狂聲見我：東亞跨界文化流動下的台灣嘻哈樂

全文

(1)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.

(2) 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.

(3) 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.

(4) iv. 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.

(5) v. 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..

(6) vi. 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. II. III.. A Brief History of Hip Hop Culture…………………………………….19 The Development of Rap Music………………………………………...23 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. III.. Japanese Hip Hop and R&B/Soul Trend………………………………..43 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. III.. Case Studies on Taiwanese Hip Hop Music’s Trans-Asian Experience...62 Trans-Asian Taiwanese Hip Hop: A Reconciliation?...............................67. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………71 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..74.

(7) 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.

(8) 2. 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 transAsian 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..

(9) 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 formerlydominated “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..

(10) 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..

(11) 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,.

(12) 6. 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 postindustrial 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.

(13) 7. 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”.

(14) 8. 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..

(15) 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 subcultural 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.

(16) 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 “timespace 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.

(17) 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 AfricanAmerican 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..

(18) 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.

(19) 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..

(20) 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.

(21) 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 transAsian collaborations in Taiwan. I will adopt Shin Hyunjoon’s concept of “transbordering” to support my analyses. Transnational collaborations of music can.

(22) 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 TaiwaneseKorean 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.

(23) 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..

(24) 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..

(25) 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..

(26) 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..

(27) 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 AfricanAmerican 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.

(28) 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.

(29) 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 singerhistorian 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).

(30) 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).

(31) 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)..

(32) 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,.

(33) 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.

(34) 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..

(35) 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.

(36) 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-tobe-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.

(37) 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.

(38) 32. 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 everchanging 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.