i

國立臺灣師範大學英語學系

碩 士 論 文

Master’s Thesis

Department of English

National Taiwan Normal University

狂聲見我：東亞跨界文化流動下的台灣嘻哈樂

Holler If You Hear Me: Taiwanese Hip Hop

Music under the Transnational Cultural Flow in

East Asia

指導教授：黃 涵 榆 教授

Advisor: Dr. Han-yu Huang

研究生：王友良

Advisee: Yu-liang Wang

中華民國一百零四年七月

July 2015

ii

Holler If You Hear Me: Taiwanese Hip Hop

Music under the Transnational Cultural Flow in

East Asia

A thesis submitted to The Graduate Institute of

English

National Taiwan Normal University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

by Yu-liang Wang

July 2015

iii

摘要

本文以台灣嘻哈音樂在東亞影響下之跨界合作為主要研究目的。台灣嘻哈

樂在經過二十餘年的發展後，從初期的模仿到中期的音樂型態在地化，再至現

今與東亞國家進行各項跨界音樂交流，帶出台灣嘻哈音樂多樣且豐富的文化流

動與可變性，同時也呈現出台灣嘻哈音樂在全球化潮流下跨界亞洲之可能性。

本文分為三章。第一章探討嘻哈樂的歷史起源、饒舌音樂形式與其全球化

過程，並利用阿君．阿帕度萊(Arjun Appadurai) 全球景觀理論指出嘻哈文化所

具有的跨國族群離散與媒體景觀等特質，與饒舌樂所具有的多變性，使嘻哈音

樂能夠在不同的文化中發展出多樣風貌。第二章以東亞脈絡下的嘻哈音樂發展

為主，以日本嘻哈及節奏藍調音樂與韓流(Korean Wave)風潮下的韓國嘻哈音樂

為重點，指出兩者與台灣嘻哈樂的發展及形塑有著不可分割的關係。第三章回

歸台灣嘻哈音樂發展史，並以樂團大嘴巴、歌手李玖哲、音樂製作人 Jae Chong

與饒舌歌手蛋堡為例，分析其音樂風格、形象與自身之東亞跨國合作經驗。透

過全球離散流動、跨國主義與跨國界認同，強調台灣嘻哈音樂在地化的同時，

也經由跨國音樂合作產生了跨東亞嘻哈音樂的可能。

關鍵詞：嘻哈音樂、饒舌、跨國合作、東亞、韓流、全球化、台灣嘻哈

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Abstract

The thesis focuses on the transnational collaborations of Taiwanese hip hop

music in East Asia. Over the past twenty years, Taiwanese hip hop music has

transformed from the stages of initial imitation and appropriation of the music form,

the domestication of local culture to the present transnational crossover collaborations

among East Asian countries. Transnational Taiwanese hip hop music brings abundant

cultural diversity and flow and also presents the possibility of “trans-Asian” hip hop.

The thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter probes into the history of

hip hop culture, the art form of rap music, and the globalization of hip hop. By

adopting Arjun Appadurai’s “scape” theory, I indicate that ethnoscapes and

mediascapes are related to the globalization of hip hop, along with the mutability of

rap to develop hip hop in different cultures. The second chapter draws the attention on

the development of hip hop music in the context of East Asian countries by discussing

specific issues as Korean Wave/K-pop, J-hip hop and J-R&B to thus suggest that the

interrelations of hip hop’s cross-cultural and regional experience in East Asia has the

great influence on Taiwanese hip hop music. In Chapter Three, I first summarize the

history and development of Taiwanese hip hop and take Taiwanese hip hop group Da

Mouth, singer Nicky Lee, music producer Jae Chong and rapper Softlipa to be the

cases to analyze their images, music style and experience of East Asian

collaborations. I argue that transnational Taiwanese hip hop music in East Asia has

come to possibility through global mobility of diaspora, transnationalism and

transbordering identities.

Key words: hip hop music, rap, transnational collaboration, East Asia, Korean Wave,

globalization, Taiwanese hip hop

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Acknowledgements

I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to those who accompanied me and

encouraged me during the writing process of my thesis. First, my grateful thanks goes

to Professor Han-yu Huang, who has always been very kind and supportive toward

my research project. I thank him for letting me choose the thesis topic and helping me

complete this project because the thesis stands for a part of my life story. Whenever I

met obstacles or felt perplexed in continuing my writing, his constant support,

patience and guidance often gave me confidence. I also regard him as a mentor in

many ways. I am thankful to my thesis committees, Professor Chen-hsing Tsai and

Professor Yuh-chuan Shao, whose precious comments inspired me to improve my

project as well. My special thanks also go to Professor Eva Tsai. Without her

encouragements, I could not have finished this thesis.

Second, I want to thank my mom and dad for their love and tolerance. I am lucky

enough to have their support no matter what happens. Also, I would like to thank my

husband, Max, for his unfailing help and support. During my long-term writing, he

always provided me with constructive suggestions and feedbacks. His warm

companion also helped me go through those dark nights. I feel truly grateful for

having him by my side. In addition, I would like to thank all my besties: Irene, Inging,

Rin, Angel, Emily, Zoe, and Ting. Thank you all for always being there for me and

participating in all the important events of my life.

Finally, my greatest gratitude goes to hip hop. For so many years, hip hop has

taught me how to live one’s life with attitude, and how to appreciate a culture with

respect and love. I thank hip hop for being my lifelong friend.

PEACE.

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Table of Contents

Chinese Abstract……………………………………………………………………...iii

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….iv

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………v

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………....1

I. Motivation………………………………………………………………..1

II. Literature Review………………………………………………………...5

III. Approach………………………………………………………………..10

IV. The Outline of Chapters………………………………………………...13

Chapter One: A Brief History of Hip Hop Music and Its Globalization……………..18

I. A Brief History of Hip Hop Culture…………………………………….19

II. The Development of Rap Music………………………………………...23

III. The Globalization of Hip Hop…………………………………………..29

Chapter Two: The Transnational Development of Hip Hop Music in the East Asian

Context……………………………………………………………………………….36

I. “Asianism” as Thinking Transnational over National………………...37

II. Japanese Hip Hop and R&B/Soul Trend………………………………..43

III. The Korean Wave as K-pop of “The Localized Hip Hop” in South

Korea……………………………………………………………………48

Chapter Three: Hip Hop Music in Taiwan: History, Culture and Trans-Asian

Experience……………………………………………………………………………55

I. The Development of Hip Hop Music in Taiwan………………………..56

II. Case Studies on Taiwanese Hip Hop Music’s Trans-Asian Experience...62

III. Trans-Asian Taiwanese Hip Hop: A Reconciliation?...............................67

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………71

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..74

1

Introduction

I. Motivation

Jump the way you want like crazy 跳乎伊爽 跳甲欲起痟 跳甲凍袂條

It’s been a decade of us coming back 已經過十年

Long live the Taiwanese hip hop 台灣的 hip hop 永遠袂死

It toughens more and more 逐年愈來愈硬

It toughens more and more 逐年愈來愈硬

Shout it loud, shout it loud 做卡大聲 做卡大聲

That’s the way you listen to our hip hop Hip Hop 就是應該按呢聽

—Machi “Jump 2003” on Machi —麻吉 “跳 2003” 麻吉同名專輯

(My translation on the lyrics)

When Jeff Huang (Huang Licheng 黃立成) rapped for his Machi crew debut in

2003, he claimed that his comeback signified another peak of Taiwanese hip hop

music over a decade of its development in Taiwan because hip hop music has

progressively spread out the significance in Mandarin pop-music industry. For many

people, Huang has been considered one of the precursors introducing hip hop culture

(e.g. rap, break dance, baggy jeans, etc.) from America to Taiwan with the boy group

“L. A. Boyz” in the early 90s; by the time L. A. Boyz’s music, dancing and costume

style caused huge sensations, the concept of “hip hop” or the new school style as they

formerly called it, had thus been incorporated into the mainstream Taiwanese popular

culture. It was the first time hip hop music ever drew my attention before I came to

realize what it was and where it originated. Yet little did I know hip hop would

ultimately become the obsession and also the main issue to my academic study.

This Afro-diasporic, black urban and African-American cultural form went

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across the Atlantics to rapidly spread out its most appealing and notorious features to

the rest of the world. To me, hip hop used to be all those fascinating beat, slick rap

flow, oversized apparel with most fake jewelry, and trendy break dance. It was not

until I began to trace the history, the social issues and the civil rights of hip hop did I

have more precise understanding of hip hop culture from different accounts and

perspectives. Hip hop represents a complex assemblage of modern colored American

culture keeping alive and nowadays it also transforms into myriad looks to live not

only locally but transnationally. Over the past twenty years hip hop music has been

growing in Taiwan from a novel cultural form to one of the most influential popular

cultures. I have witnessed it changing from initial appropriations of the music form to

the later mechanics of pan-patriotic ideology, patriarchy, misogyny and nationalism

wrapped in the lyrics to present its politics in a rather provocative sense. Nevertheless,

if we take a further step to scrutinize how hip hop can reach such a position here in

Taiwan today and to see how Taiwanese hip hop music has entered the phase from the

merely foreign pop music form to the local business, we will later find that trans-

Asian music collaborations with cultural bricolage alter the routes of hip hop music

and its development in Taiwan and give Taiwanese hip hop a new look.

Chronologically, hip hop in Taiwan encountered the global communication trend

by “re-mixing” hip hop elements into Taiwan’s music industry in the early 1990s. It

later became one of the energetic music genres, and the impact of hip hop music

stroke not only the youth subculture but also the former Mandarin pop music styles1

more than ever, which could not be detached from the context of Taiwanese popular

music culture therefore. Besides, hip hop culture, which originates from the streets

and the black neighborhoods in South Bronx of New York City in the late 1970s,

____________________

1. Before hip hop music was introduced in Taiwan in 90s, folk, rock, Chinese ballads and art songs

would be considered as the best seller of mainstream popular music genres.

3

has indeed swept across the world and has been inscribed into and familiarized with

the East Asian regions2 (here mainly indicating Taiwan, Japan, China, Hong Kong and

South Korea).This distribution of hip hop culture, mainly resulting from cultural

fluidity and globalization, affects both mainstream popular culture and subculture

over East Asia for the past twenty years and still thrives today. More specifically, hip

hop music today, therefore, as a notable form of cultural dissemination, social

identification, and art contribution, would be a comparatively substantial field to be

investigated. When listening to the music of some so-called rappers or hip hop artists,

such as Jay Chou (周杰倫), Machi (麻吉), Dog-G (大支) or MC Hot Dog, just to

name a few, one must understand that the music they call “Taiwanese hip hop” has

much to do with its background roots and requires cultural diversity and assimilation

altogether to flourish in Taiwan’s music industry. It represents not only musical and

commercial achievements but also the manifestation of cultural hybridity, both

regionally and globally. In addition, albeit Taiwan’s pop music industry possesses

excellent creative works and talents, abundant production, scholarly works on hip hop

music in Taiwan are yet to be developed; borrowing the words from the music critic

Shi-fang Ma (馬世芳), who once commented on Taiwanese popular music, “a

prosperous market with much less attention and discourse.”3

Furthermore, the growing influence of hip hop music in Taiwan cannot be

viewed solely in the local Taiwanese popular music scene since the popular music

____________________

2. The concept of defining East Asia has always been contested and categorized diversely. According to

the UN sub-regions of Eastern Asia, the idea of East Asia refers to the geographical entirety of People’s

Republic of China, Taiwan (ROC), North Korea, South Korea and Mongolia, instead of the formerly-

dominated “Great China” or ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), the geo-political and

economic organization. The East Asian context here, in a sense, refers to the territories of Taiwan,

China (including Hong Kong), Japan and South Korea, in which share more historical backgrounds and

cultural affinities. Those regions also have more commercial and cultural exchanges in popular music

business in Asia.

3. Cited and translated from Shi-fang Ma. The Best 200 Albums in Taiwan 1975-2005, China Times

Publishing, Taipei, 2009.

4

business in East Asia turns to be so well-connected, even regionally incorporated.

Therefore, the regional incorporations here allow Taiwan’s hip hop music to not

merely absorb the spirit or music elements from America, hip hop’s motherland but to

also distinguish its features by producing the so-called “Taiwanese rap” and through

collaborating with artists and producers from neighboring countries. As a result, to

look back at the process of hybridizing, localizing, and even regionalizing Taiwan’s

hip hop music, we must not disregard the tremendous influence of hip hop music from

other East-Asian countries. Because of such globally regionalized shared facts,

Taiwanese hip hop is endowed with complex meaning in constructing and

legitimating its position into the context of Taiwan’s popular music. In this sense, it is

the cross-regional and trans-Asian cultural exchanges around East Asia that builds

Taiwanese hip hop music today.

We may question about how we consider the development of Taiwanese hip hop

music and its cultural phenomenon both as a social-political issue and as a medium of

establishing transnational and “Asian” interconnected consciousness through different

collaborations to accumulate its cultural capital. As a long-time devotee to hip hop

music, I do pay close attention to how Taiwanese hip hop music in the East Asian

context can be linked back to the contemporary black cultures worldwide and how it

forms its features and later interrelates to the regions of the Chinese circle4 and other

East Asian countries to arouse cultural resonances.

So far, most academic publications regarding Taiwanese or Mandarin hip hop

music are mainly dealing with the issues of how it is affected by or interwoven with

hip hop’s original root in America or how it is de-centered and morphed from the

___________________

4. The China Circle refers to the economic relationship between the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Naughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy; Transitions and Growth. Cambridge: MIT

Press, 2007.

5

American pop or subculture to build its own local collective identity or ideology; yet

the transnational issues of how Taiwanese hip hop music influences or is influenced

by other East Asian countries are rarely discussed or often omitted. However,

Taiwan’s unique locality and colonial history causes the proximity to its neighboring

countries, which to a certain extent affects the development of Taiwan’s pop music

industry and in a way has the impact later on the category of the so-called “Chinese

pop” music around the world as well. The hip hop music in Taiwan has been

incorporated into the East Asian cultures to obtain diverse musical elements and styles

to render different meanings; hence, the widespread Taiwanese hip hop music here in

East Asia would appear to be a very significant phenomenon to notice.

II. Literature Review

Ever since hip hop became one of the most outstanding global popular culture

forms, there have been plenty of researches concerning how hip hop can be

successfully disseminated and then prosper globally. First of all, hip hop is associated

with African-American culture and also African and global diaspora. Paul Gilroy

interprets his idea of the “fundamental dislocation” toward hip hop’s distribution in

his remarkable work The Black Atlantic (1993), asserting this is what makes “modern

western civilisation possible, now dominate its popular cultures” (Gilroy 80).

Consequently, black music is detached from the racial slavery and now has the power

to turn the pristine Africanity into a different meaning and transcend into a new phase.

To use Gilroy’s words, that “it is possible to approach the music as a changing rather

than an unchanging same” and “[new] traditions have been invented in the jaws of

modern experience and new conceptions of modernity produced in the long shadow of

our enduring traditions: the African ones and the ones forged from the slave,

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experience which the black vernacular so powerfully and actively remembers” (101).

Gilroy thus considers that traditional black music has been changed to provide another

channel for imagination. Later, Andy Bennett points out that “hip hop is culturally

mobile” and “the definition of hip hop culture and its attendant notions of authenticity

are constantly being ‘re-made’ as hip hop is appropriated by different groups of young

people in cities and regions around the world” (Bennet 133). Furthermore, music

scholar George Lipsitz states that

Hip hop expresses a form of politics perfectly suited to the post-colonial

era. It brings a community into being through performance, and it maps out

real and imagined relations between people that speak to the realities of

displacement, disillusion, and despair created by the austerity of post-

industrial capitalism. (36)

The performing style of hip hop generated from the very urbanized life and also the

very marginalized part of “ghetto”; through constant struggles and challenges, as

Tricia Rose analyzes, “[it] is the tension between the cultural fractures produced by

postindustrial oppression and the binding ties of black cultural expressivity that sets

the critical frame for the development of hip hop” (Rose 425). Besides, hip hop has

changed and challenged the way people see Western music and therefore provided a

new form of arranging rhythms and rhymes, channeling the politics of Nationalism

and Afrocentrism (Bennett 91). Hip hop, as a genre of global music cross-culturally,

by J. Macgregor Wise’s analyses, becomes “a means of expressing issues of politics,

place, and identity…[m]usicians can also speak to the experience of displacement,

living in foreign lands, longing for real or imagined homelands” ( Wise 89).

