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The effect of hip hop on Chinese youth

http://www.52ch.net/bbs/thread-408581-1-1.html

Introduction

       Hip-hop has expanded into many cultures worldwide. Now we can find hip hop in every corner of the globe. Obviously, it affects China as well. Hong Kong and Taiwan are the two earliest places in China to absorb hip hop culture. In the late 1980s, mainland Chinese music started to absorb pop music influences from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and became less traditional. At the same time, two western hip hop movies, Wild Style and Breakin, were shown in several big cities in China. This was the earliest impression of hip hop for mainland Chinese youths. These two movies opened the door for freestyle art into China. After Eminem’s Eight Mile came out and showed in China in 2002, hip hop became popular in China. Therefore, those movies have played a significant role in the cultivation and growth of hip-hop culture in China. Now, hip hop is not only the representative of a sort of music, but also a kind of new culture, life style. More and more youths in China, a typical traditional country, accept this new culture and life style.

      Hip hop culture & fans 

        Hip hop is a form of rap music and is a sort of influential culture to current society. The original of emergence of hip hop was in 1925. Earl Tucher, was the earliest performer to perform free style dance with moves similar to today’s hip-hop (1). However, the time that hip hop started to be an independent performance, a representative of the street culture, is in the late 1960s in New York. Young African-American people would get together as a group to perform songs and dance, but not individually. People called such groups as gangs. In the early 1970s, gang show of black messages only performed on the street. In 1979, two great influential rap groups were formed and the first rap record was recorded. During this time, hip hop was becoming popular inside of the United States (2). During the middle of 1980s, hip hop culture reached Germany, Japan, Australia and South Africa through break dancing which was the first aspect of hip hop culture. (Mitchell, 2001) Due to its popularity in such countries’ and the development of hip hop itself, this black street culture has spread all over the world since 1990s. 

Hip hop can be divided into three main types: music, dance and fashion, and is based on seven elements of loop, rapping, freestyle, Dj-ing, scratching, sampling and beatboxing (Price, 2006, p. 1) gave a suitable description of hip hop and hip hop culture:

               “Hip hop is a means and method of expression thriving on social commentary, Political, critique, economic analysis, religious exegesis, and street awareness. While combating long-standing issues of racial prejudice, cultural persecution, and social, economic, and political disparities. Over the past three decades, hip hop culture has grown to represent urban, rural, suburban, and global communities of all ages, genders, religions economic classes and races (p.1).”

        The impact of Japanese hip hop and Korean hip hop on Chinese hip hop  

       Although Chinese hip hop comes from the African-American hip hop, it does not exactly copy the original one because the effect of Japanese hip hop and Korean hip hop on China’s hip hop culture.       

        In the late 90s, a wave of Korean pop culture hit China. Chinese youths went crazy about Korean romantic movies, Korean dancing, and even Korean hairstyles. As for Korean hip hop, the most influential part to the Chinese hip hop is the dance. Combining original hip hop with their local culture, Koreans produced their own hip hop dancing style which is loved by large amount of people not only in Korea but also in other Asian countries like China.

        In Korea, rap, hip hop and other types of dance music are the best-selling styles in 1996 (Morelli, 2002). At the end of 90s, HOT – a Korean band – was extremely famous in China and had a huge number of fans in China (Huang, 2006). Although the Chinese youths could not understand the songs, but the dance shocked youths and attract them to become big fan of it. They treat these hip hopers as their idols, so they try to learn their dancing and even copy their clothing style and hairstyles. At that time, in the streets of Hanoi and Beijing, “it is common to find young members of the “Korea tribe”, or Koreanophiles, sporting multiple earrings, baggy hip-hop pants” (Shim, 2006 p.29). Therefore, it is obvious that Korean hip hop influence the visual part of Chinese hip hop.

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1. Why do Chinese youths love hip hop or hip hop dance so much?

2. How does hip hop or hip hop dance develop its market in China?

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       In this paper, I am going to apply two methodologies – textual analysis and political economic analysis – to analyze the two research questions.

