated and inosculated a great hybridity in hip-hop culture: celebrity Kris Wu as an agent of capital, and public hip-hop literacy as an agent of social-cultural power.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Chinese hip-hop underwent a hybridization of many elements, including rhythmic imitation, the deprecation of swear words, an ideology of authenticity, the focus on everyday struggles, the generation of positive energy, the integration of place-based local culture, and the exposure to television audiences. However, hip-hop remained a marginalized artform, as demonstrated by Keyso’s conservative performance when he chose not to rap but to sing a sentimental ballad in the final round of the ‘China’s Got Talent’ competition. The music industry in mainland China thought hip-hop lacked a potential profitable market and thus marginalized the genre, evident in the reduction in the sponsorship fees from RMB 300 million to RMB 200 million when the original sponsors found out that iQIYI intended to produce a reality show on hip-hop music (Wang, 2017). Before recording the first episode of ‘The Rap of China’, there was only one sponsor, Absolut Vodka. Potential sponsors waited to gauge the audience’s reactions. As the show went on, more companies, including Nongfu Spring Co., Ltd., McDonald’s Corporation, Xiaomi Inc., TikTok, and Chevrolet became sponsors, suggesting a surge in the popularity of the show (Wu, 2017).
A comparison of news reports presents two crucial factors that can explain why ‘The Rap of China’ was able to promote the mainstream emergence of hip-hop music in China: symbolic hybridity, in the form of the celebrity judge Kris Wu (see example 4), and the enhancement of public literacy in hip-hop music and culture. These two factors suggest the applicability of critical transculturalism in explaining the mainstream emergence of hip-hop music in mainland China.
In response to the audience’s doubts about the professionalism of the judges in the show, Che Che said that he hopes to produce shows that have ‘popularity’. Therefore, the judge’s popularity is a very important factor. Many ‘hip-hop supporters’ have made a lot of contributions to [Chinese] hip-hop music and [this field] needs to take one more step further. It’s time to make use of the power of a collective idol. Che Che said that Kris Wu can easily cause a trend in anything he does because he is very popular. But at the same time, Kris Wu is also a very pure rapper. ‘Kris Wu’s hip-hop single ‘Juice’ was ranked 28th on the iTunes overall chart, which was already the best score for a Chinese male singer. He is a real hip-hop singer’. According to Che Che, although Kris Wu and Ayal Komod have sung popular songs, they are essentially hip-hop. ‘Hip-hop is a culture, and its roots are hip-hop music. Manifestations like skateboarding, street dancing, graffiti, and street basketball are also part of hip-hop culture.’. . . . . .In Che Che’s view, hip-hop music is not as niche as others think. ‘Hip-hop fans are actually the 90s [generation]’. Che Che said. Many young mainstream singers in mainland China, such as Li Yuchun and Zhang Jie, are also singing hip-hop. ‘If you talk about 10 years ago, Jay Chou was also considered a niche singer. When he first debuted, everyone attacked [him] and didn’t understand his lyrics’.
‘The Rap of China’ was the first reality show to promote hip-hop music but not the first to focus on rap. In 2017 another show, ‘Listen Up’, invited many popular rappers who were later featured on ‘The Rap of China’; however, ‘Listen Up’ did not gain popularity. Come Lee, its director, said, ‘We had both rappers and good music, but we didn’t have [a] 200 million [sponsorship fee]. We didn’t have such a big platform. We didn’t have the money to invite Kris Wu’ (Wu and Ge, 2017). Kris Wu is a Chinese Canadian rapper and singer who was trained by the commercialized entertainment industry in South Korea. He represents the industrialization of hip-hop music in mainland China and aims to integrate Chinese culture into rap. The act of inviting Kris Wu to be a judge on ‘The Rap of China’ led to heated debates among the public. Chinese underground rappers on the show were not satisfied with this decision; they believed idolized rappers to be inauthentic and unprofessional because they did not write their own lyrics. Underground rappers resisted commercialization and thought that being commercialized meant losing the ideology of the self. For them, the conflict between authenticity and commercializing production, as well as between the adoption of celebrity training systems in the entertainment industry and the grassroot production tradition (Wu, 2017), were ideological confrontations.