There are also many other studies in the globalization and localization of hip hop

by different methodologies. Tony Mitchell adopts Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome”

in Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop outside USA (2001) to explain the globalization

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and transplantation of hip hop and rap culture; Mitchell also asserts that the use of

vernaculars can be seen as a form of resistance to preserve local culture. This idea can

aptly be applied to the use of Taiwanese or Hakka rap in Taiwan for exalting the

Taiwanese consciousness to some extent. Bennett studies the development of hip hop

culture in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and New Castle, England by ethnography to

attempt to elucidate how hip hop can be a resistant form in the local contexts to fight

against the global hip hop. He finds that the youths there attempt to “rework hip hop

into a medium for the expression of local themes and issues came as a number of local

rap groups began incorporating German lyrics into their music” (Bennet 140), so that

the cultural significance can be focused and sung.

As to the Asian hip hop study, Angel Lin seeks to follow Eric Ma’s project

(2002) on the local alternative Hong Kong hip hop/rock band, LMF (also known as

Lazy Mother Fucka 大懶堂) to discover how indie hip hop music artists dig their

niche space and alternative ways for survival instead of only legitimating the

identities among teenagers (Lin 2007). Secondly, ethnographer Ian Condry also does

projects on the study of local Japanese hip hop culture in his Hip-Hop Japan (2006).

By closely observing the local live performances and interviewing the rappers,

Condry draws special attention to how Japanese rappers both show their enthusiasm

and disillusion toward American nostalgia and how they turn hip hop into Japanese

(Condry 210). In addition, Condry clarifies the idea that “localization of cultural

forms, can, and at all times does, proceed simultaneously with an increasing global

sharedness, thus showing that opposition between local and global can be a false

dichotomy that hides more than it reveals” (2). Condry’s assertion discloses that in the

age of globalization, the boundaries of dichotomous symmetry would eventually

become mutual existence and construction.

Certainly, it may be a credible stance to see most of the so-called “glocalized”

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cultural features that can merge all together and live vigorously. In the case of South

Korea, Suh-Kyung Yoon points out “K-pop (as Korean music is known in Asia) is

localized hip hop that tones down the harsh beats of the American genre and deals

with issues more resonant with the Asian youth” and “it has been the dominant genre

in Korean pop music (Yoon 92, my tatlics). This demonstrates that Korean pop music

has intertwined with hip hop music culture, and even has taken it as an indispensable

element in their music industry. It is not likely to separate the relation between

Korean pop music and hip hop culture as Korean government has liberated the policy

regarding travel and media in the 1980s, so foreign television networks and music

could be introduced.

Yet, according to Sarah Morelli, Korean popular music industry has incorporated

rap and hip hop as a style of vocalization but not taken it as a category of popular

music or music genre in Korea. Likewise, black style is widely popular among

Korean youngsters, and even many young Korean students see hip hop dance and

music as “their means to success5” (Morelli 248). This conspicuous cultural

phenomenon later has a huge impact on other East Asian countries by the “Korean

Wave” strategies. Among which, K-pop (or Korean hip hop music in a way) strikes

the Asian music industry to cause turbulence. The social phenomenon has also

affected the culture of hip hop music in Taiwan for the past ten years and has not yet

seemed to die away. It is an important issue that I will have to take a further

discussion in my thesis on how Korean Wave and Korean hip hop have invaded (or

intermingled) into our music industry to alter the look of Taiwanese hip hop music.

As mentioned above, we can see that the globalization and localization of hip hop

___________________

5. Morelli describes teens in Korea today spend time practicing hip hop dance and believe it will be

their most remarkable skill in pursuing stardom. See Mitchell, Tony. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop

outside the USA, 2001, 248-58.

9

have been widely studied, providing essential resources for reference and further

research. In Taiwan, there are a few studies regarding Taiwanese hip hop culture in

different aspects, yet not so many have paid enough attention to the music itself since

street and hip hop dance acquire much more popularity and attention. Jing-yi Li is the

first one who studies the development of Taiwanese hip hop culture as a site of sub-

cultural practice for youngsters to identify with. Her research investigates Taiwanese

hip hop culture from deejay, street dance, graffiti, and rap music, seeking to discover

what the influence of hip hop culture brings to youngsters in Taiwan. Furthermore,

Mike Chuang asserts that there must be “authenticity” existing in Taiwanese rap and

hip hop music that he finds it survives mostly in the spirits of underground hip hop

community and activities. His ethnographic study offers a very truthful and clear

picture of the underground hip hop scene and sites in Taiwan, which helps understand

the politics of local Taiwanese rap and hip hop music. Although both Li and Chuang

have discussed the formation and the influence of Taiwanese hip hop music, they do

not deal with the issue of the trans-Asian collaborations in hip hop music and the

cultural routes, which I argue that it has drastically changed the look of Taiwanese hip

hop music. Since Taiwanese hip hop music now follows neither its local tone nor the

pursuit of its original African-American root; instead, it tends to be clustered with the

East-Asian flow to strive for a survival. The newly formed “East-Asian hip hop”

brings Taiwanese hip hop music a possibility to go trans-Asia. For this reason, the

relation between hip hop music in Taiwan and other East Asian countries can be

intriguing and yet discrepant and also a field worthy to probe.

Those academic studies of hip hop and black dispora cultures mentioned above

provide me weighty research resources in understanding globalized hip hop and the

culture behind it. Those researches enter hip hop culture by different approaches, from

historical perspectives to ethnographic field studies, so I can frame a panorama of the

10

past and the present in the development of global hip hop culture. Still, studies of

Asian hip hop are relatively scant than that of American or European; for this reason, I

believe a primary research of transnational Taiwanese hip hop music is needed as a

contribution for future study since the development of hip hop music in East Asia is

somehow intertwined to each other.

III. Approach

The circulation of hip hop music worldwide can be understood and analyzed by a

sequence of key concepts which deal with globalized and transnational cultural flows.

My thesis plans to first address two significant ideas to explain this cultural mobility.

When placing hip hop music under the framework of a cultural form, in light of the

contemporary popular cultural globalization theories, David Harvey’s idea of “time-

space compression” creates a disjunction to place to thus cause sense of

postmodernity. While new modes of communication have altered the way hip hop was

once toward, as Harvey claims it,

innovations dedicated to the removal of spatial barriers. . . have been of

immense significance in the history of capitalism, turning that history into a

very geographical affair—the railroad and the telegraph, the automobile,

radio and telephone, the jet aircraft and television, and the recent

telecommunications revolution are cases in point. (Harvey 232)

To be precise, as spatial barriers are to be reduced through particular modernizations,

the world has thus turned to be a rather smaller place, and connect producers and

consumers with a global market. Secondly, since cultural flow comes largely from

people’s mobility, in this regard, I will also address the distributions of hip hop music

to the ethnoscape based on Arjun Appadurai’s five influential “scape6” theories in

11

Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). Appadurai

proposes a framework that disjunctures of cultural flow can be termed by five

dimensions: (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) fianacescapes, (e)

ideoscapes (Appadurai 33). Among five of which, ethnoscape are deemed to be the

landscape of persons, tourists, immigrants, refugees or exiles. Thus, as Wise addresses

the idea in music, “[t]he movement of diasporic people changes not only their music

but the music of the places they move to and through” (Wise 87). The African-

American diaspora brings hip hop music to the world, with its Africanity changed,

appropriated or even eliminated into diverse phases. It is therefore no longer

associated only to the blacks. However, hip hop’s spirit has been kept through the

music form, rap, hip hop’s best weapon, along with immigrants from all over the

world, as Tony Mitchell says, “has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and

tool for reworking local identity” (Mitchell 1-2). Thirdly, to discuss the global features

of “re-mixing” and “sampling” presented in hip hop music, as Dominic Strinati’s view

on communication arts, can be marked as “a trend towards the open and extensive

mixing of styles and genres of music in very direct and self-conscious ways”, and this

trend “has ranged from straightforward remixing of already recorded songs from the

same or different eras on the same record, to the quoting and ‘tasting’ of distinct

music, sounds, and instruments in order to create new sub- and pan-cultural identities”

(Strinati 215). Since hip hop music has entered the territory of globalization for over

twenty years, other than merely adopting the technology in music production, the

feature of “re- mixing” and “sampling” can be easily found in the inscription of

society, culture, and even politics. Accordingly, during the unceasing cultural

practices of exchange, re-mixing and sampling, hip hop music will be unavoidably

_________________ 6. Appadurai uses the suffix –scape to address different shapes of landscapes regard the characterization

of cultural capital, in which these landscapes provide diverse perspective as factors of globalization.

12

facing various challenges and changes to fit in with the foreign cultures and therefore

develop a local one outside America.

Then, to have a better understanding of the cross-regional cultural resonances

and the flow of collaborations on hip hop music in East Asia, I attempt to borrow

Koichi Iwabuchi’s idea, which focuses on how the “Asian value and identity”

presented and built under Japan’s extensive cultural interactions with other East-Asian

countries to demonstrate that “the transnational flow of popular culture has

significantly rearticulated Japan’s historically constituted relation with ‘Asia’ in a

time-space context in which cultural similarity, developmental temporality, and

different modes of negotiating with Western cultural influences are disjunctively

intermingled with each other” (Iwabuchi 6). Also, from Iwabuchi’s view, the forms of

youth culture in Asia has departed from its previous traditions because of its

embodiment of heterogeneous origins and cultural bricolage. In this regard, the image

of youths can be defined as “consuming hybrid”, and instead of caring about the

origins of those cultural products, their preferred cultural products have thus become

more “East Asian flavor”; so “[t]hose popular cultural forms made in East Asia are

neither ‘Asian’ in any essentialist meaning nor second-rate copies of ‘American

originals’” (Iwabuchi 200). From this respect, youths in East Asia experience and

receive things similar and yet heterogeneous through rapid local and global cultural

exchanges at the same time.

By focusing on the studies that Iwabuchi illustrates on Japanese popular culture,

I can apply his viewpoint to hip hop music in Taiwan as to narrow down the scope to

examine the cultural flows among Taiwanese hip hop music and its counterparts or

collaborations in other East Asian countries. I would like to examine if the

intermingled cultural interactions of global homogenization and heteregenization of

hip hop music under the East Asian context can be reflected or represented through

13

such discourse.

Moreover, to precisely discuss the transnational collaborations of hip hop music

in Taiwan, I will draw Shin Hyunjoon’s concept of “transbordering”, which has been

transformed and revised from Appadurai’s “ethnoscape” and Eun-young Jung’s notion

of “transnational cultural traffic7,” in which Jung uses to analyze the interaction

between Japanese and Korean popular music. Transbordering refers to the “particular

interactions that have taken place between migrant musicians who have crossed

borders literally and figuratively and this phenomenon is “at once global and local”

(Shin 103). Shin asserts that the idea can be carried and actualized through

international collaborations in music industry, especially in the category of popular

music. In the final analysis, I will take three different transnational hip hop

artists/groups (Da Mouth, Aziatix and Soft Lipa) in Taiwan as my case study; by

analyzing their “transborering” experiences, diaspora image and most of all, their

music works, I intend to prove that “trans-Asian” hip hop music in Taiwan has created

its own niche.

IV. The Outline of Chapters

My attempted thesis will be divided into three chapters. To give a clear picture of

the development of Taiwanese hip hop music and its relation among the East Asian

countries, I will discuss its historical backgrounds, global dissemination to the

analyses of socio-political accounts to focus on hip hop’s global experiences in the

realm of popular culture and how the transnational cultural flow has affected its

development in Taiwan and East Asia. To begin with, I first explore the history of hip

__________________

7. See Eun-young Jung, “Transnatinoal Cultural Traffic in Northeast Asia: The ‘Presence’ of Japan in

Korea’s Popular Music Cuture.” Ph. D. Diss., Univ. of Pittsburgh, 2007.

14

hop, from its origin in America to the later disseminations around the world to bring

out some important ideas of cultural globalization and issues that have been addressed

or concerned. I shall briefly introduce the history of hip hop culture, focusing on its

influences of music form and politics; in addition to its background history, I also pay

close attention to the language use of rap, a kind of African storytelling originally

called “griot” (The History of Rap music 10), and since this chanted rhymes turns into

a distinct modern black verbal communication, its diasporic feature has become part

of “a transnational movement and collective, a transnational dialogue speaking to

local political and economic conditions and providing cultural resources for local

populations to find a voice and means of expression” (Wise 99). Yet, after rap records

and videos have been spread globally, this cultural power of hip hop, as Lipsitz has

viewed it “the radical nature of hip hop comes less from its origins than from its uses”

(Dangerous Crossroads 37). I will continue to focus on the globalization of hip hop

around world and how it causes tremendous popularity and cultural phenomena since

hip hop “demonstrates the various and particular flows of people, music and politics

we’ve been discussing as crucial to understanding cultural globalization” (Wise 101).

My main focus in Chapter Two lies in the development of hip hop music in the

contexts of East Asian countries, and I attempt to connect their interrelations by

closely observing the cultural flow and the “transnationalism” among them. In

addition to merely stating the development of hip hop music in each country, I would

draw attention to Iwabuchi’s analyses of trans/nationalism among East Asian

countries and take Japan and South Korea hip hop (presented features as Korean

Wave) as two main focuses. According to Iwabuchi, “[c]ultural flows among East

Asian countries, particularly between Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea are

gradually becoming active and constant more than ever”; however, cultural flows in

East Asia circulating as transnationalism turns out to highlight “uneven power in the

15

region” (Iwabuchi 201). Japan, in particular, as a major role in constructing meaning

under the system of global capitalism, intertwines with its nationalistic discourse to

generate the transnational cultural power in Asia; in another word, the

transnationalism of Japan’s popular culture renders cultural superiority and

“postcolonial desire for ‘Asia’” (Iwabuchi 202). I will adopt this assertion and

combine it with another significant notion “Korean Wave” (Hallyu or Hanryu in

Korean), which recently has been considered a cultural invasion in the popular

cultural studies to draw significance on how they influence the development of hip

hop in East Asia, especially K-pop is considered, as Joon has put it “a localized hip

hop” (92). This discussion will also be continued to the next chapter to show how

Japanese and Korean hip hop makes great impact on transnational Taiwanese hip hop

music.

I would like to draw attention in Chapter Three to Taiwanese hip hop music

scene to foremost give an account for the development of hip hop music in Taiwan

and the particular issues (Korean Wave and diaspora) concerning East Asian hip hop

nowadays and later discuss their interrelationship among each other. This chapter is

divided into three parts. I first introduce a brief development of Taiwanese hip hop

history to further analyze what topics are most discussed and therefore contextualize

the whole picture of the development of Taiwanese hip hop culture in East Asia. Then,

I shall discuss that ever since the emergence of Taiwanese hip hop culture has become

one of the globally hegemonic forms of popular culture, its transnational

interrelationship among those East Asian countries would trigger myriad social

influences and generate cultural transformations. Second, I draw special attention to

the rappers and hip hop groups as my image and lyric text to exemplify the trans-

Asian collaborations in Taiwan. I will adopt Shin Hyunjoon’s concept of

“transbordering” to support my analyses. Transnational collaborations of music can

16

and always, in a sense, reflect and present the cultural and music flow. Taiwanese hip

hop group Da Mouth (Da Zuiba 大嘴巴), and rapper Softlipa (Dan Bao 蛋堡) to be

the cases (both image and lyrics context) to discuss the East Asian collaborations of

Taiwanese hip hop music and what phenomena and effects they cause by examining

and comparing their music style, modes of collaboration and their figure images.

