New Chinese shoegaze + 'the Jia Zhangke of rap'
+ a short doc about one of China's longest-running gig venue brands
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In this issue: rappers from Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, and more come together for an album focused on the stories of everyday people, a dazzling dreampop-shoegaze debut, a trove of videos from Shenzhen’s bastion of alternative culture Old Heaven Books, raw bass, an “energetic banger” of a mixtape, and a short documentary about one of China’s longest-running livehouse brands.
Straight outta Guangyuan: Zhiyu Xia and Dizkar team up for a dialect-driven hip hop album
“Linguists have split Chinese into somewhere between seven and ten main language groups,” according to the Asia Society. Yet such groupings oversimplify the reality on the ground. When I lived in a small village about an hour outside of Fuzhou, the language spoken there was distinct from that in the provincial capital; many of the elderly residents spoke only that dialect, with little understanding of Mandarin. It was a similar story across the province, with a diversity of languages that fed into broad buckets such as ‘Min’ and ‘Hakka’ but offered so much more variety than such groupings suggest at first glance.
Regional tongues have not always been welcomed in mainstream Chinese culture, where the unifying nature of Mandarin has been strongly pushed from above. Many of those elderly residents in the village in Fujian had grandchildren who, after years of Mandarin-only schooling and cultural bias, could muster only a few words of dialect. Yet many of these languages survive nonetheless, and in certain select regions, their return has even been encouraged, as long as they don’t threaten the supremacy of Mandarin.
Supercharged by TV show The Rap of China, the importing of hip hop into the Chinese mainstream in recent years has had an interesting effect. While Mandarin still reigns supreme, hip hop’s emphasis on regional identities, beefs and battles has seen some dialects imbued with a renewed sense of regional pride in rap circles. Which brings us to Everybody Loves HipHop, a new collaborative record that pushes its creators’ local identities to the fore.
The LP sees rapper Zhiyu Xia, born and raised in the city of Guangyuan in northern Sichuan, team up with hip hop-influenced soul singer Dizkar, who hails from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. Across the record’s 17 tracks, there’s also a geographically diverse range of features, from Hong Kong’s Dough-Boy and Guiyang’s popogo to Beijing’s SouthSideSamurai and Jincheng’s Jin Tiaozao.
The album makes use of these rappers’ different accents and dialects not just for the sake of it, but because its focus is on telling authentic stories. For Xia, the talented MC behind one of 2023’s stand-out Chinese hip hop records, this new LP is billed as “liberating”, with the self-styled ‘Jia Zhangke of rap’ using his mother tongue to capture everyday stories of struggle.
“Born in a factory family in Guangyuan, Sichuan, Zhiyu Xia grew up surrounded by a mix of Sichuan regional accents, speaking in a blend of dialect and standard Mandarin. That gave him what locals call “waigan” Sichuanese—imperfect, inauthentic dialect.
“Because of this, he often avoided rapping in Sichuanese, worried he couldn’t express himself precisely. But this new project, though still inspired by his upbringing, is less theatrical than Young Fresh Chin—it’s more rooted in everyday life, built from real people around him.
“To capture that life honestly, Zhiyu Xia turned to his mother tongue.”
The record is also a celebration of hip hop, as its title suggests, with a focus on youth and nostalgia, on the time when its protagonists first discovered and fell in love with the music. Those memories too, are viewed through a local filter. For Dizkar, whose latest solo record saw him attempt to forge a uniquely Chinese version of soul music, this new release marks a first meaningful return to rapping since he “made a name for himself in Kunming’s underground with sharp, fiery freestyle battles in Yunnan dialect” as a teenager.
Everybody Loves HipHop has some cheesier moments and occasionally the beats can feel a little generic (a generous interpretation being that that’s all part of the nostalgia theme), but when the formula works, it really works. ‘Street Girl’ featuring Daliangshan’s MIA AIM and ‘Street Boy’ with Tibetan rapper Pupten make for a great one-two; ‘Shoe Sole + 18 Years Old (Outro)’ is a stirring closing number.