Nevertheless, Kris Wu was crucial in bringing hip-hop music to the mainstream because he symbolized the hybridity of Chinese hip-hop. Zhou Liu, the music director for ‘The Rap of China’, said, ‘Most of these [rappers] (competitors in the program) have not been trained as artists in the music industry. I have to tell them the status of music and integrate the musical system into their minds, and tell them how to let the public understand [the music]’ (Wang, 2017). In contrast, Kris Wu had been trained by the industrial system. He was invited because of his popularity as an idol in mainland China. Che Che said, ‘The promotion of hip-hop culture will not be effective if you and I go on stage. Promotion needs to be done by someone with great appeal. Everything done by Kris Wu can easily cause a trend because he is popular’ (Chen, 2017). As suggested by the title of a news article, ‘Mocking Kris Wu blurs the original intention of “The Rap of China”’ (Aidiren, 2017), Kris Wu’s identity symbolized the purpose of the show. Whereas Chinese underground rappers could become famous by joining the mainstream market, they also had to accept mainstream industry rules to some degree. For them, Kris Wu represented a business they hoped to engage in but also suspected. Intentionally or not, the rappers and their music were pushed into the mainstream by Kris Wu’s popularity.
‘The Rap of China’ was the first program to promote hip-hop music through increasing public literacy about hip-hop. People began to learn about hip-hop music as a cool and fashionable musical type through television programs in 2010, but they had little professional knowledge about it. ‘The Rap of China’ made an explicit effort to fill the knowledge gap by introducing information about flow, rhyme, and the historical background embedded in the music through the use of subtitles (Figure 2 presents an example). Their aim was to reach ordinary people but not only hip-hop fans. They achieved this by ‘using popular and accessible expressions to [present] marginalized culture’ (Mosiqige, 2017). Many news articles also explained professional terms frequently used in hip-hop, like ‘diss’, ‘freestyle’, ‘battle’, and ‘flow’ (e.g. Zhang, 2017a). Southern Metropolis Daily described how the public felt while watching the show: ‘[They] can’t help but shake their legs. . . .[they] were immersed in the world of hip-hop music. Thinking about the rhythm while dreaming and not being able to wait to rap when awake’ (Huang, 2017b). The strategy of enhancing public literacy successfully aroused public interest in hip-hop music and deepened public understanding of hip-hop culture.
A screenshot of the typical viewing interface of The Rap of China.
Conclusion
Critical transculturalism sheds light on the agency and power relations involved in the localization and mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop music (see Figure 3). Based on qualitative content analysis and CDA of news articles about Chinese hip-hop music from both longitudinal and comparative perspectives, the findings suggest that while cultural factors (e.g. social norms) and political factors (e.g. regulations) were influential on both localization and mainstream processes of emergence, the factor of capital (e.g. Kris Wu) played a major role in the mainstream emergence of hip-hop in China.
Conceptual framework of critical transculturalism in Chinese hip-hop culture.
The processes of localization of Chinese hip-hop music included imitation, the exploration of Chinese grassroots and place-based local culture, adaptation to social norms and cultural regulations, and promotion of hip-hop music through television and online streaming programs. Public literacy about hip-hop aroused interest, and symbolic hybridity served as a role model for underground rappers and attracted social attention. Symbolic hybridity provides a mesolevel perspective that complements the findings of previous studies, which mainly focused on macro (global, state) and micro (single rapper, band, or community) perspectives. Although Kris Wu, considered a symbol of hybridity in this study, is a single person, his identity was interpreted as a commercialized system of hip-hop music that linked underground rappers with mainstream society.
This study is limited in that it does not investigate the localization of Chinese hip-hop music after 2017. Some scholars have suggested that governmental regulations began to influence the culture more explicitly after 2017 (Sullivan and Zhao, 2019). The objective of this study, however, was to apply critical transculturalism theory to explain the localization and mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop music. Future critical transculturalism studies should examine ideas of symbolic hybridity in other forms of cultural hybridization.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments, Dr. Dominic Tien Ee YEO for his suggestions in the early development of the paper, and Mr. Ziyuan Li for his support.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