Along with these two different types of hip hop artists and groups, I also address

Nicky Lee (李玖哲 이철구), the former member of the Machi crew and now leading

vocal of the Asian band (as they name it,) Aziatix and also Jae Chong, the famous

Korean-American producer in East Asia to connect their trans-Asian collaboration to

construct “Asian hip hop” in their debut album. With the analyses of Da Mouth and

Softlipa, I tend to indicate that the recent emergence of the two seemingly wants to

transform the impression that hip hop music used to bring to the mass from hatred,

condemnation, sex or misogyny to a more urbanized and less hard-core preference. In

addition, the members of Da Mouth come from different music and cultural

backgrounds, including Japanese, Taiwanese-Japanese, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese-

Korean descendants, which to a certain extent strengthen the notion of transbordering,

no matter in music or in culture. As to Softlipa, his music style, by the cover slogan, is

described as “rap with urban Jazzy hip hop style”; his Golden Melody Award-winning

album Moonlight and new release Riding Bicycle were produced and collaborated by

one Japanese hip hop producer, Shin-Ski, and an urban jazz group, Jabberloop. I

particularly focus on the Japanese producers here because the transnational crossover

collaboration, which Softlipa presents in his music; I argue that a different Taiwanese

hip hop style of musical expression has thus been formed that Taiwanese local

independent rappers have no longer insisted on the way of making their music on their

own for the purpose of national identity; instead, they turn to transnational

collaborations to seek a novel breakthrough. Last, I seek to address the issue of the

17

possibility of transnational Taiwanese hip hop music by arguing that there is no

absolute “authenticity” in global hip hop, because under the age of globalization, any

claim of any “authentic” cultural form would comparatively dubious when to comes

to essentialism.

My thesis seeks to explore transnational Taiwanese hip hop music in the

context of East Asia and therefore indicate the possibility of “trans-Asian” hip hop

music in Taiwan. I combine contemporary globalization theories as analytical

backgrounds; I further address significant cross-cultural issues, such as Korean Wave

and transnational Taiwanese hip hop music as my main observing focuses. I will also

examine the transnational Taiwanese hip hop music as the case study to support my

assertion. My main aim in this thesis is to offer a solid research of trans-Asia

Taiwanese hip hop music and to develop its cultural routes and cause in East Asia.

18

Chapter One

A Brief History of Hip Hop Music and Its Globalization

Nobody knows how a rapper really feels

A mind full of rhymes, and a tongue of steel

Just put on the hammer, and you will be rewarded

My beat is ever boomin’, and you know I get it started

MC Hammer, “Let’s Get It Started” (1988)

From the very beginning of hip hop culture, the African diaspora holds a large

part of its cultural origin, just as many other music forms popularized in America (e.g.,

jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll). Hip hop’s African root later develops

its spirit throughout the practice of the language form, rap, and other important elements

(breakdance, graffiti and deejaying) to communicate messages of different social and

life issues.

As hip hop culture emerges from the intertwined Black and Latin communities in

America, its innate political nature has thus been presented in order to address the

ongoing poverty, racial discrimination and social injustice. The hip hoppers who have

an alternative mind in exposing their wrath and channeling their voice build their

identity and subjectivity on rap, break dancing, graffiti and deejaying; their distinctive

life styles soon receive wide attention in public and become one of the most

influential youth and popular cultures around the world. As Nelson George points out,

“[B]ecause hip hop has so many elements—music, dance, attitude—its essential

mutability makes it adaptable worldwide” (Hip Hop America 203). As hip hop

expands and grows as a contemporary global cultural form, its wider impacts on

different groups, cultures and regions have thus become notable and researchable.

19

I. A Brief History of Hip Hop Culture

According to the definition of Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture (2006),

the term “hip hop” refers to the newly-formed music and subculture of which Africa

Bambaata credits DJ Lovebug Starski as the inventor. Around 1973, the Zulu Nation8

begins widespread usage of the term hip hop as means to organize the new subculture

(171). The birth of hip hop culture is in fact based on the youth who live in the urban

black community in the South Bronx district of New York City, where people in

poverty desire new things for a change. The background story starts with the city

planner Robert Moses’s The Cross-Bronx Expressway Project between 1948 and

1972. Although this urban renewal project at the first claims to benefit all city

residents, it turns out to support the rich and the influential, leaving the minority and

the working class’s civil rights behind. As Tricia Rose indicates, “The Cross-Bronx

Expressway Project, like many of Moses’s city projects, broke up Black and Latino

communities and left them with little leadership and resources” (quoted from The

History of Rap Music 18). The desperate reality triggers the birth of hip hop culture.

As the founder of the Zulu Nation, Bambaataa urges his young fellows to commit to

rap music and dance instead of drug and violence as outlets to express themselves

(The History of Rap Music 24). Lipsitz analyzes that this appeal, to a large degree,

helps “channel the anger and enthusiasm of young people in South Bronx away from

gang fighting into music, dancing and graffiti” (26). Thus, the performing style of hip

hop is generated from the very urbanized life and also the very marginalized part of

“ghetto”; through constant struggles and challenges, as Tricia Rose analyzes, “[it] is

___________________

8. The Zulu Nation is a group which Bambaata organized in 1974, a collective of DJs, breakers, graffiti

artists and homeboys.

20

the tension between the cultural fractures produced by postindustrial oppression and

the binding ties of black cultural expressivity that sets the critical frame for the

development of hip hop” (425). As a result, hip hop enters the public sphere to

become one of the members of popular culture with its unique performing style and

critical nature. The activities and events held by Bambaataa soon spread in favor of

young people of color under the tough living circumstances in the marginalized

communities, which those groups of diverse ethnicities enable the cross-cultural

exchange, as Lommel describes the phenomenon, “[g]raffiti-tagged trains became

unwitting cultural ambassadors, showcasing hip hop throughout New York City”

(Lommel 24).

And African-American and Latino teens from neighborhoods across the city

descended on parks and clubs in the Bronx to hear rap musicians relate experiences

overlooked by mainstream media and entertainment” (Lommel 18-19). Nelson

George also concludes in Hip Hop America (1999) that Bambaataa’s important

contribution lies in the myth he established for hip hop culture for the Zulu Nation

“filled the fraternal role gangs play in urban culture while de-emphasizing crime and

fighting” (18). At present, Bambaataa and the Zulu nation still serve as the anchor and

also mediates disturbances for its safety value in hip hop culture for over twenty-five

years and more (George18-19), even when hip hop is not possessed by merely small

amount of local people.

Along with Bambaataa, DJs (Disco Jockeys) in the clubs such as Kool Herc and

Grandmaster Flash are also the precursors in cultivating and promoting rap music and

break dancing. They develop new techniques9 for break beats on turntables and

___________________

9. The new break-beat techniques included “cutting”, “back spinning, “punch phasing” (The History of

Rap Music 23). Further aesthetics of rap will be explained in following sections.

21

blend reggae styles (based on their Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean heritage) into the

foundation of rap music; they recruit young people for dance crews and produced hip

hop tracks for rap groups like The Furious Five, which push the culture to higher

visibility as well (The History of Rap Music 23). Kool Herc introduces Coke La Rock

as his MC (master of ceremonies); Coke La Rock later invents several party slogans

which are to be deemed as the classic ones in the club culture. As to Flash, with his

electrician background, he further invented and applied techniques to mix sound. As

George analyses, “[O]ut of his curiosity came the ‘clock theory’ of mixing where

Flash is able to ‘read’ records by using the spinning logo to find the break” (Geroge

19). Flash even leads beat mixing to an entertaining level by using body gesture to

please the crowd (George 19). On the whole, Africa Bambaata, Kool Herc, and

Grandmaster Flash’s contributions to hip hop culture not only build the criteria of rap

music but also merge the music into “an expression of a local culture hungry for new

connections and eager to form a unique identity” (The History of Rap Music 25) to the

youngsters in the South Bronx community and “outgrew the local and burst on to the

national scene, drawing in young white teenagers as well as others of the African-

American diaspora” (The History of Rap Music 25). By the time the rap hit “Rapper’s

Delight” (1979) presented by Sugar Hill Gang, it has marked the momentous

milestone that hip hop music first starts to be known by the mainstream public, so as

to claim the coming of the epoch of hip hop (Rap Attack 3 ix). The song also heaves

the position of hip hop “from a local to an international entity” (Encyclopedia of Rap

and Hip Hop Culture xxiii).

Nevertheless, Bakari Kitwana has provided an alternative way to understand the

formation of hip hop culture. In The Hip Hop Generation (2002), Bakari Kitwana

points out that the group of African Americans whose birth years start from 1965 to

1984 can be considered as the group of “hip hop generation”. They are involved in

22

the activities of all areas, from artists to activists. They also lay the key ground that

helps materialize this cultural form. Hip hop generation is set to describe “the young

African Americans born between 1965 and 1984 who came of age in the eighties and

nineties and who shared a specific set of values and attitudes” (Kiwana 4). This group

of people play a very essential role in laying the groundwork for hip hop to appear in

the society as a prominent youth/popular culture. They obtain the rights from their

older generations to enjoy “the fruits of civil rights and Black power movement,”

including voting rights, affirmative action, the rise of Black elected officials, and

social programs benefiting the poor (Kitwana 147). They offer their critical or

political viewpoints through their works. Rap artists in the late 1980s such as NWA,

KRS-One, Queen Latifah or writers and filmmakers like Carlito Rodriguez, Bonz

Malone, Selwyn Hinds, John Singleton and Hype Williams in the mid-1990s all

endeavor themselves to the making of hip hop culture. Kiwana believes that those hip

hop generationers lay the foundation for understanding the generation’s worldview

(Kiwana 4-5). However, with those harvests of the previous civil rights movements,

those young Black middle-class citizens of hip hop generation seem to have less

critical and political acts regarding their culture and rights. Hence, the hip hop

generation seeks for a change covering race, class, gender and ethnicity. As Kiwana

continues to state, “our generation focuses on a wide range of issues: racial profiling,

environmental justice, electoral politics, youth issues, parenting, and globalization”

(Kiwana 149). Yet, Kiwana gives credits to Africa Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash,

Melle Mels and DJ Kool Herc and many others that Lisa Sullivan called the “bridge

generation,” who technically do not belong to the hip hop generation but the ones who

“gave birth to the hip hop movement that came to define the hip hop generation”

(Kiwana xiii-xiv).

The historical consciousness, as mentioned above, endows the hip hop

23

generation with a strong motivation to search for their identity and also encourages

them to manifest their significance to the society of coming out from the streets to the

nation.

II. The Development of Rap Music

For the very first time hip hop culture appears as a cultural form constituted

by the four elements of rap, deejaying, graffiti and break dancing; hip hop rises

to inherit myriad features from different cultures.10 Although each one of the elements

counts in the development of hip hop culture, from Andy Bennett’s view, rap still

remains the particular and most significant one as resisting and addressing the living

condition of everyday life in Bronx. As Bennett argues,

In particular, the absence of a need for a musical skill, in the more

conventional sense of being able to play a musical instrument, gave rap

an essentially “hands-on” quality, making it an ideal medium through

which young people could spontaneously express their views or simply vent

frustration regarding issues such as interracial violence, poverty, and

unemployment─issues that were all exacerbated due to the ghettoization of

the Bronx district and its labelling as a “no-go” area. (89, my

italics)

Accordingly, rap as an oral art form contains the innate feature of arranging materials

____________________

10. According to Ian Maxwell, hip hop culture has the standard narrative, which from his words would

be the three key practices, “rapping, the historical precedents of which can be found in the singer-

historian father/faith healer of sub-Saharan Africa, inflected through the forced orality of slavery and the

more benign evangelism of southern Baptism, (re)united with the rhythms of Africa via the Caribbean,

collided, in the late 1970s, in New York, with the Latino-American tradition of quasi-combative dance

and (also) Latino urban idiographics, morphing into what Brewer (1992) calls ‘Hip Hop Graffiti’”

(Maxwell 41). See Phat Dope, Beats, Rhymes: Hip Hop Down Under Comin’ Upper (2003)

24

at hand for sounds and blending with rhythms and rhyming words, and using vinyl

records on turntables to produce sound effects called “scratching.” The “hands-on”

quality makes rap accessible because instrumental devices can be replaced by human

voice to produce the sound effects of music.

It is also considered that rap’s oral form has carried the African root from the

historical slavery in America. Based on the storytellers in traditional African culture,

“griots” are believed as the root of rap music, by singing and reciting things to reserve

knowledge. In Lommel’s words, “[T]hey entertained their audiences, and they educated

their people. . . [t]hey required and inspired the participation of their people in events

and by extension, in communities” (Lommel 10-11). Henry L. Gates has argued that

rap is the cultural continuity and “an African-American oral tradition, traceable through

the Middle Passage back to the sub-Saharan griot, elaborated by the experience of

slavery” (Phat Dope, Beats, Rhymes 42). Griots had the similar structures as rap now

possessed of its oral musicality which the “chanted rhymes punctuated by the rhythm

of drums underlines modern rap music, as it does so much of 20th-centrury black poetry

and musical expression, such as R&B11” (Lommel 11). Hip hop and R&B songs have

had bonds between each other because hip hop songs often “sample a musical or vocal

hook from a well-known R&B or pop song” (Hip Hop America 64) to acquire success

in business.

Moreover, hip hop culture’s thriving specialties include the performance presented

by the MC rapping on the stage, the DJ(s) working on musical collages and scratching

sound effects, and sometimes the DJ samples/adapts beats or verses from old songs

__________________

11. R&B sprang from the chord and beat of jump blues in the 1940s and it laid the groundwork for rock

and roll. In recent development, R&B evolves into a more changeable facet, often associating with hip

hop that “R&B began adding stylistic components of hip-hop until – by the end of the millennium—

there were hundreds of artists who featured both rapping and singing on their records.” More details of

the relations between contemporary R&B and hip hop will be discussed in later chapters. (See the music

genre definition http://www.allmusic.com/genre/r-b-ma0000002809)

25

seeking to create different styles for a new song. The sampling technique turns out to

be the most adventurous invention in the development of hip hop music that ties the hip

hop history from traditions to innovations (American Popular Music 386). Bennett

adopts L. Back’s interpretation on the “mixing” with the term “bricolage” to illustrate

the relations between rap music and the hip hop culture itself. According to Back’s

definition, “[R]ap music is independent on the rearranging of musical fragments

intermixed by the DJ. . .[t]he DJ is close to what Lévi-Strauss (1976) called a

‘bricoleur12’ or craftsperson who makes use— of musical fragments in order to create

new music” (Cultures of Popular Music 90). Back indicates that rap music has the

similar usage of musical fragments for which it extracts different music and lyrics from

different pieces of music works, thus forming the same “bricoleurist cut and mix”

effects (Cultures of Popular Music 90). Thus, Bennett concludes Back’s notion to

suggest that rap is postmodern music because it reassembles “songs and sound bites

from different eras, genres and ‘cultures’ of music corresponds with the blurring of

stylistic boundaries now occurring across a range of cultural and artistic concerns”

(Cultures of Pop Music 90). The idea of “bricolage” stands for a great part of hip hop’s

spirit, especially in the making of its music; through the process of bricolage, hip hop

music proves its capability of absorbing diverse elements across time and space and

creating its own cultural production.

Apart from the technical features presenting rap music with cultural diversities,

rap lyrics also possess an artistry of its poetic aesthetics. Lyrics, however, can be seen

_________________

12. To define “bricolage” in youth or subculture, Hebdige takes British punk music to reveal how the

subcultures are constructed: different materials with or without meaning borrowed or assembled into

shaping the punk style, which “was defined principally through the violence of its ‘cut-ups’” (Hebidige

106, my italics). Hebidige then clarifies the idea by exemplifying the already “manufactured objects

which qualified as art because [he] chose to call them such. . . a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television

component, a razor blade, a tampon — could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion”

(Hebidige 107).

