By Angela Diane Steele
Excerpts of the thesis of Angela Diane Steele for the Honors Program in Cultural & Social Anthropology at Stanford University submitted December 14, 2006.
Abstract
From urban hipsters spending their nights in the clubs dancing and drinking to the sounds of Hip Hop, to Bboys sweating out their days perfecting power moves in the studio, the seeds of Hip Hop culture are sprouting throughout Beijing. Hip Hop emerged around the year 2000 and currently a small number of casual consumers and cultural producers create, support, and maintain Hip Hop culture. Despite its fledgling status, Hip Hop has already influenced popular music, youth fashion, entertainment culture, and corporate marketing.
This work will answer many questions concerning the establishment and growth of Hip Hop culture in Beijing. I posit Hip Hop as an object of cultural study and use the circuit of culture model introduced by Paul du Gay et. al in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman to explore the ways in which articulations of representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation operate within four distinct categories - translation, localization, racialization, and resistance. I map the original sources of Hip Hop in Beijing and argue that consumption is valuable for the growth of Hip Hop culture. I analyze the performance of Hip Hop and argue that sites of locality lie within language, message, and style. Situating Hip Hop within Chinese racialism and the racialization of Hip Hop as a Black art, I argue that the production of Blackness is involved in the construction of style and that articulations of race perpetuate the Chinese race-nation paradigm. Lastly, I expose how Hip Hop artists navigate government censorship and argue that Hip Hop has potential to affect change in the lives of Beijing youth. This work is important for establishing a method for examining Hip Hop culture, exploring shifting cultural forces in Beijing, contributing to the canon of Hip Hop scholarship.
Introduction
“It [popular music] has, in fact, become part of the everyday reality of millions of these Chinese youth, many of whom do not remember a time without it. It has, in fact, become an integral part of their view of what Chinese culture is.” – Tim Brace 1991:44
“You can’t really define Hip Hop. I am a dancer but I am still Hip Hop. He is a DJ but he is still Hip Hop. Anyone who loves Hip Hop is Hip Hop. Hip Hop is a concept, an idea. It’s something you do, but it’s also something you live.” – Gao Bo, interview with author September 4, 2005
Hip Hop is the latest musical genre to capture the attention and imaginations of Beijing youth and has become an integral part of popular music culture. Hip Hop began in the South Bronx borough of New York City in the late 1970s. Five elements originally defined Hip Hop – DJ, Bboy, MC, Graffiti Art, and Knowledge. DJs spun the records, MCs rapped over the music, Bboys danced to the beats, and Graffiti Artists bombed city walls and subway trains. Knowledge was created and spread through Hip Hop music and art. Hip Hop has since grown to describe a type of fashion, literary style, cinematic genre, journalism, lifestyle, ideology, activism, and scholarship.(1) Hip Hop’s creativity, flexibility, accessibility, and rebelliousness appeal to youth and members of marginalized communities around the world. Traveling through the forces of the global market economy, migration, and telecommunication, Hip Hop has become a growing cultural force in Beijing, China.
From urban hipsters spending their nights in the clubs dancing and drinking to the sounds of Hip Hop, to Bboys sweating out their days perfecting power moves in the studio, the seeds of Hip Hop culture are sprouting throughout Beijing. Hip Hop is not yet widely understood by the general populace and is most influential among Beijing youth. A small number of casual consumers and cultural producers create, support, and maintain Hip Hop culture.(2) Despite its fledgling status, Hip Hop has already influenced popular music, youth fashion, entertainment culture, and corporate marketing. The development of Hip Hop culture in Beijing is representative of the ways in which Hip Hop has taken root in other Chinese cities.
China
With approximately one-fifth of the world’s population, one of the fastest growing economies, and ambitions to be a major power in global politics, China is one of the most dynamic countries in Asia.(3) The People’s Republic of China was established under the rule of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. The three decades following saw China isolated by foreign nations and fraught with political and natural disasters. With the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping, China embarked on a new path. Deng passed the “Open Door” Policy in 1978. This invited direct foreign investment and jump-started China’s economy. In 1979 China normalized relations with the United States and also implemented the “One-Child Policy” to curb population growth. The population of China is now 1.3 billion (The World Factbook 2006). China is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The intersection of economy, politics, education, and popular culture is easily explored in Beijing.