The interplay of different dialects may make the album difficult to follow at times, but it also adds authenticity. With these languages on show, Everybody Loves HipHop offers a more realistic glimpse of China’s incredible linguistic diversity — and, crucially, of the stories that make up the lives of its people.
Everybody Loves HipHop is out now.
Related:
Just like honey: Fujian shoegazers The Curly deliver a delectable debut EP
China has not been immune to the global shoegaze revival. Far from it. And The Curly, a young quartet from the beautiful Fujian city of Quanzhou, may just have released the best record so far by one of the country’s new crop of shoegaze bands.
Formed in the summer of 2022, The Curly featured on last year’s Kind of Shoegaze compilation series, showcasing young Chinese bands. Theirs is a sound that straddles the (appropriately fuzzy) boundary between shoegaze and dreampop, making use of plenty of static and wall-of-sound guitar noises but adding a sprinkling of sweet, soaring vocals on top. It may not be a wholly original formula, but it’s one that The Curly absolutely nails.
The only real disappointment is that it’s not more widely available. Hopefully that’ll change soon.
Lonely Lover is out now.
Related:
Just like heaven: experimental happenings at Shenzhen’s Old Heaven Books
While it’s been a rough year for alternative music venues in China, Old Heaven Books in Shenzhen appears to still be going strong, thankfully. In addition to being a great space to browse, Old Heaven also runs an excellent record label and doubles as a performance space.
Two acts who’ve been no strangers to performing there over the years have recently uploaded a few videos of them in the space. Here are some of the highlights.
Old Heaven is a very regular haunt for the ever-watchable Mamer. Here he is with a 20-ish minute improvisation ‘Fantasy’ from earlier this year:
And here’s a deeper cut, IZ’s ‘Bawer’ performed in 2021:
Meanwhile, free jazz experimentalist Lao Dan has added this video of him performing with American percussionist Chris Corsano as part of this year’s Tomorrow Festival, which takes place primarily in the larger B10 live space next door, but sometimes spills over into Old Heaven:
(For more Lao Dan at Tomorrow Festival, but not in Old Heaven, check out this video of his collaborative performance with Japanese satsuma-biwa player Junko Ueda.)
Related:
Just briefly: raw bass, offbeat electronica, and a footwork mixtape
Newly released on party brand-turned-record label Gully Ridim is this two track EP from experienced Shanghai-based producer Zean and newly emerging Changsha-born talent Willy Yo, “blurring the boundaries between drill, dubstep, and experimental sound design.”
I’ve been listening to M0naker’s EDEN2 since the spring yet somehow kept forgetting to include it in a newsletter. It’s time to rectify that. The record’s 18 tracks capture two years’ worth of work from the Beijing-based producer, traversing offbeat electronica and instrumental hip hop.
Huizhou-based producer Cartoon Pistol has dropped her debut mixtape, “a high energetic banger for all the NERDS”, as Guangzhou label WackSaturday has it, cutting together dubstep, footwork and a bit of jungle.
’Tang dynasty: watch this film about a legendary Shanghai gig venue
Last summer we lost the long-running Kaixuan Lu outpost of Shanghai gig stalwart Yuyintang. Fortunately, the brand survives through its other branches in the city. Here’s a nice little film about the history of it all from the people at bié Records:
Exit music
Guangdong band Zhaoze are known for their fusing of post-rock with an electrified version of the guqin. But here’s a rare video of them that doesn’t feature the traditional Chinese string instrument. Filmed at last year’s Can Festival in Zhoushan on China’s east coast, the 13-minute video sees them play ‘The Metamophosis’, a piece they say is “seldom performed”.
This year’s Can Festival is set to hold ‘part two’ next month (‘part one’ was held in May), with Chinese post-rock titans Wang Wen teasing a special performance accompanied by Taiwanese orchestral group Just Busy Music Studio.
I can only source TheCurly album on 网易云音乐. But not available without a paid subscription- which I don’t have anymore. 😭
The production on the Xia Zhiyu tracks reminds me of Soft Lipa 蛋堡