26

as rap’s most essential property, which functions to make the music works expressive

and cultivated. Adam Bradley carefully examines the structure and the techniques of

rap and classifies its poetic conditions in Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop

(2009) to six categories: rhythm, rhyme, wordplay, style, storytelling, and signifying.

He discreetly puts rap into a theoretical domain and explains it in an intellectual eye.

First, he claims that rap is public art and also an oral poetry; it cannot be separated from

the rapper/MC or leave without the beat because the beat in rap is “poetic meter

rendered audible” (Bradley xv). Rap has to be sung and performed:

The majority of rap beats are in 4/4 time, as Bradley indicates, and it means

that “each musical measure (or bar) comprises four quarter-note beats. For

the rapper, one beat in a bar is akin to the literary poet’s metrical foot. Just as

the fifth metrical foot marks the end of a pentameter line, the fourth beat of

a given bar marks the end of the MC’s line. (Bradley xix-xx)

In addition to beat, rhythm, another essential factor in poetry, is also significant to

the creation of rap. Drawing on M. W. Croll’s theory, Andrew Walsh explains the

importance of rhythm in Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (1987):

[T]he rhythmic form of verse is the same in its essential principles as that of

the music of song, from which it is, in fact derived in the first

instance…meanwhile a great of poetry continues and will always to

be made much like song as possible. Dancing and music are the arts of

rhythm; they have nothing to learn their own business from poetry; poetry,

on the other hand, has derived all it knows about rhythm from them.

(Walsh 192)

Therefore, rhythm proves to be one of rap’s fundamental elements, born with

rapper/MC’s voice and the beat they produce to create the dual relationship. Besides,

when rappers/MCs want to achieve the conformity with the syncopation and the stress,

27

they must try to connect their works with flows and rhythms that can best surprise the

audience.

Along with the beat and rhythm, rhyme can also be regarded as the most creative

and original artwork that rappers/MCs make from their mouth as well. In general, rap

usually rhymes in the end of the line, falling on the last beat, as Bradley analyzes, and

“two lines in succession with end rhymes comprise a couplet” (Bradley 50). With every

repetition of the last (or middle) stressed vowel, there comes the rhymes in the

accordance with the sound. Yet, whether the rhymes lie in the end or in the middle of

the lines, the function of the rhymes can always be the sparkle or the spotlight of rap.

Furthermore, the literary technique “wordplay” is another indispensable yet

interesting element of rap. Wordplay may possibly be the “most revolutionary way that

rap refashions the language. Wordplay creates surprising figures of speech and thoughts

that bind words and ideas in unexpected ways (Bradley 91). Rap morphs when MCs

have to use the inexplicit implications (similes or metaphors) to avoid the subject matter

they actually refer to; in this regard, rap can transcend the language into another level,

more playful and tactful. This technique not only presents the varieties of rap but also

demonstrates rap as the poetic form and a cultural phenomenon as well.

As to storytelling, many believe that it is a credit to rap, but also a defect. Since

rap is performed in public, the lyrics weigh much more than the written text, as it is

usually attacked by some social critics (e.g. C. DeLores Tucker, the African-American

activist, was deemed the most aggressive one in degrading the value of rap) for the

excessive inclination toward violence, misogyny, drug, and commercialism. However,

there are still intelligent storytellers who contribute themselves to writing their real life

stories and personal opinions and perform them with skilled rhymes and rhythms. The

lyrics can stand for an “attitude.” Tricia Rose once mentioned in Black Noise: Rap

Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994) that to rappers, storytelling

28

means more than just sharing life experience:

Rappers tell long, involved, and sometimes abstract stories with catchy

and memorable phrases and beats that lend themselves to black sound bite

packaging, storing critical fragments in fast-paced electrified rhythms. Rap

tales are told in elaborate and ever-changing black slang and refer to black

cultural figures and rituals, mainstream films, video and television

characters, and little-known black heroes. (Black Noise 3)

Rap has close relationship to urban black culture, carrying and voicing out the thoughts

and attitudes of urban blacks. In a sense, storytelling communicates how the ethnicity

live their life and how they would like to share their life with others via this slick

language form.

Even though rap now can no longer be exclusive only to the “Blacks” or, to some

extent, not as the medium of conveying the black consciousness for its highly

commercialization, the performing style still reveals strong individual or local identity.

Moreover, when rap is appropriated into different languages other than English, its

language structure will also be modified into a novel form with new metrical flows and

new syncopated rhythms to meet the rhetoric device and thus to create unique lyrical

aesthetics. For instance, French Rapper MC Solaar, whose rapping style is considered

pure musicality that both the combination of the rhymes and syllables of French

language of his works render with different flows, punch lines and stops. Signifying

(aka battling) is a rather special facet of hip hop culture. Competitors stand face to face

to deliver improvised rap, battling rap skills (including rhyme, puns, and other wordplay)

with one another; whoever has better skills wins the battle. Such “freestyle battle” could

have originated from the ancient Greeks thousands of years ago.13 Because of its

___________________

13. See Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk (2000) for a word definition on rap.

29

impromptu characteristic, some people may wonder its orthodoxy of being poetry

instead of the finely revised composition. However, as Bradley seeks to defend that “no

matter how we define the precise connection, the freestyle battle provides a way of

understanding something as a whole. Most raps, whether freestyled or written,

celebrates individual excellence” (Bradley 179).

In a word, youngsters channel their emotions, thoughts and life philosophy

through rap, turning daily conversation into lyrical or poetical patterns and also

communicating many of the personal ideas about political, social and racial issues for

“rap is a legitimate literacy tool with the added benefit that addresses the social,

economic, and political position. . . It serves to facilitate cultural synchronization”

(Forell 30). Yet, no matter what political or social causes have ever influenced and

reconstructed the transformation of hip hop culture, as young African-American (and

other ethnicities that make the progress) people resort to rap music for the vent to

dissatisfaction or anger toward the society thirty years ago, hip hop culture now is going

beyond its original root and it has morphed into diverse looks concerning the popular

culture worldwide. Since the serious issues discussed from the African-Americans such

as racism, inequality and oppression have been loosened, the definition of hip hop has

been reworked as well (Bennett 102). Nonetheless, music remains the core of hip hop

as it progresses into the postmodern popular culture globally (George xiii).

III. The Globalization of Hip Hop

The globalization of hip hop culture could be discussed in several phases and

aspects as cultural mobility takes great part in its worldwide development. First of all,

Paul Gilroy addresses the Black Diaspora in The Black Atlantic (1993) to explain that

hip hop is not only associated with African-American culture but also African and global

30

diaspora. Gilroy asserts that the process of hip hop’s distribution could be interpreted as

the “fundamental dislocation” since black music is detached from the mobility of race

and turns the pristine Africanity into a different phase which can mutate elsewhere (The

Black Atlantic 101). Traditional black music henceforth varies and provides another

channel for imagination. Andy Bennett also points out that “hip hop is culturally mobile”

(Bennett 133). One important reason lies in its resistant nature, in terms of the easy-to-

be-appealing provocativeness of rap, is that rap “can be used as a means of engaging

with and expressing dissatisfaction at the more restrictive features of everyday life in

globally diffuse social settings” (Bennett 89).

Yet, what facilitates hip hop culture to spread globally does not merely conclude

with one dimension. According to Appadurai’s accounts, the disjunctures of cultural

flows can be classified into five scapes, which are enthnoscapes, mediascapes,

technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. Among them, the ethnosapes and

mediascapes are fairly related and commonly adopted to elucidate the globalization of

hip hop. Ethnoscapes refer to the landscape of persons that move from place to place,

including “tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving

groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect

the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (Appadurai

33). Therefore, Wise addresses both ethnoscapes and mediascapes in global music to

elaborate that “the movement of diasporic peoples changes not only their music but the

music of places they move to and through….[T]hese immigrant populations represent

potential audiences for these music” (Wise 87). In this sense, global musicians can carry

the experience of displacement and also “speak to trans-Atlantic, and transnational

movement of people and music” (Wise 89-90). Thus, hip hop culture’s dissemination

relies largely on people’s diaspora with the unceasing movement and cultural practices

of exchange around the world. Obvious transnational samples given as South Korean

31

rap groups Drunken Tiger, the group members are mostly Korean ethnicity with

American nationality, rap in English and Korean and sample local Korean music into

their songs and sign to Korean record label (Wise 101). Similar to Drunken Tiger,

Taiwanese hip hop group Machi rap in Taiwanese, Mandarin and English, and they

record and produce their music in both America and Taiwan, releasing their albums on

international record label. The cases above present how human movements can affect

the spread of music in such a global form and thus alter the content of music from its

original look. Mediascapes, as Appadurai defines, are related to the “landscapes of

images” and are also “disjunctures” that cannot be formed as simple or mechanical

infrastructures:

Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities

to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television

stations, and film-productions studios), which are now available to a

growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to

the images of the world created by these media. These images involve many

complicated infections, depending on their mode (documentary or

entertainment), their hardware (electronic or preelectronic), their audience

(local, national, or transnational), and the interests of those who own and

control them. (Appadurai 35, original italics)

Hence, the mediascapes offer audiences large contents of different sorts of texts, from

television to audio products, to which “the world of commodities and the world of

news and politics are profoundly mixed” (Appadurai 35). The technical and media

agencies both render the so-called “black” music with public attention and propel hip

hop culture onto global stage. Nelson George takes Michael Jackson’s music videos

as a pioneering model when his music videos first changed people’s appreciation of

music, the images of his music videos not only “extend the conceptual reach and

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upgrade filmmaking style and budgets for acts of all colors” (George 99) but also

pioneer for other crossover stars (e.g. Whitney Houston, Prince and Lionel Richie) to

gain much more visibility. While rap group Run-D.M.C. playes an essential role in hip

hop’s first music video, MTV Channel’s daily show Yo, MTV Raps! helps promote hip

hop culture to a larger stage. As George says, the show “didn’t just pull in viewers—it

sent seismic waves through the whole music industry. By giving hip hop music,

dances, and gear a regularly scheduled national platform, the broadcast was integral to

inculcating hip hop’s distinctly urban culture into the rest of the country” (George

101). Moreover, as George continues, videos can “project images of these ever-

changing styles and the artists who wore them across the globe, as no other African

American music style had been before” (102). Appadurai pretty much draws the

account that mediascapes “tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of

strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a

series of elements” (Appadurai 35). Hip hop’s attitude and the obsessions of urban

America have been transmitted to the world through the images of music videos;

while “black music was shown only briefly and often in a very culturally hostile

environment” (George 103), the constantly repeated images from music videos

engage young kids everywhere around the world for hip hop’s larger than life

personas has been visualized since then and therefore make the culture “mythic”

(George 98).

Yet, the globalization of hip hop culture manifests itself in various aspects because

of hip hop’s innate mutability when it appears in different countries. Scholars and

cultural observers deduce that “mutability” enables hip hop culture (including its

music, dance, and costumes, or ideologies such as Afrocentrism or political

inclination) to be embraced diversely by the young people and popular culture

worldwide. The mutability of hip hop can be detected from different fashions. Tony

33

Mitchell adopts Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome” to interpret the quick application of

hip hop culture and rap music into different cultures. He uses Silent Majority, a

Switzerland rap group that raps in a mixture of English, Jamaican patois, French,

Spanish, and Swahili to exemplify how. The multilingual use of the languages can be

seen as “a ‘plant’ neatly corresponds to Deleuze’s ‘rhizome’ and serves to emphasize

the ‘glocalization’ of rap” (Mitchell 3) and he also asserts that the use of vernaculars

presents as a form of resistance to preserve local culture. This idea applies to the use

of Taiwanese or Hakka rap in Taiwan for exalting the local Taiwanese consciousness

to a certain extent. Moreover, based on Bennett’s ethnographic study of hip hop

culture of Frankfurt am Main, Germany and New Castle, England, he attempts to

elucidate that hip hop tends to be a resistant form in the local contexts. The youths

there attempt to “rework hip hop into a medium for the expression of local themes”

(Bennett 140). Bennett also finds that “local rap groups began incorporating German

lyrics into their music” (Bennett 140), so that the cultural significance in the lyrics can

be portrayed and performed through such artistic creation.

In France and Italy, hip hoppers are likely to express the political and socially

conscious side of hip hop music for rap is taken as a means to articulate the political

or critical appeals for them and to vent the anger toward the government (George

206). The radical nature has been transplanted into foreign culture. As Lipsitz views

the phenomenon, “the radical nature of hip hop comes less from its origins than from

its uses” (Dangerous Crossroads 37). In Hong Kong, the local alternative Hong Kong

hip hop/rock band, LMF (also known as Lazy Mother Fucka 大懶堂) seeks the

identity from teenagers with their local consciousness and blue collar image. They

create the “emotional space” for their fans to feel they are an integral whole to the

group which brings “the band and its audience together to express something likewise

unintelligible, a rage or frustration or something else which expresses their daily

34

affective experience of life in Hong Kong” (Wise 105). Eric Ma argues that LMP

presents a local identity that Hong Kong has been longing for since its diasporic

history lacks strong “nationalist imperatives” and it always “involves a triangular

articulation of Chinese nationalism, British colonialism, and globalization” (Ma 187).

Japan and South Korea adopt different manners in carrying the high popularity of

hip hop culture. In Ian Condry’s Hip-Hop Japan (2006), he closely observes the local

Japanese live performances and interviews the rappers. Condry draws special attention

to how Japanese rappers both show their enthusiasm and disillusionment about

American nostalgia and how they turn hip hop into Japanese (Condry 210). They

embrace the grassroots of the African-American hip hop culture, which they call “new

blackism” while at the same time they also seek the latest fashion of hip hop trends, or

go as far extreme as to tan their skin dark (George 204). However, Japanese hip hop

still has created its specialty by the language use and different performing styles that

gives the culture a local tone. Moreover, Condry clarifies the idea that “localization of

cultural forms, can, and at all times does, proceed simultaneously with an increasing

global sharedness, thus showing that opposition between local and global can be a

false dichotomy that hides more than it reveals” (Condry 2). Condry’s assertion more

or less discloses that under the age of globalization, the boundaries of dichotomous

symmetry would eventually become mutual existence and construction.

In the case of South Korea, Suh-Kyung Yoon points out “K-pop (as Korean

music is known in Asia) is localized hip hop that tones down the harsh beats of the

American genre and deals with issues more resonant with the Asian youth” and “it has

been the dominant genre in Korean pop music” (Yoon 92, my italics). Nevertheless,

according to Sarah Morelli, rap has been well-incorporated into Korean popular music

industry and hip hop music has been taken as a style of vocalization but not been

seriously deemed as a category of popular music or music genre in South Korea, which

35

seems to generate the rupture from what hip hop culture is usually defined and realized.

Similarly, black style is widely popular among Korean youngsters, and even many

young Korean students see hip hop dance and music as “their means to success” in

pursuing the stardom.

From New York to Paris, or Tokyo to Hong Kong, hip hop has emitted its light

to shine the global culture. In this chapter, I have discussed the history of hip hop culture,

from its origin in America to the later national dissemination and “the hip hop

generation”, which refers to the people committed the contribution to the development

American hip hop. I also have addressed the language use of rap, pointing out the

original African roots and its linguistic features that credit it a distinct modern black

verbal communication. Yet, I focus on the globalization of hip hop culture, discussing

its dissemination and how its socio-political consciousness has affected different

cultures to be resonated since “hip hop demonstrates the various and particular flows of

people, music, and politics […] as crucial to understanding cultural globalization” (Wise

101). In the next chapter, I will continue to focus on the development of hip hop music

in the context of East Asia countries. I will pay attention to the proximity to Taiwan,

Japan and South Korea to closely analyze the cultural flows and transnationalism among

each other and how they intermingle with different issues of Asian hip hop music that

turn out to influence the experience of hip hop music in Taiwan.