Beijing
The home of China’s finest universities, numerous cultural heritage sites, and government agencies Beijing is not only China’s capital city but also its educational, cultural, and political epicenter. Beijing has a fluctuating population of 14 million people and is made up of sixteen districts and two counties (Beijing International 2006). Most Hip Hop-related events take place in Chaoyang and Haidian Districts. Chaoyang contains Beijing’s nightlife and has numerous clubs, bars, and pubs. Most of Beijing’s universities are in Haidian and the district has many venues that cater to local and foreign students.
Popular music culture reflects Beijing’s history as well as its increasing cosmopolitanism and consumerism. Employment opportunities, higher education, diplomatic activities, cultural heritage sites and opportune locations for multinational offices bring other Chinese citizens and foreigners(4) to Beijing to live, work, and travel. Beijing is thus exposed to myriad domestic and foreign influences.
History of Hip Hop in Beijing
Hip Hop in Beijing emerged around the year 2000, but its roots stretch back to the late 1980s. Beijing’s first contact with Hip Hop culture came from early Hip Hop movies such as Wild Style (1982)and Breakin’ (1984). Copies of the movies often entered Beijing via trade and travel with Japan and Hong Kong. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, interest in Hip Hop waned as the government attempted to revitalize reverence for traditional Chinese culture and socialism.
Throughout the 1990s Hip Hop culture regained momentum. Hailed as the “Godfather of Rock”, Cui Jian was influenced by many musical genres including rap, which he introduced to Chinese Rock & Roll fans in the late 1980s and early 1990s (de Kloet 2005:611). Another important musical influence was the sale of dakou CDs on Beijing’s black markets. Dakou CDs were surplus CDs created in the West that were supposed to be destroyed but were instead smuggled into China and sold on the black market.(5) The mid-to-late 90s also saw unprecedented levels of commercialization and commodification of Hip Hop in the United States, and Hip Hop came to dominate popular music markets. From movies to magazines, numerous cultural products exported from the United States bore Hip Hop’s influence. Hip Hop consumer products and mass-marketing schemes further exposed Beijing residents to Hip Hop culture.
In the 1990s improved communication, technology and migration drove Hip Hop’s expansion. Internet technology enabled the rapid transmission of music (much of which was banned in stores), movies, literature, and ideas. The Internet helped Beijing Hip Hop fans and artists access and share information. Lastly, the movement of foreigners to and through Beijing greatly aided the development of Hip Hop. All of these forces combined to see the emergence of a substantial Hip Hop scene in 2000. This is the year that some artists also note as marking the separation of the “underground” from the “mainstream”. I found these definitions to be fairly ambiguous, but they most often meant that some artists now had the opportunity to get record contracts or perform in commercials, television programs, or state-sponsored events.(6) Since 2000, Beijing has had many “firsts”, from the first DMC Champion(7) to the first nation wide Hip Hop dance competition. Today Hip Hop in Beijing has a solid foundation and continues to grow.
Thesis Question
This work will answer many questions concerning the establishment and growth of Hip Hop culture in Beijing. I posit Hip Hop as an object of cultural study and use the circuit of culture model introduced by Paul du Gay et. al in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman to explore the ways in which circuits of culture operate within four distinct categories - translation, localization, racialization, and resistance. Paul du Gay et. al conduct a case study of the development of the Sony Walkman and create a methodology for the analysis of cultural texts or artifacts. Their method concentrates on the articulations and interplay of processes of representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. Their analysis examines the multiple ways in which meaning is assigned and contested and cultural practices are interpreted and managed. They argue that both the production of culture and the culture of production associate cultural texts and artifacts with particular identities but that individual agents situated within specific public and private spaces ultimately assign meaning. In order to offer a comprehensive evaluation of Hip Hop culture in Beijing, I focus on the circuits of culture within four categories important to Hip Hop studies. I place my research in dialogue with the work of the following theorists, ethnographers, and Hip Hop scholars.
Section I: Translation
Most Hip Hop artists and fans in Beijing remember when, where, why and how they first encountered Hip Hop culture. Some speak of their first contact with Hip Hop as a life-altering moment and others as an event of little consequence. All stories revolve around three themes: migration, media, and technology. Jeroen de Kloet asserts that the development of Hip Hop in China is a result of “cultural translation” from which a “copy” of Hip Hop is made from an “original”. In this section I examine how Hip Hoppers in Beijing access representations of “original” Hip Hop.
