Keep It “Skr:" The Incorporation of Hip-Hop Subculture through Chinese Talent Shows and the Online Battle for Authenticity
Creator
Zhang, Alexander
Contributor
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service
Abstract
Despite entering mainland China in the 1980s and achieving early mainstream success in the West, hip-hop remained a relatively underground subculture over the past few decades, experiencing bursts of popularity that were quickly overwhelmed by mainstream media or suppressed by government intervention. However, this changed in 2017 with the appearance of an internet-based talent show called The Rap of China (中国 有嘻哈), which became one of the most popular programs of the year and introduced hip-hop culture to a massive general audience. This paper takes a media anthropology approach to analyze the rapid development of Chinese hip-hop since 2017, applying Dick Hebdige’s subculture theory as a framework for understanding hip-hop’s evolution. This study draws from various examples of hip-hop representation in Chinese online entertainment platforms as well as its incorporation within dominant culture in both the commodity and ideological forms to critique the fundamental “authenticity” of mainstream, state-regulated Chinese hip-hop. Despite that, using Stuart Hall’s theories on encoding/decoding and Michel de Certeau’s theories on consumer production, this paper ultimately concludes that consumer participants in Chinese hip-hop can implement large-scale, online oppositional decoding methods to construct authentic meaning outside of mainstream media, even if they had no prior understanding of hip-hop culture.
Permanent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/10822/1055372Date Published
2019Subject
Type
Location
Asia
Publisher
Georgetown University. School of Foreign Service. Asian Studies Program.
Extent
volumes
Collections
Metadata
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