36

Chapter Two:

The Transnational Development of Hip Hop Music in the East Asian Context

During the past decades, hip hop culture has arrived and been embraced by the

youths and the popular culture around the world. As I have mentioned in the previous

chapter, after hip hop appears to be the global shared culture by cross-cultural

exchange, people’s diasporic movement and the circulation of international capital

commodities and technology, its impact has thus been expanded for the culture’s

strong features of “remixing” and “sampling” to inscribe different cultures into the

category from local identity, politics to the development of society to decenter or

innovate hip hop’s global look. The routes of the disseminations of hip hop do not

occur to only one itinerary after hip hop departed from America, in which different

societies and cultures around the world can breed diverse hip hop cultures that now

emerge to be connected to turn into one of the significant global cultures. Ever since

hip hop has been widely spread and been inscribed and familiarized with the East

Asian regions (mainly indicating Taiwan, Japan, China, Hong Kong and South

Korea), it has also become one of the most intriguing and also influential popular

cultural forms over East Asia. The East Asian context of hip hop culture, in a sense,

could result from the geographical proximity and cultural affinity for East Asian

countries share some of the historical backgrounds and cultural affinities other than

the Euro-American ones, which Koichi Iwabuchi asserts “East Asia as a region”

(Iwabuchi 403) to have more commercial and cultural exchanges to a certain extent.

In this chapter, I shall discuss the influences of cultural flows and routes

regarding the development of hip hop music and the issues around its transnational

development in the context of East Asia, focusing on the mainstream fad of Korean

Wave (i.e., K-pop), J-R&B and then the hip hop trend and the transnational mass

media culture in Taiwan to thus indicate how the interrelationship of hip hop’s cross-

37

cultural and regional experiences in East Asia affects Taiwanese hip hop music.

I. “Asianism” as Thinking Transnational over National

As Okakura Kakuzō mentions earlier in The Ideals of the East (1941) to point

out that “Asia is one,” he suggests that every region of Asia, though demarcated by

geographical, social and cultural ranges, has unique connections to build a common

life to each other. Yet, over the past decades, the definition and interpretation of

“Asianism” has been reconstructed and revised through various means since the end

of World War II. Asianism once indicated Japan’s another imperial reign after Asia’s

long post-colonial history of the Western countries that granted Japan the expansionist

role to resist the Western imperialism in wartime. However, Japan’s defeat in World

War II subverted the situation and even changed the conception of Asianism and the

connotation of Japanization to later entitle it a more positive meaning. As Iwabuch

Koichi elaborates in Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese

Transnationalism (2002), this historical turnover “curtailed Japanese cultural

orientation toward other Asian countries as a colonial power” (9) and simultaneously

Japan forged to change the fairly inferior status compared with that of the Western

(usually referring to the United States) by indigenizing or domesticating the Western

culture, to which intended to replace the process from “imitation” to “appropriation”

(Iwabuchi 10). Moreover, Iwabuchi asserts that even though Japan received notorious

reputation after the war, the prevailing economic growth along with other countries in

Asia after the 1960s reversed the situation because “[t]he rapid economic growth of

several countries in Asia14 has, for the first time in history, turned negative

connotations associated with the term Asia into positive ones” and “[i]n this context,

the Japanese experience of modernization and its economic power are no

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longer perceived as scandalous or spectacular, since the ascent of Asian power is

becoming more important to the West” (Iwabuchi 12, original italics).

Therefore, on the account of Iwabuchi’s assertion, Japan’s returning-to-Asia

experience transits and mutates into a more novel and positive form. Although

constantly seeking for the Japanese national identity through an unique place built

under the trichotomy of Asia, Japan and the West, Japan’s encounter with Asia

mutually grows with the so-called “Asian values.” Namely, the rising power of Japan

has created a space to speak for herself since “the rise of ‘Asian’ capitalism signifies a

transnational configuration wherever the global spread of Western-origin capitalism

has made any attempt at a clear discursive demarcation of ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’ (and

‘Japan’) fallacious” (Iwabuchi 15, my italics). Iwabuchi also discovers that other than

the past historical invasion and the political complex which Japan once longed or

imagined concerning the regions of Asia, in recent decades, the Japanese

commercialized popular culture has taken over the position in terms of diffusing

Japanese TV dramas and popular music since “[t]he development of communication

technologies has facilitated the simultaneous circulation of numerous kinds of media

information, images and texts, on a global level” (Iwabuchi 16). This phenomenon

explicitly represents Japan’s transitional take on its cultural flow in the East-Asian

regions.

In fact, Iwabuchi indicates that transnational interactions have tremendous

impacts on the circulations of Japanese popular culture because

[C]ultural flows among East Asian countries, particularly in Japan, Taiwan

and South Korea are gradually becoming active and constant more than

____________________

14. The countries that Iwabuchi mentions here include Singapore and Malaysia. The leaders of these

Southeast Asian countries, such as Lee Kuan-Yew and Mahathir Mohamad, advocated the preliminary

Asia value against the Western modernization.

39

ever……as the spread of common popular and consumer culture in many

parts of Asia is often referred to as evidence of the ‘Asianization of Asia,’

evidences cited are in many cases the prevalence of Japanese popular

culture in Asia. (Iwbuchi 209)

However, even if those East Asian countries receive and share cultural influences

from each other, Iwabuchi does not suggest that the Japanese colonial power of

wartime has disappeared henceforth; on the contrary, Iwabuchi points out that the

“Asia” in Japan is reworked through the transnational popular cultures, which

“Japan’s conception of being ‘in but above’ or ‘similar but superior’ to Asia is

asserted, displaced and rearticulated” (Iwabuchi 199). Thus, Japanese popular culture

can be reconstructed through a seemingly postcolonial route to disseminate to other

areas across East Asia yet not quitely deemed as a negative approach as what the

Asianism in Japan was once accused. As a result, the wide spread of Japanese popular

culture in East Asian regions reveals the reciprocal relationships of the transnational

exchange:

Young people in Taiwan or Hong Kong actually perceive the sense of

cultural similarity or proximity in positive ways in consuming Japanese

popular cultural forms. Yet, even if this is the case, audience identification

of cultural proximity should not be seen in any essentialist manner. It is a

more complex and dynamic process of ‘becoming,’ in which the perception

of comfortable distance and cultural similarity is based upon a recognition

that Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan live in the same temporality, the

recognition brought about by the narrowing gap of material conditions and

the (globally) converging tendency in terms of the urban consumerism of an

expanding middle class, the changing role of women in society and the

development of transnational communication technologies and media

40

industries. Hence, even if a craving for Japanese popular culture and

consumer commodities is being generated among the youth in East Asia, it

is no comparable to the yearning for ‘America’ evoke in the 1960s or 1970s

Japan, in which the people found the pleasure of identifying with the

materially and symbolically unambiguously superior center. (Iwabuchi 205,

my italics)

Iwabuchi thus claims that the popularity of Japanese popular culture among East Asia

is formed upon the mutual foundation of the proximity with other East Asian

countries, the growth of the middle class in material societies, the elevation of women

roles, technologies and the development of media industries. Yet at the same time, the

fondness of Japanese popular culture does not completely symbolize an attitude of

xenomania, i.e., the frenzy for Western or American culture or the identification of

Western power; instead, it is forged with wider intensity and connections among other

Eastern Asian countries to perform a cultural fusion. On this account, the Asianism

presenting in Japanese popular culture would be as a reversed version differing from

the regional dominant power or ideology in the past.

However, those influential reasons shown above somewhat disclose the “return

of Asia” (Iwabuchi 15), particularly as media industries propel the transnational

circulation of East Asian popular culture among the regions. Iwabuchi also

specifically points out the importance of transnational media market in East Asia:

East Asian media cultures are not just well-received domestically. They

have crossed the national boundaries as well, especially to other parts of

East Asia. This is suggestive of another trend of media globalization that

regional connections are enhanced in such a way as to bypass the command

of Euro-American media culture production and distribution. Furthermore,

inter-Asian promotion and co-production of media cultures has become

41

commonplace with the growing collaboration and close partnerships

among media culture industries in the region with the aim of pursuing

international marketing and joint ventures spanning transnational markets

(Iwabuchi 199, my italics).

From this perspective, the transitional collaborations indeed take a great part in

facilitating the cultural exchange and cluster the shared Asian value.

Similarly, Leo Ching discusses Japan’s regional identity on the basis of

Asianism over the transnational development. Ching mentions in the article

Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in

the Age of Late Capital (2002) to indicate that Japan and Asia are mutually seeking a

more modern consumerism and also the shared popular culture:

Asianism no longer represents the kind of transcendental otherness required

to produce practical identity and tension between the East and the West.

Today, “Asia” itself is neither a misrepresentation of the Orientalist nor the

collective representation of the anti-imperialist. “Asia” has become a

market, and “Asianness” has become a commodity circulating globally

through late capitalism (Ching 306).

Ching then refers to the Japanese popular music producer, Komuro Tetsuya’s

viewpoint from an interview: “I want to create an entertainment complex for Asians.

It will be a place not just for Japanese or Chinese, but for Asians as a whole. I foresee

music as a way to hold the continent together” (Ching 306, my tialics). Tetsuya’s

statement here manifests that pop music in East Asia may carry out the possibility of

bringing the regions a new unification under the transnational cultural flow, which to

a certain extent echoes Iwabuchi’s concept that “inter-Asian media culture

consumption has brought about new kinds of cross-border relationships, mutual

understanding and self-reflexivity about people’s own society and culture on a large

42

scale that has never been observed before” (Iwabuchi 201).

As global hip hop music evolves throughout East Asia as one of many pivot

genres of popular music, Taiwan’s hip hop music has also been embraced by constant

interactions and cultural exchange from other East Asian regions and countries. In the

past twenty years, Taiwanese hip hop has been changed drastically in several phases

and received the recognition during the developmental stage. Hip hop music in

Taiwan first grows as imitation and appropriation of the music form directly

implanted from America, and later expands as one of the sub-cultures regarding local

identity and national recognition. However, as its tentacle spreads across East Asia,

hip hop music in Taiwan enters into the East-Asian realm that seems to discover a

new face differentiating from the past. In the following discussion, I would draw on

the development of Japanese and South Korean hip hop music and have a primary

analysis on how they could interconnect to Taiwanese hip hop music in different

periods.

Undeniably, due to Taiwan’s modern colonial history with cultural and

geographic proximity toward Japan, Japanese culture has a huge impact on the

development of Taiwanese local culture in myriad dimensions accordingly. Even

though Japanese pop music has widely influenced the music industry in Taiwan, it is

until late 1990s and late 2000s that Japanese hip hop is thus shown on the growth of

Taiwanese hip hop music. There are two reasons to explain the nearly a decade gap.

One is because hip hop in Japan, as Ian Condry describes, “grew from as a small,

underground scene in the eighties and early nineties, largely dismissed by Japan’s

major media companies, to become a mainstream pop culture phenomenon today”

(Condry 1). Meanwhile, hip hop in Taiwan then is still in its early experimental stage

with only a few attention received in the early 1990s. The other reason is that

Taiwanese hip hop music had once been demarcated by two diverse forces at the time,

43

that is to say, the battle between local Taiwanese and the ABC/ABT (American-born

Chinese/Taiwanese) rappers or hip hop artists to dispute the authenticity against

Taiwanese hip hop music. However, the influences regarding the J-R&B trend, the

performativity of Japanese rap and the succeeding Korean wave (i.e. Korean hip hop)

have indeed accelerated the spread of hip hop music and propelled it to the

mainstream, incorporated as one of the transnational music genres around East Asia

through transnational collaborations, inter-Asian media culture exchange,

communication, and consumption.

II. Japanese Hip Hop and R&B/Soul Trend

Japan is the country that opens her arms to hip hop culture in its early stage.

Japanese hip hop is first discovered in the early 1980s with a small group of people in

local clubs, where youngsters practice and battled their skills with remixing, sampling

and breakdancing before it grew mature and reached mainstream success. Ian Condry,

the author of Hip Hop Japan (2006), explicitly investigates and analyzes the history

of hip hop in Japan and how it has evolved and transformed the black (or African-

American) culture into Japanese. In Hip Hop Japan, Condry deals with various facets

of Japanese hip hop comprehensively. He begins from the early stages of the

underground Japanese hip hop in the 1980s, finding out the premier links between the

imitation of the music and dancing style to the later issue of mimicking the “black”

and how hip hop turns into Japanese forms under the flow of globalization.

Initially, the radicalized topic regarding the globalization of hip hop culture,

whether there is any connection of Japaneseness existing in the blackness: two

dialectic debates upon how Japanese hip hoppers reinforce and reproduce the black

style by themselves and how they seek to develop the unique and distinctive forms to

44

fight against in the other way. Condry then states that even if race issues does trigger

controversy in Japan, it is not as the same as that of the United States. For the reason,

he tends to clarify that

hip hop creates a space of questioning race and power by laying bare the

constructedness of racial identity. Japanese hip hoppers are not engaged

solely in transforming hip hop style into something pure indigenous, but

rather in reconfiguring the cultural politics of race such that the issues do

not revolve primarily around dichotomies of Japanese versus other. (46)

Moreover, Condry continues to explain the phenomenon in an alternative

account, eschewing from the local versus global debates, but more depending on the

new model of transnational cultural politic of difference. As Japanese rappers called

themselves “yellow B-boys”, it is a means to remind people that “race forms a

necessary part of hip hop consciousness than in asserting a pan-Asian racial identity”

(48).

Then, Condry also focuses on the language usage applied in Japanese rap. He

reckons that during early hip hop era, rap in Japanese language was considered an

impossible act because early Japanese rappers thought the Japanese language pattern

“simply would not ride the rhythm” (149). Yet, except for some bilingual rappers,

rapping in solely English language never actually occurs in J-rap. For the issue,

Condry goes to two explanations: first, as Japan confronted the high peak of bubble

economy, it was the political-economic factor that Japan attempted to resist the

Western economic power to thus build a healthier domestic music industry itself.

Second, Japanese rappers learned to innovate and exchange the Japanese language

pattern so as to meet the rhyme and to adopt new approach by mixing English and

Japanese or using Japanese vernacular to thus “liberate” the Japanese language in rap.

To Condry, this is all about “finding a language that can crack the fissures of artificial

45

language, the standard Japanese, and in so doing, change society” (152). In this case,

Japanese rap lyrics construct its uniqueness by creating the new patterns of language

and using local slang to feel domestic. Consequently, the newly invented language

pattern of Japanese has conquered the language barrier of rap verses; in other words,

English then tends to be less adopted in the composition of Japanese rap music.

More importantly, Condry, who spends numerous years studying Japanese hip

hop, discovering and asserting that “genba” (generally referring “sites of

performance” or “sites of cultural production” in Japanese but the actual definition of

genba would vary, depending on the performative and social accounts regarding

Condy’s concept) can provide “a window on some cultural processes better than

others” (13). Genba, as the most indispensable factor in breeding the local Japanese

hip hop culture in performative and media contexts, which Condry believes “[genba]

was very useful for broadening our understanding of the mutual construction of

cultural forms (like hip hop) beyond ‘producers vs. consumers’ to include to other

actors (artists, record companies, media, fans, etc.) in dynamic feedback loops” (13).

For this reason, Genba is where Japanese underground and mainstream hip hop lies its

cornerstone and also the most essential cultural site that cradles, localizes and

diversifies the culture.

However, according to Condry, it is not until around 1994 and 1995 that

Japanese hip hop finally jumps up to the mainstream popular culture and wins the

commercial recognition not only by those underground artists but also by the

cooperation with the record companies and music producers. Yet, the key factor that

accelerates hip hop music to be widely spread in Japan is the combination of female

vocals and male rap by mainstream music production around late 1990s right after the

success of several female R&B artists. This new music style that comprises rap with

the arrangement of hip hop and urban R&B15 music has soon started to be noticed.