Arjun Appadurai suggests a theory about capitalist consumption. He argues that non-habitual consumptive practices are based on “an aesthetic of the ephemeral” (1996:68). I expand this theory to explore the particularities of consumption of Hip Hop products in Beijing’s socialist market economy. Jonathan Friedman found that consumptive practices in the Congo are central to imagining selves and communities. I similarly argue that the consumption of Hip Hop commodities is a claim on the present and can support the development of Hip Hop identity and ultimately Hip Hop culture.
Section II: Localization
The idea of “keeping it real” is ubiquitous in Hip Hop. The idea evokes the sense that true Hip Hop artists represent the depth, complexity, struggles, and successes of life in their current social, political, economic, geographic, and cultural climates in a meaningful way. As Hip Hop cultural producers work to represent their life experiences in a meaningful way, they create spaces in which to examine “real” Beijing Hip Hop.
In his article, “Japanese Hip-Hop and the Globalization of Popular Culture”, Ian Condry maps the processes of localization of Hip Hop in Japan. Condry introduces the phrase genba globalism. Genba means “actual site” in Japanese and Condry sees the nightclub as being the physical, social, and symbolic space in which “globalized images and sounds are performed, consumed, and then transformed in an ongoing process” (2001:381). Localization enables Hip Hop to be represented audiences in a meaningful way. I utilize Condry’s theory of the genba to argue that the actual sites of locality lie in the language, message, and style of Beijing Hip Hop.
Section III: Racialization
Any assessment of Hip Hop outside of the United States must address the ways in which Hip Hop is racialized. Hip Hop has an inextricable link to Black bodies and culture. As Hip Hop travels around the world, the performance of Blackness becomes an important and often contentious point of inspection. Nina Cornyetz examines the role of Blackness in Japanese Hip Hop in her article “Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Japan”. Cornyetz argues that in order to justly evaluate the role of race in Hip Hop we must first separate “hip hop and rap from the specifics of American racialism, and a reconstruction bounded by Japanese racialism”(1994:114). I similarly situate my evaluation of expressions of race within Chinese racialism. I argue that Blackness carries cultural capital for foreigners within Beijing Hip Hop culture and representations of Blackness are involved in the creation of style.
Frank Dikotter asserts that over the past century, China has moved from a conception of race based on cultural heritage to one based on national identity. I utilized Dikotter’s definition of Chinese racialism to argue that articulations of a racialized identity in Beijing Hip Hop perpetuate the Chinese race-nation paradigm.
Section IV: Resistance
Integral to my study is the concept of resistance. The primary way in which the Chinese government seeks to control popular music is though censorship. Jeroen de Kloet evaluates how rock and roll artists navigate and subvert government censorship. I argue that Hip Hop artists similarly negotiate censorship in order to make their work socially relevant.
In his evaluation of popular music, George Lipsitz explores the ability of popular music to destabilize the nation-state. Part of the power of popular music culture is that it gives participants the ability to assign various, subjective meanings to cultural practices and products. In this section I argue that the potential for Hip Hop’s political potential lies in its ability to influence, inform, and subvert processes of identity formation.
My Interest in Beijing Hip Hop
In my small, rural, working class town in New Jersey, I did not have much access to Hip Hop culture outside of mainstream radio and television. My family listens to a range of popular music genres including funk, soul and classic R&B while most of my friends enjoy Rock & Roll, pop and country music. While all of these influences have given me an eclectic taste in music, rap, New Jack Swing, and later Neo-Soul was the music that spoke to me. After listening to a tape of Salt-N-Pepa Very Necessary I became a huge Hip Hop fan. I used to make my own Hip Hop mix (cassette) tapes by recording songs off the radio. MTV, BET, VHI, The Source, and Vibe taught me about new artists and Hip Hop styles. I built a decent Hip Hop and R&B tape and CD collection by illegally filling out orders for “12 CDs for a penny” deals from Colombia House and BMG. (My mom paid for my purchases.) Though I considered myself a fan of Hip Hop music, I did not learn about Hip Hop culture until I went away to boarding school in Massachusetts and then to college in California. The more I learned and experienced the music, the more I realized Hip Hop’s potential to really affect change in the lives of young people. This potential has yet to be realized in the United States and it is particularly interesting to explore how Hip Hop is influencing the lives of young people outside of the United States.