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           “Hip-Hop, like Rock ‘n’ Roll before it, is not only a genre of music, but also a complex system of ideas, values and concepts that reflect newly emerging and ever-changing creative correlative expressive mechanisms including but not limited to song, poetry, film and fashion (p.1).”

       Therefore, it is worthwhile and interesting to understand why such black art has a large impact on Chinese youth. There is no clear answer to this question; however, there are several aspects that hip hop fans mentioned in their blogs influence them to love hip hop.

Attracting by features of hip hop dance

       Matching young people’s physiological need is another basic reason for the hip hop youth craze in China (1). Coolness, self-expression, two main surface characteristics, are sent to young people and give them the first impression of hip hop. Michael Jackson’s dance is good example to explain it is MJ’s style hip hop. On the stage, different people can receive different messages from his dance, but the coolness of his dance is all audiences’ common feeling. During hip hop dance, every step, such as flip, one hand balancing, seems extemporaneously play and without discipline but it is full fill with skill. Moreover, dancers seem to perform for the audience, but they more likely are enjoying themselves in their own world. Current young people, no matter boys or girls, they would like to be cool not only from appearance but also from mind. Hip hop is able to provide a platform for Chinese young people to express cool. A Chinese hip hp dancer wrote in his blog, “When I first saw hip hop in the movie, I feel I really want to try it because it looks so cool. And I want to be cool because I want to draw other people’s attention.”(Blog[1], 2009) This dancer is the representative that tells us what current youth think and what they like.

http://www.0263.com/singer/217.html

        The unique fashion of hip hop is another aspect to attract Chinese youth. “Hip hop fashion is not only one style, but a mixture of influences from both the street and high fashion design label. Hip hop style can include brand name baggy clothes, baseball caps, sneakers, sports jackets and jerseys and other sport clothes such as hooded tracksuits, and puffer vests (Chandler and Chandler-Smith, 2005, p.230).” This type of fashion is not like any styles Chinese young people are used to wearing, and fascinates them because they feel so different.

Fulfillment of cultural needs

         Social transition is the process in which a society as a whole changes from old to new traditions. In other words, it is also a process of social modernization. “Many aspects of society changes enormously, such as economic structure and psychological structure. Moreover, such changes influence the existence and development of society culture. As China opens to the outside world further, variety of thoughts pour into China which crash and confluence with mainland culture. Lacking innovation of mainland culture, young people easy get familiar with outside culture because outside culture represents modern, fashion and advanced guard (Cheng, year, p.1).” Under such complicated situation, hip hop brings refresh art and culture to young people in China and attract them.  

Provision of Happiness

          There is a special reason to love hip hop particularly hip hop dance. The current Chinese education system narrowly focuses on very promotional examinations because of large population leading high competition. Thus, every Chinese young person has faced a stressful studying life for many years. According to this situation, the emersion of hip hop provides a way for young people in China to have fun and release their pressure with its dynamical movement and loose wearing at the same time(1). Many fans write on their blogs that hip hop dance not only help them do exercise physically but also adjust their psychology because the kind of dance, not like gymnastics, gives dancers enough space to let them create their own steps and show their own personality. Fans also mention that performing such dance in front of friends and family builds much self-confidence for them. Moreover, simple but important aspect is hip hop dance make those youths happy (Blog[2], 2009)

      Hip hop dance industry in China

       Since arriving in China at the middle of 90s, hip hop dance grows gradually to be an industry recently. This industry develops comprehensively such as dance, music, DJ, graffiti and fashion even though all parts develop at different speeds.

      As hip hop dance boom developed in China, other areas of culture influenced by hip hop dance try to extend their market in China, such as clothing. Obtaining information of market research, many brand companies export their hip hop trappings to China, such as SEAN JOHN from New York, LRG from the US, AZZURE from Europe, etc. Moreover, China has its own hip hop trapping brand, like WAZZUP from Taiwan and MISSOUL from shanghai. Also, the hip hop culture company named Zhengzhou Hip Hop Culture Transmission Company is established in China in 2006. This company’s main production is training hip hop dance, hip hop trappings, scheming culture and art of hip hop activities, hip hop clubs etc. Its main markets are mainland of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao. Annual average revenue of this company is around 300,000RMB (6) from this example, the clear information that we received is hip hop dance is transforming from popular youth culture to a business.