46

Condry specifically addresses the music form and explains how it has affected the

Japanese mainstream music industry,

[i]n the late 1990s, a Japanese R&B boom led by women singers helped to

bring (male) Japanese hip hop into mainstream consciousness. Sparkled by

female artists like Misia, Utada Hikaru, and groups like Double and Sugar

Soul, this ‘new R&B’ (nyū aru ando bii) was characterized by melodic and

attractive young women singers. The music tends to be bass heavy with an

emphasis on the rhythms and always with a token DJ scratch solo. As these

singers and groups produce hit songs, they often record remix versions with

Japanese rappers accompanying them. (171, original italics)

The “new R&B” trend is believed to have much to do with the rise of the female

artist, Utada Hikaru (宇多田 光), whose music creates a large space for J-R&B and

hip hop to be disseminated over Japanese mainstream as Condry concludes “it was the

new R&B boom that brought a variety of the underground hip hop artists into the

national spotlight” (Condry 171).” and “Utada defined the pinnacle of Japanese pop

music in the late 1990s with the style that drew on hip hop production methods of

sampled, bass-heavy music” (Condry 172). This new R&B style exalted by Utada’s

songs not only sheds light upon Japan’s hip hop music but also alters the

arrangements of hip hop, R&B and soul music in other East-Asian countries adjacent

to Japan since then. Although Condry argues that the J-R&B trend brought by Utada

__________________

15. According to the definition of the American credible website “AMG” (All Music Guide), urban

R&B is the subgenre that derived from the R&B/soul music of the 1980s and 1990s. However, music

producers, such as Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis (Janet Jackson), Denzil Foster & Thomas McElroy (En

Vogue), and Antonio “L.A.” Reid & Babyface, who “dominated urban music at the turn of the decade,

with Babyface going on to a hugely successful singing career in his own right.” Accordingly,

“[u]rban R&B and hip-hop continued to cross-pollinate during the early '90s, eventually resulting in a

new hybrid tagged “hip-hop soul.” In the context of J-R&B, hip hop and R&B music are incorporated

as a novel music form, which combines Japanese (or English) rap, DJ scratching effects, soulful vocals

and the arrangement of syncopation and heavy rhythms.

Website link: http://www.allmusic.com/style/urban-ma0000011965

47

Hikaru formed a standard female language (as a comparatively vulnerable or

generalized feminine expression) use in her song lyrics to sound more “kawaii”

(cuteness or loveliness in Japanese) for the sake of marketing, which somewhat

contrasts and weakens the masculine image of the collaborated hip hop and rap artists,

and the language choices of women’s speech might also construct a notion of

Japaneseness that “women tend to be regarded as ‘more Japanese’ than men, at least

of their language use” (172-173). Nevertheless, around early 2000, more male J-R&B

and hip hop artists came into view, such as Ki-yo (清貴), Hirai Ken (平井 堅), and

the male duo CHEMISTRY. These “male” singers tend to collaborate with different

rappers so that there are not merely “female singers vs. male rappers” but more male

singers involved to break the image of female R&B singers being “kawaii” in the

music production. And along with music producer Kiyoshi Matsuo’s promotion on the

mass music production of R&B and hip hop in the market, the new R&B trend have

thus acquired the rank in Japanese pop music to embrace more audience.

Simultaneously, the popularity of the Japanese new R&B shone on the pop music

in Taiwan in early 2000 as well. Followed by tremendous inspiration of Utada Hikaru,

Hirai Ken, A.I. CHEMISTRY, and Misia, Taiwan’s music industry begins to notice

and produce hip hop and R&B music similar to that of Japan, initially adopting

female vocals with male rap vocals, e.g. Elva Hsiao and music producer Jae Chong’s

“Cappuccino” (1999), Jay Chou and Coco Lee’s collaboration “Daw Ma Dan (刀馬

旦)” (2001), and Will Pan and Jill Hsu’s “Tell me” (2003). This kind of music style

has thus formed a model for Taiwan’s R&B and hip hop music.

In fact, before the new J-R&B trend, the group Tokyo D once sweeps over

Taiwan’s pop music industry in the early 1990s, a music band constituted by eight

Japanese breaking dancers. They often present their stage performance with breaking

and new jazz dance and style with dreadlock hair and in saggy tops and jeans,

48

accompanying catchy candy pop songs or dynamic dance rhythm in both Mandarin

and Japanese language. Although the Tokyo D fad on Taiwanese pop music does not

seem to last long, even less than L.A. Boyz during the period, their influence, whether

on hip hop music or dance style, uncover a path to transnational collaboration by

introducing the new wave of hip hop into Taiwan’s mainstream popular music

industry at the time, in a rather Japanese fashion.

As a matter of fact, the other part of the rise of Taiwan’s hip hop and R&B music

(which will be discussed and elaborated in Chapter 3) also flourishes during the early

2000. It can often be traced respectively to the overwhelming success of Jay Chou and

David Tao, whose musical composition and arrangement contain the elements of

R&B, hip hop and soulful vocals. In addition, MC Hot Dog and Dwagie’s (aka 大支)

hardcore rap also generates a series of controversies because of the sharp rap lyrics

and the political ideology. Still, I would like to assert and conclude again that the J-

R&B and hip hop trend has been positively played an essential role in introducing a

novel form of R&B and hip hop music to Taiwan no matter in singing, composing or

performative style and until now, the influence of this kind of pan-Asian J-R&B style

still lasts in Taiwan’s pop music production.

III. The Korean Wave as K-pop of “The Localized Hip Hop” in South Korea

Aside from Japanese R&B and hip hop music, South Korean pop music has

also swept over East Asia for the past decade and still expands its power via the trend

of Korean Wave. In the definition of Korean Wave (2008) edited by The Korea

Herald, the term Korean Wave “refers to the phenomenon of Korean popular culture,

which is disseminated through the mass media and is enjoying the popularity outside

of Korea” (13-14). Korean Wave (also known as Hanliu 韓流 / 한류 hallyu) covers

49

a broad range of cultural and commercial consumption, from TV drama, movie,

reality show, fashion, to popular music to propagate Korea popular cultures, even to

endow the audience with the imagination concerning the country itself. In fact, South

Korea’s media liberation during the late 1980s to the mid-1990s is considered to be a

fairly crucial turning point for the rise of Korean Wave. Doobo Shim indicates that the

rapid increase in foreign television and the television channel expansion and the open

film policy toward Hollywood are two important factors awakening Koreans to pay

attention to their domestic industrial development in local culture (Shim 31). After the

first blockbuster Korean film Sopyonje (1993) topped the box-office chart, Korean

public and the government were excited to believe that the idea of culture could be an

industry, that the cultural industry had the potential to advance the national economy

(Shim 32). The initial rise of Korean Wave was the popularity of Korean TV drama,

which caught the East Asian (majorly among China, Japan and Taiwan) audience’s

eye in the late 1990s as Korean TV networks (KBS, MBC, and SBS) began to sell the

copyrights overseas (Hyejung Ju 75). With a great quantity of drama series export,

Korean TV drama, in this case, has been regarded as the outset of Korean cultural

product and the leading factor of Korean Wave, which has more or less dominated the

popular trend in many East Asian countries after 2000. Korean Wave then circulates

as an immense cultural phenomenon, in light of Sang-Yeon Sung’s elaboration:

[Korean Wave] Hanliu is a global flow of a national product which

circulates only within regional boundaries. Although it is not a new

trend, it should be recognized as a different type of global flow, one in

which “Asianness” is emphasized, and one that is affected by the

accelerated speed of the cultural movement through new technologies.

(Sung 57, my italics)

However, Korean Wave goes beyond the regional boundaries to other countries

50

outside Asia after 2009 such as USA, Iraq and Australia, continuing to broaden its

growing power. It is not extraordinary to mention how Korean Wave is spread under

the process of globalization, but what it actually signifies within such global flow is to

share its Asianness with other Asian countries, and how it has been rooted in other

cultures to thus transform or localize by different means matter substantially.

I would particularly emphasize the later prosperity of K-pop music, for it has

earned the reputation and success and has also been well-connected in both Asian and

global market. Furthermore, the K-pop music itself contains the very deep core from

hip hop and R&B elements to thus be cultivated as “the localized hip hop” in Korea.

Before the rise of Korean Wave, according to Shim, the Korean pop music scene is

under the basis of two categories: Korean ballads and ppongjjak. The Korean ballads

have been classified into love songs with melodic sound and romantic lyrics that are

similar to American folk music. Ppongjjak, which has often been onomatopoetically

called “the Japanese enka-influenced musical style by Koreans, is “[l]argely

associated with the pathos of the older generation” and “has experienced periodic ups

and downs” because the government would ban the hit songs with elements of

“morbid Japanese aesthetics” (Shim 35). Shim also mentions that before the 1990s,

either the Korean pop music or the entertainment industry was prosperous. In

addition, South Korea’s two public television networks, Korea Broadcasting System

(KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) control most of the music

distribution and the consumption of the music genre; that is to say, the television

medium mainly manipulate the taste of local pop music, judging which songs or

singers should be considered popular.

Shim indicates that the tremendous change of South Korea’s media emerges

after Seoul’s 1988 lifting restrictions on foreign travel and the considerable quantities

of people purchasing satellite dishes in the 1990s, so more and more musicians begin

51

to adopt different music styles into their works and fans are also eager to “have a

better grasp of global music trends and hunger for new tunes from local musicians”

(Shim 36). Against this backdrop, Western music is channeled as “an integral part of

this rapidly urbanizing world” and “[t]he seemingly homogenization of music in the

case of Korea…is replete with new innovations, both musical and societal” (Morelli

249).

Sarah Morelli, who focuses on Korean pop culture finds out that rap, hip hop and

R&B and dance music take large part of Korean pop music. She observes that “[i]n a

country where approximately half of the population is under age thirty…the sounds

and styles of rap and hip hop are now common place” (Morelli 248). However, what

even more marks the mix of globalization and indigenization is the appearance of

Korea’s shinsaedae 16. Shinsaedae’s voice, as Morelli drawing on Kim Byong-suk’s

definition, is “loosely identified as those in their twenties, with rap music and Seo

Taiji at the center” (Morelli 250).

Seo Taiji is regarded as the most powerful and influential popular singer during

the 1990s, who represents the threshold for “an introduction to the musical culture of

the shinsaedae” and the leading role of musical transformation in K-pop (Morelli

250). Seo Taiji’s group, Seo Taiji and boys, composed of one singer, and two rapper-

dancers, release their first single “I Know” in 1992, which is believed to be the first

rap track in Korean language. According to Morelli, Seo Taiji and the boy’s hybrid

music styles utilize numerous elements of contemporary Western music, such as rap,

hip hop, soul, rock, hardcore and dance music. Seo Taiji even sets the criterion on

creating the musical form which “employs rap only during the verses, singing

________________

16. Shinsaedae, or New generation in English, Kim Byong-suk refers to those who were

born after 1970, and “whose values and customs seem alien and irresponsible to their elders. These are

youth who cut holes in new jeans, prefer pizza to rice, and don’t believe that the old are necessarily

wise.” 1993. “Rap Setting New Beat in S. Korea” Chicago Sun-Times, 29 November

52

choruses in a pop style” (Morelli 250). Yet, as Seo Taiji’s career progresses, he tends

to express his thoughts through critical lyrics and he is later concerned about social

issues, e.g., miseducation, inequality and political corruption.

Shim considers that Seo Taiji’s music excites local listeners in Korea because

they have already been fed up with the ballads and pongjjak that lacks “dynamism and

musical experimentation” (Shim 36). Seo Taiji successfully creates a whole new

music style intermingling Western music, affects the composing and performing styles

for the succeeding artists and expands the scale of the local music market. Moreover,

as Morelli discovers, Seo Taiji and boys establish a group style based on hip hop

culture, and many of whom “not only use rap, R&B and other ‘black’ musical styles,

but also model their visual images after the b-boy styles of the USA” (Morelli 254).

Seo Taiji and boys’ overall impact could be very significant to the development

of Korean popular music and to the following trend of Korean Wave. The formation

of the group, one singer and two rappers/dancers influences the latter style of Korean

pop bands or groups; the adoption of hip hop, R&B and rap music in their musical

compositions serves as the standard model of K-pop music. Yet, they do not obey the

rules from television networks to sing only ballads or ppongjjak; instead, they turn to

political or social issues as the topics of their music works. The group’s success leads

to the expansion of record company and talent agencies as well. Even when Seo Taiji

and boys disband in 1996, one of the group members, Yang Hyun-suk continues to

produce hip hop music and founds his own company YG Entertainment in 1996. I

would conclude that hip hop music has been growing strong in Korea after Seo Taiji’s

achievement on the music transformation, and the K-pop inherits many of Seo Taiji’s

style of hip hop music. Hip hop is a fairly active music genre in Korea, and many

youngsters pursuit their success through the mode of Seo Taiji and boys.

As Korean pop music starts to be promoted outside South Korea, along with the

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Korean Wave, its distinguishing characteristics expressly catch the countries which

are sphered by its power. Suh-kyung Yoon, who once interviews Bernie Cho, the host

of Seoul Sonic on the music station Channel V, mentions in the article Swept Up on A

Wave (2001) to point out “Korean music, fashion and style has basically taken over J-

pops popularity” and he further agrees that “[t]houghtout Asia right now, people will

grab anything that reeks of kimchi” (Yoon 92).

In addition, the trend of Korean pop music in East Asia could be traced back

from the boom of Korean artists and groups like CLON, H.O.T. (Highfive of

Teenagers), NRG, Fly to the Sky and Baby V.O.X. around the mid-1990s. However,

as Yoon continues to analyze the reason that Korean pop music would overtake the

Asian market, he turns to hip hop as the possible answer. Yoon explains that Korean

pop music has been affected drastically by American hip hop culture on a whole:

For the past decade, hip hop—the music, the clothes, the attitude of

America’s black ghetto—has been the dominant genre in Korean pop music.

Brought to the country by Korean-Americans, the hard-core raps and harsh

beats have been toned down and adapted by groups like Seo Taiji, The Boys

and UpTown. Today, almost all the bands sport at least one Korean-

American, usually a rapper, who adds vital street cred. (Yoon 92-93)

Yoon specifically points out that Western hip hop culture has permeated into South

Korean’s popular culture, especially the music industry. However, Yoon also indicates

that “Korean hip hop gives the genre an Asia spin, making it more accessible to

teenagers growing up in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia” (Yoon 93). Korean hip

hop’s influence on Asian mainstream popular music, as well as on Taiwanese pop

music has “increasingly obvious in Taiwan and among Asians living abroad” (Korean

Wave 13). Meanwhile, the fast dissemination of K-hip hop helps build up the

audience of R&B, funk and jazz music to a certain extent in Taiwan as well because

54

those music genres are often considered minor in the market.

In this chapter, I first address the notion of “Aaianism” in the past and present as

the main idea to discuss the cultural exchange and interaction occurred in East Asia

and how Asianness is employed and consumed through the dissemination of popular

culture under the transnational flow. I also pay close attention to the development of

Japanese and Korean hip hop music to further indicate the influence which later

generate on specific issues of Taiwanese hip hop music. I would continue analyzing

Taiwanese hip hop music’s trans-Asian experience in the next chapter to examine its

recent transformation.