The first time I experienced Hip Hop in Beijing was at a dance competition on China Central Television (CCTV) (8) in the summer of 2004. I watched the battle for hours and was amazed by the talent of the Bboys and Bgirls. I was focused on surviving my language program and did not further explore Hip Hop at that time. I returned to Beijing in September to participate in the first Stanford Overseas Studies Program at Peking University (PKU). At PKU I used my free time to travel, visit cultural sites and go out to popular nightclubs. I quickly learned that, at least in terms of entertainment culture and fashion, Hip Hop music and aesthetics are popular.
My academic interested was piqued when I went to a Hip Hop showcase at PKU. The show featured several college dance crews and a professional crew called The Sol. The dancers were talented and entertaining. Afterwards I was determined to find out why people were interested in Hip Hop dance and how they learned about it. I first contacted the choreographer of PKU’s Hip Hop dance crew, a physics major named Tang Ke. He invited me to come along with the group to another showcase where I met the Forbidden City Rockers (FCR), arguably Beijing’s best Bboy crew. They allowed me to do an impromptu interview with them. FCR had a solid knowledge of Hip Hop history and kept up with new sounds and styles from around the world. They recommended other dancers and MCs for me to contact to learn more about Hip Hop in Beijing. I had no time left to conduct more interviews but knew that I wanted to return and continue to explore the development of Hip Hop in Beijing.
Methodology
This study is mainly based upon ethnographic research I conducted in Beijing from June to September of 2005. However, I also draw from my personal experiences in Beijing in the summer and fall of 2004 and the summer of 2006. Before formally embarking on the project, I studied Chinese for three years at Stanford University, for two months at Beijing Capital Normal University and for four months at Peking University. My methods consisted of participant observation, in-depth interviews, and media analysis. I read English language articles and reviews on Hip Hop in Beijing as well as blogs concerning Hip Hop events. I frequented popular nightclubs such as Mix, Vics, Propaganda, and Club Look (now Star). I also attended an MC battle at Club Taku, Section 6 Hip Hop Parties, Open Mic Nights at Lush, the DMC Championship, the Keep on Dancing Competition, the Dragonstylez Bboy Battle, and the Battle of the Year. I conducted ten formal interviews with Bboys, MCs, DJs, club owners, promoters, and one graffiti artist. I also conducted surveys with students at Peking University and Qinghua University. My language training allowed me to translate all interviews. Denise Chu, Chen Minqian, and Lu Hongyou translated all song lyrics.
1) For a complete history of Hip Hop see Chang 2005, That’s the Joint! 2004, Rahn 2002, George 1998, Rose 1994.
2) I use cultural producers to mean Hip Hop artists or fans who actively create cultural products and/or work towards developing Hip Hop culture in Beijing (i.e. MCs, DJs, promoters, etc.) and casual consumers to mean Hip Hop fans who consume Hip Hop cultural products or commodities but do not actively work towards developing Hip Hop in Beijing (i.e. club goers, audience members, etc.). I consider cultural products to be materials created by cultural producers of Hip Hop in Beijing and commodities to be items associated with Hip Hop through mass-marketing (i.e. Nike shoes or Taishan Beverages).
3) For a complete history of China see Patricia Buckley Ebrey. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
4) The word “foreign” can refer to foreign nationals (waiguoren) or Chinese citizens from other regions (waidiren). I use “foreign” and “foreigner” to refer to foreign nationals.
5) For an examination of dakou culture see de Kloet 2005.
6) MC Webber, DJ Wordy, Gao Bo, Raph Cooper, and DJ VNutz gave various definitions of the underground and the mainstream in interviews and discussions.
7) The DMC is an annual DJ competition that is like the World Cup of turntablism. Participating countries hold national competitions and winners travel to London to compete in the world battle. Learn more at: www.dmcworld.com.
8) CCTV is the main television broadcasting company in China. It is run by the State Administration of Radio, Television, and Film.
Angela Diane Steele is a senior at Stanford University, major in cultural & social anthropology with honors. She could be reached at juststeele@gmail.com.
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