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Global Music with a Local Voice: Chang Jui-chuan's Genesis
Donald John W. Hatfield, Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology
djhatf@wm.edu
djhatf@gmail.com
Over the past few years, Taiwanese underground hip hop has begun to flourish. No longer purely imitative, Taiwanese rappers have begun to "keep it real" by commenting on the island's history and sampling Taiwanese musical sources. Chang Jui-chuan's (張睿銓) Genesis (創世記) exemplifies this creative and political ferment, combining sparse musical textures, news report and speech samples, and witty lyrics to create music with a message. George Clinton of P-Funk said, "Move your ass and your mind will follow." In keeping with this theory, Chang's rap will provoke debate and reflection. As the parody of Michelangelo on the cover suggests, Genesis might make you laugh. It should make you think. It will make you dance.
In the United States, hip hop has long sounded contradictions of African-American life that W. E. B. Du Bois famously called "double consciousness," an awareness of the necessity to engage in a public sphere always configured by white privilege while maintaining connection to one's own reality as Black. Perhaps double consciousness may also account for the productive ironies of hip hop when it has taken root outside of the United States. On Taiwan, underground hip hop employs the globally circulating beats of rap music. Yet critical of the top-down globalization of WTO, the American military-industrial complex, and big media, it attempts to forge from globally circulating sounds a politics of solidarity in opposition to economic globalization. As Chang chants in track two of Genesis, "My Language (我的語言)," "I speak your language / don't mean I'm your slave / I speak your language / 'cause I'm about to invade / your music, your culture, your beliefs, and your fate." Doubled language, doubled consciousness serves as a source of strength.
Chang's main producer for the Genesis album, Adia (阿弟仔), has avoided dense layering, preferring instead relatively spare beats with a slightly reggae feel. Overall, the beats maintain a focus on Chang's strident lyrics, which alternate between Taiwanese and English throughout the album. Addition of a sinister sounding bass track and occasional world music samples, as well as distortion over the voice, gives the sound a sense of urgency without loss of groove. The textures and the rap are reminiscent of West Coast flow, while the samples point out a kinship with world music further developed in Chang's lyrics, which like reggae interweave apocalyptic themes and libertory politics.
Chang's work as a rapper mines the tonal and rhythmic possibilities of Taiwanese, creating a clear sense of groove even to a listener who does not understand the lyrics. In "Voiceless (無聲)," for example, poetic alternation of tones in the repeated call response pattern "siaNmy siaN? / ly hi-ah ootioh long boo thiaNtioh (What can you hear? When you cover your ears . . . [什麼聲？你耳朵摀著攏無聽到])" swings against the strings in the musical track to create a complex polyrhythm. "Hope Is Here (希望的所在)," a reggae track, employs dense alliteration and internal rhymes to great effect. When rapping in English, Chang tends to the speech effusive flow popular in contemporary U.S. rap. Although at times the rhythmic effect is not completely successful, Chang brings a fresh perspective to metaphor, comparing the world to a carton of "expired milk / white but extremely sour" in "My Language (我的語言)" (track two). He also makes some inventive complex rhymes, as in "No Justice, No Peace (無正義則無和平)" (track fifteen) in which he comments wittily on the ongoing China Panda dispute: "We've had enough of this melodrama / sick of this blood-stained propaganda / we don't need your laboratory panda / Taiwan's never been part of China." The complex slant rhyme, laboratory panda / part of China, not only works as a clever rhyme; it also points out the artificiality of Taiwan as "part of China" to great effect.
Chang's lyrics take on the IMF, economic globalization, and American imperialism. They also remain close to home, describing children who can speak English but not their grandparents' language and other failures of the educational system, recalling the struggle of Taiwanese people for democracy, and underscoring the need to remember history. In "The Miseducation of J.C. (非教育)," a song that gives a personal account of Chang's decision to return to Taiwan to take a post as a lecturer of English, Chang denounces an educational system with misplaced emphases. It "wasn't me, wasn't my way, and wasn't my life," says Chang. "Hey Kid (囡仔)" (track eight), reminds the listener to look back to where one has been in order to know where one is going. In this track, which is likely the first work of rap music to address the 2/28 incident of 1947 and subsequent period of white terror, Chang brings a sensibility to Taiwan's troubled history that maintains its humanitarian emphases even as it calls for justice. "Understand and respect each other, work it out together," he cautions, "if you oppress and exploit them, one day the tables will turn and you'll have nowhere to hide." The lyrics' insistence that one "must forgive but should never forget" gains more support from the analog blips and scratches and reverse flowing synth sounds in the musical track. Here, as throughout the album, however, Chang's execution of the lyrics gives the song its heft. With samples from Malcolm X's speeches and a tribute to Difang Duana (郭英男) among its tracks, the album captures Taiwan's position at cultural and political crossroads.
Genesis is not a CD for everyone. Those looking for feel good, commercial party rap or Mandopop should stay far away. Listeners who want to hear some of the ongoing explorations in underground hip hop now happening on Taiwan will find Genesis rewarding. The Taiwanese language tracks will move even listeners who do not understand the language, and the message of the English language tracks is both timely and compelling. Genesis should come with a warning that listeners will want to sing along, particularly when Chang raps, "The train's been pushed / it's time to f*** Bush!" Grooving along to anti-globalization lyrics has never been this fun. |
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