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Chapter Three

Hip Hop Music in Taiwan: History, Culture and Trans-Asian Experience

In the previous chapter, I examine hip hop music’s transnational experience in East

Asia, and how Japanese and South Korean hip hop and R&B music (K-pop in a way)

intermingle or assimilate with Taiwanese hip hop music. As a country willing to absorb

and digest new things from different cultures, Taiwanese hip hop music also encounters

its myriad changing phases, and still grows and varies from time to time. I began to

listen to hip hop and R&B music in the late-1990s when I was a teenager. At that time,

I only enjoyed the rhythm, beats and the melodies. Later, I started to realize that hip

hop culture contains more than what I had imagined; it could be a form of entertainment,

but it could also be a weapon to resist against social injustice. In this chapter, I would

first summarize the history and development of Taiwanese hip hop music to give a clear

picture of how Taiwan hip hop music is formed and how it is interconnected with East

Asian hip hop music on particular topics (Korean Wave and diaspora) to further discuss

their interrelationship among each other. I will later take Taiwanese hip hop group Da

Mouth (Da Zuiba 大嘴巴) and rapper Softlipa (Dan Bao 蛋堡) to be the cases,

discussing their image and music style to elaborate the East Asian collaborations of

Taiwanese hip hop music and the phenomena and effects they have brought about. I

would also address Nicky Lee (李玖哲 이철구), the former member of the Machi crew

and now leading vocal of the Asian band (as they name it), Aziatix, and also Jae Chong,

the famous Korean-American producer in East Asia, who has been responsible for the

music production in their albums and is the producer and rap vocal for many Taiwanese

singers. Through their trans-Asian collaboration, they tend to construct an image of

“Asian band” in their debut album. Then, I would seek to address the issue of the

possibility of transnational Taiwanese hip hop by arguing that there is no absolute

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“authenticity” in global hip hop, because under the age of globalization, any claim of

any “authentic” cultural form would be comparatively dubious when it comes to

essentialism.

I. The Development of Hip Hop Music in Taiwan

Despite the complex historical and cultural factors that hip hop means to African

Americans of the young generation, the story of hip hop culture in Taiwan flips in an

ambivalent manner. Unlike some of other countries where hip hop comes as an

underground activity, its first formal appearance on the stage in the Taiwanese

mainstream culture is through public entertainment, namely, our pop-music industry.

First, according to Hao-li Lin’s field study on the development of hip hop culture

in Taiwan (2005), the emergence of Taiwanese hip hop culture does not resemble the

way as hip hop’s original root, disco. Lin asserts that because the discos in Taiwan

during the 1970s embrace lyrical ballads rather than disco, soul or funk music, lyrical

ballads have later taken over the place to be the hegemonic and the most popular music

form in Taiwanese pop music industry. And hip hop culture fails the specific era to

cultivate and stand firm in Taiwanese mainstream music industry. For this reason, the

latter development of hip hop culture in Taiwan would only focus on dance,

partying/clubbing or apparel or accessories (Lin 13). Furthermore, Taiwanese record

companies do not categorize hip hop as a music genre at the very beginning.

Chronologically, the singer Harlem Yu is the first one who mixes rap and the

syncopation in his hit single “Yes, sir! (Bao gao ban zhang 報告班長)” in 1987.

Although not mature enough and more like Chinese chants instead of rapping, the song

receives great success in the music market. It is the first step that music with hip hop

and rap elements has the potential to gain its popularity in Taiwan’s pop music industry.

57

However, not until L. A. Boyz publish their debut “Jump” in 1992 does hip hop music

confirm its visibility in Taiwan. The so-called “ABC” (American-born Chinese)

singers/artists at the moment not only inject new energies to our pop music industry but

also lead the American singing style to hit the market of Chinese ballads and rock music.

L. A. Boyz, whose members are all Taiwanese boys growing up in Los Angles, open

the market and bring in the popularity of hip hop in Taiwan. Their dancing style, apparel

and English-mixed Taiwanese rap all appeal the teenagers to imitate, thus causing a

trend. Afterward, Jutoupi (豬頭皮/朱約信) figures as one of the pioneers contributing

his works in Chinese rap and he later chooses to rap in Taiwanese in his music career.

Billboard (1994) says Jutoupi has

combined Western rock and traditional Chinese songs, and has tackled

subjects in his lyrics that have gone against the grain of much of the country’s

pop music. Jutoupi is one of the first true Taiwanese rap artists. . . Jutoupi's

music, with its spirit of social criticism and personal expression, is closer in

style to American rap.” (Billboard vol. 106 1, my italics)

At the early age of the development of hip hop music in Taiwan, “hip hop” has not yet

been classified as a music genre, but is appropriated as composing elements or a

performing style to be presented to the audience. However, as what has been mentioned

above, hip hop culture (or its features during the period) is introduced into Taiwan’s

music scene through mainstream mass media. As he puts the popular culture in a

postmodern stance, Strinati asserts that postmodernism has brought the emergence of a

society in which the mass media and popular culture are to be the most “important and

powerful institutions.” And the media is to be a mirror to reflect the social reality, even

to include the economy in to the realm. “What we buy and what determines what we

buy—is increasingly influenced by popular culture because popular culture

increasingly determines consumption” (Strinati 205-06). The rise of hip hop music in

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Taiwan is launched by mainstream popular music, which indicates that it needs and

depends on economic consumption as one of the channels to present its mobility. The

naked truth is that the “Western” hip hop culture imported from America has been

migrated into Taiwanese culture to be socio-economical phenomena.

For global interactions in music, the formation of Taiwanese hip hop music does

not happen accidentally. It connects with the mainstream popular music to be

distributed via media at first. Hip hop music in Taiwan later encounters the process of

its domestication. Initially, it imitates and copies the forms of American hip hop culture

and then attempts to create a style of its own after the L. A. Boyz fad. Yet, after the boy

group breaks up, the development of hip hop music in the Taiwanese mainstream music

industry seems to lose its visibility.

Another phenomenon that needs to be noticed is that hip hop music sneaks into

more underground activities around year 2000. It jumps from the mainstream music

industry to the underground. Some rappers turn to support local disco performances and

some turn to take hip hop music as an outlet for expressing political thoughts or

ideological inclination against the government. Originally, they speak out for the

underprivileged, reflect social issues, and present their personal thoughts via rap lyrics.

Their music works constitute a form of resistance and localization; on one hand, they

boost the localization of Taiwanese hip hop music; on the other hand, they communicate

hatred, misogyny, and racial discriminations. Evidently, this kind of composing style

inherits from American gangsta rap17, which often characterizes specific lyric contents

in violence, nihilism, street life and misogynistic themes. Although gangsta rap is

deemed as one of the most form of hip-hop in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in America,

_________________

17. According to All Music Guide, gansta rap evolves out of hardcore rap and gangsta rap contains “an

edgy, noisy sound.” Gansta rap is lyrically as “abrasive, as the rappers spun profane, gritty tales about

urban crime. Sometimes the lyrics were an accurate reflection of reality.” See complete definition on:

http://www.allmusic.com/subgenre/gangsta-rap-ma0000002611

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the direct appropriation of such provocative wording is normally attacked by

mainstream audience, and to some extent disconnects from most people’s daily life in

Taiwan.

Nevertheless, as more and more local Taiwanese artists (e.g. Dwagie, MC Hot

Dog and 拷秋勤/Kou Chou Ching) devote their life careers to hip hop music in the

popular music industry underground or mainstream, the situation changes again. They

successfully combine the oncoming “Tiker” (台客文化/ Taiwanese rooted culture)

culture with hip hop spirits/features to invent a distinct touch and fashion a new cultural

form. The term “Tiker” originates from the former military communities in which the

people live there are the military dependents from China; initially, the term usually

refers to the local Taiwanese people with the meaning of depreciation. However, as

Tiker culture is praised by some local artists and rappers, the meaning of “Tiker” turns

out to be a rather positive, and even a popular slang in popular culture, emphasizing on

the real Taiwaneseness. Ian Condry has explained the phenomenon in an article that “[a]

clear trend is that foreign styles are initially consumed as foreign, but gradually the

local appropriations come to dominate the market” (Condry 226).

The article “Hip Hop Culture in Taiwan: Reflections on the Commercialization

of Hip Hop Culture” says that Taiwan has long been intimate with the American culture,

so “the introduction of the hip hop culture has also imported the original, inexplicable

historical and socio-cultural phenomena of the hip hop ideology.” Yet, it is far from

enough to keep a culture alive by only mimicking its superficial part. In addition to

local appropriation, the government also adopts the major elements of hip hop culture

for propaganda in social activities to present parts of Taiwanese hybrid cultures, such

as Metro Street Dance Competition or Rap Battles for Teenage. However, in the

meanwhile, the sales of American hip hop records and singles thus drops off instead. It

could be deduced that the rise of Tiker culture, Korean Wave and J-R&B

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simultaneously form another power, and all of which weaken the influence of the

American hip hop music.

As what I have mentioned in the previous chapter, Korean Wave and J-R&B have

drastically altered the development of Taiwanese hip hop music. The elements of

Korea’s “localized” hip hop music could be seen in numerous K-pop stars/groups’

music works, from CLON, H.OT. or BoA’s earlier albums to the latter Big Bang, Super

Junior, and 2NE1. Their music works contain many of the black music elements, such

as rap, soul, urban R&B and funk music. What is worth mentioning is that since Korean

hip hop has been prominent in both South Korea and East Asia, to some extent, their

music production has been considered mature and well-produced by music critics and

audience. The commercial success somewhat propels the popularity of hip hop music

from the underground scene to the mainstream market.

In addition, the popularity of early J-R&B in Taiwan neatly overlaps with the

Korean Wave in its early phase as they both partly stand for East Asian hip hop music.

Utada Hikaru and Hirai Ken’s soulful vocals with arrangements of urban R&B music

and rap lyrics obtain immense success and acceptance in Taiwan. Taiwan’s popular

music industry and its audience begin to embrace such music genre. However, in the

first instance, the fervor toward K-pop and Japan fever is seriously criticized by

Taiwanese local rappers who think Korean pop music and idols are shallow and

superficial. MC Hot Dog and Dwagie’s “The Invasion of the Korean/Cold Wave” (2001)

triggers the event by rapping the lyrics: when I turn on television, there is various hip

hop music which looks like Chinese but sounds like an-ya-ha-sa-ya [the

incomprehensible sound of Korean language]. Strange! Why do you buy Korean music

when it is just incomprehensible s**t (Yang 202). In “Rap(p)ing Korean Wave: National

Identity in Question” (2008), Fang-chin Yang indicates that Taiwanese rappers intend

to create a series of binaries, seeking to “take back their territory” by intentionally using

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scatology as a weapon to convey their power, while she believes the employment of

scatology is yet powerless (Yang 203-04). Such viewpoint regarding cultural invasion,

discrimination of nationality and political incorrectness are often taken by local rappers

to fight against their identity and authority as Korean Wave and Japan fever initially

gain the recognition in Taiwan. Nevertheless, the pan-political rap lyrics are not

welcome by the mass audience because they consider the lyrics not appropriate to be

performed in the public. Moreover, as some of the independent rappers enter

mainstream music market, Taiwanese hip hop music also meets its transitional phase.

In the past, Taiwanese hip hop music could be roughly divided into two groups:

the local Taiwanese rappers/artists vs. the ABC rappers/artists. The two conspicuous

groups constantly debate and contend against the authenticity over their positions in

Taiwanese hip hop music. Now, Taiwanese hip hop music has again transformed

through transnational crossover collaborations with East Asian hip hop artists to seek

lucky strikes. As the crossover of East Asian and Taiwanese hip hop music discloses a

transnational interrelationship on cultural transformation, Taiwanese hip hop music

thus differs from its former impression. The rise of Softlipa overturns the image of local

Taiwanese rappers; his close-to-life rap lyrics, urban jazz music style and the

collaboration with Japanese hip hop producer open a new page for the development of

Taiwanese hip hop music. Furthermore, the hip hop group Da Mouth provides an East-

Asian transbordering identity, which in a way destroys the long-term binary opposition

of local vs. Western in global hip hop music, but establishes another mobile form of a

new hip hop music expression in Taiwan. Also, Nicky Lee’s music and his personal

stardom reflect an East-Asian identity that constantly shifts from place to place.

Although the history of hip hop music does not seem long in Taiwan, its

plentiful performance on each stage offers varied looks in the development of cultural

bricolage, social and national identity, and global mobility of diaspora, etc. From the

62

early appropriation, the later localization to the present trans-Asian experience, it

unceasingly evolves and keeps bringing surprises.

II. Case Studies on Taiwanese Hip Hop Music’s Trans-Asian Experience

In recent development of Taiwanese hip hop music, transnational collaborations

among Taiwanese and East Asian hip hop artists become as an fresh act. New modes of

transnational collaborations point out the global mobility and the transnational links

which hip hop makes available across boundaries. Da Mouth, the first hip hop group in

Taiwan with members of different Asian ethnicity, is constituted by Huai-chiu Chang

(leading male vocal, Taiwanese-Korean of US citizen), Senda Aisa, (leading female

vocal and rapper, Japanese), Sakamoto Chun-wha (beat maker, Amis-Japanese raised

in both Taiwan and Japan), and MC40 (leading male rapper and composer, Taiwanese).

The trans-Asian experience of Da Mouth occurs on their mobile “transbordering”

nationalities through their music works to achieve East Asian cultural identity and

imagination. Shin Hyunjoon’s concept of “transbordering” borrows the

conceptualization from Arjun Appadurai’s ‘‘ethnoscapes’’ produced at the disjuncture

or border-crossing; more specifically, transbordering refers to the cultural flows

between Korea and Japan’s transnational musical interaction. Shin underlines that

“popular music is one of the most active cultural fields in which cultural flows cross

borders, but also because this aspect of cultural flow appears to be more striking in

popular music than in any other genre of popular culture (Shin 103, my italics). In spite

of the troubled history of Korea and Japan regarding political tensions, Shin asserts that

the cultural traffic between the relocation and shifting identities of Korean and Japanese

artists and their music would facilitate “a state of being both aesthetically cosmopolitan

and culturally Asian” (Shin 117). Here, I would like to adopt Shim’s idea to scrutinize

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Da Mouth’s transbordering music experience. In Da Mouth’s case, Taiwan is the

original root where they start their music career. Yet, they successfully employ hip hop

music and their multi-ethnical background as the engaging medium to cross the border

to interconnect with East Asian audience. Among the members of Da Mouth, Senda

Aisa is believed to be the most significant figure that highlights the transnational

mobility of Da Mouth’s music works. Her unique identity as a “relocated” Japanese

rapper/artist in Taiwan also advances and strengthens Da Mouth’s transbordering

experience. As the former member of Japanese girl group, Sunday girls, Senda Aisa has

been running her music career in Taiwan for over fifteen years and Aisa has identified

herself in Men’s Uno’s interview, saying “whenever I work in Japan, I often tell the

working staff that I have taken myself as a Taiwanese” (Men’s Uno vol. 171 147).

Aisa’s bilingual capability of rapping in both Japanese and Chinese and her personal

image make local Taiwanese audience receptive to Da Mouth’s hip hop music. After

Da Mouth releases their first debut album in Japan, with the reinvented Japanese

version of the hit single “Jie Guo Le” (結果咧), Aisa’s bilingual female rapper image

and her transbordering identity also facilitate the success of transnational collaborations

of Da Mouth with other Japanese artists, e.g. Thelma Aoyama. Furthermore, Aisa’s

shifting transnational identity enables Da Mouth to have access to Japanese music

industry, and such cultural and musical interaction successfully promotes Taiwanese

hip hop music from a localized position to the East Asian realm.

