I decided to document the few tags around the school. Chinese youths adore hip hop culture these days. My opinion being that when cultural movements are expropriated to non-native places or for materialist reasons, I feel that Chinese hip hop lacks some of the authenticity of the underground movement we (barely) have (left) in America.
Slam, bitches!I've always been impressed with the Chinese penchant for replacing nature with artifice made to resemble nature.
Yes, that's a Houston Rocket on the left and a concrete ping-pong table on the right. Eminem is tagged at the bottom right, so if that's the level of American hip-hop to which they're exposed, it's no wonder Chinese hip hop seems barren to me.
The Money Shot: MC Death
Basketball is China's most popular sport, and thanks to the NBA, the music industry, and Hollywood, most Chinese kids assume that all blacks in America are basketball players or gang bangers.
These tags suck.
This one sucks too, but hey, it's their second (and sometimes third) language.
Spring is just arriving.
This tag is behind my apartment. I think it says "I'm Tank." Good on ya, Tank.From what I can tell, the official establishment has nothing against kids expressing themselves in this way in China. I think it's because it never had anti-establishment roots out here in China. Kids tag and dance hip hop because that's what's mainstream and status-quo.
Although they can dress the dress and leave tags, Chinese hip hop dancing is completely choreographed. Noticing that I don't lack rhythm, my students have asked me to teach them to "dance hip hop." I don't really know what the fuck that means. Hip hop moves and rhymes are meant to be improvised, so planning it out ahead of time is antithetical. It's difficult for me to do a real survey of Chinese hip hop, but my impression is that it doesn't come anywhere close to the literary ingenuity of the best in American underground hip hop, and they certainly don't know how to mix dope samples (that's a music term, Mom. It doesn't mean drugs).
Communist China has tamed a number of Western musical styles, including rock-n-roll, punk, and now hip hop. Art has traditionally been used in China to subvert the status quo, from millennia-old veiled political poetry to the allegoric film of the mid-eighties. That was meant to change when Mao declared art to be the tool of the People's Revolution. Hip hop in the People's Republic of China is definitely a tool, but not of Communism: it's a tool of conformity and materialism.
Although they can dress the dress and leave tags, Chinese hip hop dancing is completely choreographed. Noticing that I don't lack rhythm, my students have asked me to teach them to "dance hip hop." I don't really know what the fuck that means. Hip hop moves and rhymes are meant to be improvised, so planning it out ahead of time is antithetical. It's difficult for me to do a real survey of Chinese hip hop, but my impression is that it doesn't come anywhere close to the literary ingenuity of the best in American underground hip hop, and they certainly don't know how to mix dope samples (that's a music term, Mom. It doesn't mean drugs).
Communist China has tamed a number of Western musical styles, including rock-n-roll, punk, and now hip hop. Art has traditionally been used in China to subvert the status quo, from millennia-old veiled political poetry to the allegoric film of the mid-eighties. That was meant to change when Mao declared art to be the tool of the People's Revolution. Hip hop in the People's Republic of China is definitely a tool, but not of Communism: it's a tool of conformity and materialism.
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