       To help meet the demands of hip hop fans, many city televisions organized hip hop dance competition. The great example is CCTV – China Central Television- have held hip hop dance competition for five years. There are ten application places in different provinces where applicants can go to apply, such as Beijing, Liaoning, Guangdong and Hubei (7). In 2003, the first Chinese hip-hop dance competition, attracting more than 1000 professional and amateurish applicants, succeed and created a great impact (7). In 2004, the competition enhanced its standard and scale, and the TV audience rating reached 1.61%. There were 17.95 million viewers watching the competition at its peak (7). In 2005, the audience rating reached 1.8% and the audience expanded to 23.40 million. In 2007, there were more than 3000 applicants to participate in this competition and 254 dancers went to Beijing to participate the final (7).  The main purpose for organizing such competitions is to provide a platform for professional or amateurish dancers to communicate with each other of their experiences, problems and ideas to create new idea to stimulate the Chinese hip hop dance market.

        Even though Chinese hip hop dance industry has not developed completely and perfectly, it is affecting the development of hip hop music, hip hop fashion and hip hop graffiti in China as an attachment. Therefore, since young people love hip hop dance, they will love hip hop culture as a whole one day.

      Although hip hop dance is spreading to every corner of China, other parts of hip hop culture still have potential market in China. The advanced condition for them to be prevalent is to integrate regional elements to match local people’s tastes, such as the lyrics of hip hop music. Also, hip hop can add some Chinese traditional elements, such as kung fu, minority music style, to make Chinese hip hop style. Hip hop needs to know Chinese culture first and then to develop relevantly.

       Hip hop dance is increasingly popular in China, but only in cities. In rural areas, people could not receive very much information about hip hop dance. Some places do not even know very clearly what hip hop dance is. From my perspective, the next targeted market for hip hop dance should be rural places around 50% of China’s population lives in rural China. Therefore, there will be an undeveloped market for hip hop and hip hop dance to explore. WHAT about urban working class youth? Is hip hop only popular with children of elite in urban areas, or do all city youth participate?

       Hip hop is not only a type of music and a kind of art, but also a representative of free life style and modern ideology. After analyzing the effect of hip hop on Chinese youth, we should notice that culture is globalizing. Traditional culture surely will meet a clash with modern culture. Therefore, two more questions come up:  How does Chinese traditional culture deal with more cultural challenges?

       How can Chinese preserve more good traditional culture during the process of transforming?

John Belton, Movies and Mass Culture, United States: Rutgers University Press (1996): 1-21

Price, Emmett G, Hip Hop Culture, United States: ABC-CLIO (2006):1-42, 81-102

Halifu Osumare, the Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2008): 61-104

Doobo Shim, “Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia” In Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, No. 1, 25-44 (2006)

Tony Mitchell, Global Noise, United States: Wesleyan University Press (2001): 1-33

Andre J.M.Prevost, “Postcolonial Popular Music in France” In Global Noise, edited by Tony Mitchell, 39-53, United States: Wesleyan University Press (2001)

Mark Pennay, “Rap in Germany” In Global Noise, edited by Tony Mitchell, 111-128, United States: Wesleyan University Press (2001)

Ian Condry, “A history of Japanese Hip Hop” In Global Noise, edited by Tony Mitchell, 222-244, United States: Wesleyan University Press (2001)

Ian Maxwell, “Sydney Stylee” In Global Noise, edited by Tony Mitchell, 259-277, United States: Wesleyan University Press (2001)

Huang Lu, Sun Ping, Ma Hu, “Culture character of Korean street dance” In Journal of  Shandong Institution of Physical Education and Sport, edited by Shandong Institution of Physic, 45- 50 (2006).

Davies Sandra, The Chinese People-Music, Instruments, Folklore,

Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry” In Convergence culture: where old and new media collide,   131-168, United States: New York University (2006)

Zhang Hua ying, Han Chuan lai, “The Feasibility Study of Hip Hop Dancing’s Entering into College” In Journal of Nanjing Institute of Physical Education, 73-75, 2004

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