If Da Mouth and Senda Aisa illustrate a transnational take on hip hop music, Nicky

Lee’s performance on his music career route would be a similar and yet more intricate

one in channeling the transbordering collaboration and Asian experience. Born in South

Korea but raised in L.A, Nicky Lee’s transnational identity shifts as he relocates himself

and his music career among Korea, Taiwan and America. His first appearance on the

boy group in Korea, VOICE, however, does not acquire much attention. Later, Nicky

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Lee joins the hip hop group, Machi. Around the early period of year 2000, Machi’s hip

hop music obtains great popularity among youngsters in Taiwan. The leader of Machi,

Jeffrey Huang, also the former member of L.A. Boyz, recruits Nicky Lee as the male

leading vocal and also one of the supporting rappers in Machi. When Nicky Lee releases

his debut Mandarin album in 2003, his mellow soulful voice and urban R&B music

style soon seize audience’s attention. Certainly, his Korean diasporic identity at the time

becomes as a notable mark through the fever of Korean Wave. Durng his individual

activities out of Machi, Nicky Lee also collaborates with Taiwanese artists such as

Vivian Hsu and Cindy Yuan to be a featuring male vocal or supporting rapper. His

success in Mandarin popular music industry soon appeals to Korean-American music

producer, Jae Chong, who now mainly devotes himself to hip hop music production in

East Asia. Jae Chong has been playing a crucial role in the context of the development

of Taiwanese hip hop and R&B music since the late 1990s. More importantly, Chong

has been involved in various artists’ albums in Taiwan and around East Asia by writing

or producing hip hop an R&B songs, for example, Coco Lee, A-Mei, Machi, Elva Hsiao,

Nicky Lee and Jolin Tsai in Taiwan, Sandy Lam in Hong Kong and BoA, JYJ and Park

Mi Kyung in Korea. To a certain extent, Jae Chong has established a mainstream hip

hop and R&B music form for Taiwanese popular music with syncopated beats, R&B

musical arrangement, and rap lyrics of less-hardcore content. Jae Chong seeks to form

an “Asian Band” across the border. As Jae Chong founds the hip hop/R&B group,

Aziatix in 2010, recruiting members of Nicky Lee, Eddie Shin and Flowsik (that all of

which formerly runs individual affairs separately in New York, Korea, and Taiwan).

Meanwhile, Nicky Lee is the spokesperson while they tour and promote their album in

Asia. The transnational group’s name “Aziatix” originates from the word “Asia,”

indicating that their music would stand for the Asian spirit, and they are constructing a

style of “Asian hip hop” on a transnational scale, which is “at once global and local”

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(Shin 103). Jamie Shinhee Lee reframes the concept on hip hop, asserting that “the

global and the local are not polarized opposite; rather, they intersect, each defined by

the other. Thus, the global becomes localized and the local globalized” (Lee 140).

Similarly, Nicky Lee’s trilingual capability (Mandarin, English and Korean) and his

diasporic Korean ethnicity endow him with an image connecting with what Shin has

suggested to be “cosmoAsians,” who “think beyond politics and nation(s)” (Shin 117).

His transbordering identity makes him accessible to shift transnationally via his music

works.

Apart from the cases of hip hop artists with shifting identities, I would also draw

on Softlipa as a local Taiwanese rapper on his pursuit of an alternative expression in

Taiwanese independent hip hop music. His trans-Asian crossover collaborations with

Japanese hip hop artists also reinvent a style of “Taiwanese jazz hip hop.” Initially,

Softlipa’s hip hop music route starts from the underground performance in Tainan. His

former group “Bamboo Gang” is formed with three students from Tainan First High

School. The music works of Bamboo Gang, not so much similar to other underground

rappers, whose works often containing dirty language, pan-political ideology or hatred

toward the society in the same period, are closer to youngsters’ everyday life. In this

regard, Bamboo Gang’s music style focuses on trivial matters in life, illustrating or

reflecting local young people’s state of mind. However, the later individual emergence

of Softlipa demonstrates a distinctive mode of hip hop style, injecting jazz beat, soul

music with a rather laidback rapping flow. During the interview of GQ Magazine,

Softlipa reveals that he once tried to imitate the style of gangsta rap, writing critical

stuff with a radical attitude. He tells GQ that “I always feel stuck when I seek to imitate

the Western style hip hop. After all, it is something that belongs to the Westerners.

Taiwanese don’t really identify with it. For a long period of time, I feel lost of myself

and cannot find a way out. Now, I love writing the trivial matters of life because they

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are part of my life.”

His Golden Melody Award-winning album Moonlight (2010) and the following

release Riding Bicycle (2011) are produced and collaborated by Japanese Jazz hip hop

producer, Shin-ski and Japanese urban jazz group, Jabberloop. Shin-ski, jazz hip hop

music producer in Japan, is renowned for his masterful talent in applying various kinds

of instruments to create amazing jazz music arrangement, along with the musical

elements of funk, soul and hip hop music. In fact, Japan could be seen as one of the

popular countries that embraces Jazz hip hop music, whereas this composing form is

not yet well-known in Taiwan. Instead of showing the “attitude” of hip hop, the features

of jazz hip hop mainly present on the instruments of the sound applications, namely,

the melody, rhythm, and beat. Therefore, the transnational collaboration of Softlipa,

Jabberloop and Shin-ski would be a fairly fresh combination, which to a large extent,

enriches Taiwanese hip hop music with a different performing manner. Softlipa also

participates in Japanese rapper, Kreva’s album Japanese Rap Star for Asia (2012),

collaborating the single “C’mon, Let’s Go.” Softlipa’s trans-Asian music experience

foresees the ongoing transformation of Taiwanese hip hop music as a local Taiwanese

rapper seeks to espouse another outlet differentiating from persisting on local roots and

reworking global dialogue and turns to adopt Japanese urban jazz hip hop to for a new

form in Taiwanese hip hop music.

III. Trans-Asian Taiwanese Hip Hop: A Reconciliation?

The authenticity of hip hop culture has long been a controversial issue after hip

hop reaches its multifaceted dimensions in the contemporary America popular culture.

In America, hip hop emerges in the mid-to late 1970s as “a form of cultural affirmation

and resistance” (Rose 425). According to Rose, hip hop represents multiculturalism that

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refers to “a process of incorporation of marginal groups’ contributions into a

mainstream or dominant culture” (424). Rose also emphasizes that the cultural and

musical traditions of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban immigrants all have strong

ties to the Afro-diaspora in the multicultural development of hip hop. Primary

contestation has thus been generated while some people enjoy its power on consumer

capitalism and some condemn it for “its complicity with commercialism” (Rose 426).

In the discussion concerning whether hip hop possesses authenticity or not toward the

blackness, Rose indicates that “[h]ip hop has always been articulated via commodities

and engaged in the revision of meanings attached to them” (439). Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar

also believes that authenticity will not be spoiled by the commercial purpose because

“hip hop is ‘real’ in any way” (Ogbar 1) because hip hop’s mutability has already taken

the culture itself away from the ghetto and it stands for more possibilities for the

younger generation who are working on the field (e.g. MCs, deejays, and B-boys and

B-girls) actually enjoy their livelihood and artistry. Yet, as hip hop enters its global

dimension, the pure black cultural expression, the politics of Black Nationalism and

Afrocentrism, and black diaspora are often addressed as “a form of strategic

essentialism” (Wise 99). Wise draws the account that

[o]n the one hand this move makes hip hop a form of great cultural power for

a disenfranchised group, but on the other hand it ignores the Puerto Ricans

and others involved in the early New York hip hop scene and Latino hip hop

artists in New York and Los Angles. (Wise 99)

Certainly, many of hip hop’s cultural characteristics could be challenged as they are

placed in different cultures. However, what is substantial is that it rarely remains as

mere imitation but incorporates local cultural, economic and political conditions.

In previous history of Taiwanese hip hop culture, underground hip hop rappers

tend to adopt rap lyrics as a form to fight against their authenticity over the “foreign”/

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“non-local” vs. “local”, “mainstream” vs. “underground” or “commercial” vs.

“independent” to strengthen their national and ethnical identity; e.g. Dwagie and MC

Hot Dog’s rap lyrics manifest their dislike regarding Korean Wave and J-R&B and their

rejection of Machi’s assertion as the original Taiwanese hip hop. During the period of

time, Taiwanese local hip hop rappers and devotees expect to search for their legitimate

position. They often regard “the street” as the actual site to operate the “authentic

Taiwanese hip hop” (Chuang 74) by attending independent music festivals, running

record and apparel stores, organizing online forums and publishing independent music

magazines to build the network and tend to frame cultural territorialization distant from

the mainstream to construct their hip hop legitimacy. Hsiso-hung Chang demonstrates

that there are multi-layered identities constructing the Taiwanese hip hop identity.

Chang’s annotation makes the shifting identities of glocalization, nationality, diaspora

and the authenticity of Taiwaneseness become more complex and obscure. In Fake

Globalization (2007), Chang parallels the images of “real Tiker” with “fake hip hoppers”

in Taiwan to analyze how these two different terms are represented, then destroyed

and rebuilt into an open definition. First, Chang points out that the contrary between

“Tiker” and “hip hop” culture is based on the binary opposition of the local culture vs.

the foreign culture. However, the later trend of “hip hop Tiker” (嘻哈台) creates a new

concept that links to the meaning of “neither/or” and “both-end” to overlap the two

opposites (Chang 231). “Tiker,” a rather politic term, combines with the images of hip

hop culture (e.g. baggy jeans and bling accessories) to trigger the process of re-citing

and re-siting Taiwaneseness in hip hop culture and the image of hip hop in Taiwanese

culture. Chang specifically indicates that the outfit of Tiker can passively refer to the

outdated fashion, but it can also positively represent the postmodern bricolage,

hybridity, copy and camp, which corresponds to the characteristics of hip hop culture:

“a postmodern art in that it shamelessly raids older form of pop culture—kung fu movie,

69

chitlin’ circuit comedy, ‘70’s funk and other equally disparate sources—and reshapes

the materials to fit the personality of an individual artist and the taste of a time” (George

10). Furthermore, Chang continues to take L.A. Boyz and Machi as the examples to

discuss the routes from a local “Taiwanese Tiker” to a “hip hop Tiker.” Chang claims

that L. A. Boyz can be considered as the representative of the “new” Taiwanese for they

stand for a Taiwanese-American diaspora culture and also the “re-citing” Taiwanese hip

hop culture (Chang 245). The image of L. A. Boyz as the “new” Taiwanese differs from

the former definition of Taiwanese, which refers to a more political, essential, and

national-inclined stance. Chang thus claims that L.A Boyz overturns the definition of

the real Taiwanese and breaks the binary opposition of the local Tiker and the foreign

hip hop culture when nothing is authentic, anything is possible.

Moreover, the later emergence of Machi also subverts the image of Tiker. The

name “Machi” literally mingles with Taiwanese, English and Japanese to display the

hybridity of etymology. To a certain extent, Machi’s group image and music style react

against the political discourse of national identity and the ideologies of independence

to create an imaginary space for cultural bricolage and diversity. This assertion pretty

much takes Machi into the category of the new identified Taiwanese. In fact, the long-

time opposing situation between independent Taiwanese rappers and the mainstream

ABC/ABT artists has been reconciled during Dwagie’s mini concert in 2012. He invites

Jeff Huang to be his special guest on stage and they collaborate the hit song “Taiwan

Song” together, affirming that they are both real Taiwanese. In fact, the original rap

lyrics of “Taiwan Song” contain the hostile content: I only care about the place where

you were born. Ilha Formosa! Ilha Formosa! Ilha Formosa! Hey, mister, who do you

think you are? You speak English, huh? I doubt whether being an ABC is really cool

enough or not (my translation). From the revised version, Dwagie deletes the

controversial part, leaving only the lyrics that advocate the real Taiwaneseness.

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Meanwhile, the ruptures between such cultural bricolage and hybridity also occur

on transnational hip hop collaborations. J-R&B and Korean Wave pave a way for trans-

Asian hip hop to be actualized as Taiwan’s hip hop music departs from battling for the

authentic form in hip hop music and turns to embrace transnational collaborations to

seek a novel move.

The cases of Da Mouth, Softlipa and Nicky Lee all show the growing power and

possibility of trans-Asian hip hop music collaborations embodied via global mobility

of diaspora, transnationalism, cultural proximity and transbordering identities. Their

music style, personal images and identities transform the impression of the former

Taiwanse hip hop music and lead beyond the phase of simply imitating or copying its

American counterparts to find another outlet. In this chapter, I first start with the

development of hip hop music in Taiwan, indicating its different transitional stages. I

then go to the case studies on the transnational experience of Taiwanese hip hop music

to find out the possibilities of trans-Asian hip hop music. I argue that ever since

Taiwanese hip hop music has transcended from the local form, it reinvents its look

throughout the East-Asian regions.

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Conclusion

This is hip hop

It’s country, jazz and R&B in its pot

So ain't no way you stopping this

This is hip hop

Tech N9ne, “This is Hip Hop” (2011)

Hip hop music is close to my life history. To me, I could even recall the joy when

I first felt touched by Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We do It.” And this was how the

story begins. In the past, I always conceived hip hop belongs to the blacks. As a long-

time audience and devotee of hip hop music and culture, I was often perplexed about

whether I could relate myself to the culture or not as hip hop has been deemed an

American culture with the roots of Africans and other marginalized ethnicities. It was

until I started to introspect why and when I fell in love with hip hop did I have a little

understanding about this knowledge field. And this was also where the struggle

begins. In order to trace the roots of hip hop, I have witnessed the scene of street rap

battle in Philadelphia, and I have sought to discover the hip hop experience of my

own in South Bronx; however, I eventually realized that only being infatuated with

hip hop’s original history could not take me further to the culture’s deep core. Instead,

I ought to examine it on a global scale because “hip hop is culturally mobile” and

“[its] attendant notion of authenticity are constantly being ‘re-made’ as hip hop is

appropriated by different groups of young people around the world” (Bennet 133).

Moreover, I find out the development of Taiwanese hip hop music seems closer to

72

where I belong. Mm

mm During my project, I initially find out that hip hop employs its distinguished

characteristics to engage with the local culture from the styled apparel to the skilled

rap. Hip hop music also establishes diasporic dialogue, in which local culture can be

seen on a global take. The development of global hip hop pretty much draws the

account of Appadurai’s concept of “ethnoscapes” and “mediascapes” to explain the

cultural interaction, which “the movement of diasporic peoples and mediascapes

changes not only their music but the music of places they move to and through” (Wise

87). The musicians can carry the experience of displacement and engage with the

transnational cultural dissemination and the distribution of varied technical and media

agencies can render hip hop music with public attention to gain much more visibility.

Mm In Taiwan, hip hop music has encountered several transformed phases. It serves

as the forms of imitation and appropriation to be the first step; later, its mutability of

re-mixing the features with the domestication of local culture. Tony Mitchell adopts

Deleuze’s “rhizome” to interpret the quick application of hip hop culture as the

multilingual use of the languages can serve to emphasize “the glocalization of rap”

(Mitchell 3) and the use of vernaculars in rap music represents as a form of resistance

to preserve local culture. The radical nature of rap can help express the political and

socially conscious side of hip hop music. For long periods of time, local Taiwanese

hip hop artists and rappers tend to embrace this kind of composing style to vent their

anger toward the government or society and exalt their Taiwanese identity. The

struggles for subjectivity and authenticity between local Taiwanese artists/rappers and

that of the diasporic groups have quite formed a contest in Taiwanese hip hop culture.

Mm However, in recent development of Taiwanese hip hop culture, transnational

collaborations between Taiwanese artists/rappers and other hip hop artists from East-

Asian countries have become more and more frequently. The phenomenon not only

73

stands for a breakthrough for Taiwanese hip hop music but also encourages Taiwanese

hip hop artists/rappers to reconcile the previous battle in constructing their legitimate

position. Taiwanese hip hop music thus spreads out with more cultural diversities and

mobility. In this regard, I would like to assert that transnational Taiwanese hip hop

music in East Asia has come to possibility because the free market strategy of

Taiwan’s music industry helps Taiwanese hip hop music to ripen into maturity and

show its growing success in East Asian mass culture and pop music business; more

importantly, global mobility of diaspora, transnationalism and transbordering

identities facilitate its actualization. M

m Finally, I would like to confess that this short research is part of my life story

although it is far from perfect. I hope to leave a little something as an ode to my youth

hood. Famous scholar and hip hop music critic Michael Eric Dyson says: it’s almost

irrelevant to me whether or not you grew up there [ghetto]. It’s more important to

know if you’re able to scrutinize the possibilities, the positons, the moods, the

dispositions, the interests, the sentiments, and the morality that the environment

breeds (Dyson 11). I would also hope that hip hop music, my lifelong friend, can keep

its most lively forms and reinvent different performing and composing music style

based on its original philosophy: love, peace, and respect.Mm

mm To hip hop.

74

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