Confession: Despite being a diehard fan of golden age hip-hop and having had the privilege to interview some stalwarts of that era, including Public Enemy, Ice T and DJ Premier, during my early years in Taiwan, my grasp of Taiwanese rap music is feeble.
MC Hot Dog, who I saw open for Missy Elliot in 2006; Dwagie (大支), who I didn’t recognize as a support act for Wu Tang Clan’s Raekwon and Ghostface in 2014; and LA Boyz, who I discovered (and promptly dismissed) in my ex-brother-in-law’s dusty stack of CDs back in 2002: That was the extent of my knowledge. While I often found the beats formulaic and forgettable, and the rappers’ flows clunky and overly shouty, the language barrier was the obvious problem.
Had my comprehension been sufficient to decipher the odd rhyme or two, the penchant of Taiwanese emcees for multilingual homophonic punning would still have have left me bamboozled. It is therefore fitting that a substantial portion of this book is dedicated to the pedagogic role that rap has played for young men in Taiwan; the sections that analyze intricate wordplay inspired me to find the tracks in question to see how much I could follow.
Deconstructing verses from some of Taiwan’s foremost wordsmiths, the author demonstrates how the properties of Mandarin and Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) are used to accentuate what the late, trailblazing scholar of hip-hop Adam Krims calls a “percussion-effusive flow.” This term refers to the use of complex rhyme schemes where lines “spill over the rhythmic boundaries of the meter” to create polyrhythms “through subdivision of the beat, staggering of syntax or rhymes, off-beat accenting” and other techniques. The effect is to achieve a punchiness through the vocals, such that “the listener is given the impression that the MC is using his or her mouth as a percussion instrument.”
A notable example is the 2002 track Forty-Four Fours (四十四個四, sishisi ge si) by Dwagie. (Jay-Z released a tune with the same name, which also hinged on homophonic punning, a few years later. Was this a unique case of an American rap star biting from a Taiwanese emcee?)
“Dwagie’s take on percussion effusiveness,” Schweig writes, “profits from Mandarin’s remarkable capacity for homophonic punning …”
LANGUAGE GAMES
What follows is a fascinating exposition of how this achieved. As with all the material she analyzes, Schweig renders Dwagie’s verses in traditional Chinese characters, followed by the Hanyu pinyin, and finally the English translation. She explains in an introductory note on romanization and translation that the English lyrics “do not attempt to preserve the rhythm or rhyme of the original-language texts, but are intended to provide a sense a meaning, tone and emphasis.”
As the name suggests, Forty-Four Fours plays on homophones for the si and shi syllables in the title. The latter syllable alone is used 19 times in seven different characters across the first four lines. There are also internal rhymes using the like-sounding syllable zhi. However, rather than the rhyming of the final, emphasized vowel sounds, it is the allusion to the conflation of alveolar (s) and retroflex (sh, zh) sibilants in initial consonants by Taiwanese speakers of Mandarin and Hoklo that particularly grabs the listener’s interest.
This “self-deprecating joke,” Schweig writes, recalls the music of Jutoupi (豬頭皮), an unlikely progenitor of Taiwanese rap. Starting out as a folk singer-songwriter in the early 1990s, Jutoupi — whose real name is Chu Yueh-hsin (朱約信) — was enlisted by Ni Chong-hua (倪重華), the record exec behind the success of Taiwanese-American pop-rap trio LA Boyz. (Ni went on to head MTV Taiwan and, more recently, was embroiled in controversy before resigning from his post as cultural commissioner for Taipei City in 2015.)
TRADITIONAL ROOTS
Brought in as a lyricist, Chu ended up creating his madcap Jutoupi alter-ego as an outlet for quirky material that was deemed unsuitable for another of Ni’s acts, The Party. In his 1994 release, Taiwan Language Battle, Jutoupi plays multiple characters in snippets of dialogue that he, the song’s narrator, has supposedly overheard while wandering around Taipei. These include comical misunderstandings based on mispronunciations by Taiwanese speaking Mandarin and Japanese conversing in heavily accented English. In one example, a student asks a classmate, “How old are you?” (同學你幾歲?) only to be told “That’s my foot bath water” (我洗腳水啦) — a supposedly Hoklo-inflected mispronunciation of “I’m 19 years old.”
Schweig and several of her interviewees, including Jutoupi, trace this type of “rapped” dialogue set to music to liamkua (唸歌) folk traditions, where performers recite verses in song and spoken-word form in a variety of voices and pitches, usually accompanied by a moon lute (yueqin, 月琴). Another traditional art that is mentioned in passing by the rapper Manchuker (滿人) is xiangsheng. From the comical miscommunication angle, this certainly seems more influential.
FORGING AN IDENTITY
Nevertheless, liamkua is identified as one of three inspirations for Taiwanese rap. The other two are xiha (嘻哈), a transliteration of “hip-hop,” which refers to a black- and Latin-influenced “composite hip-hop culture” brought to Taiwan from the US in the 1980s; and raoshe (饒舌), which Schweig translates as “rhapsodizing tongue.”
This latter strand, which “demands verbal agility” is associated with “politically incisive multi-genre musicians who first experimented with Mandarin- and Hoklo-language rap after the end of martial law.” Elsewhere, Schweig examines hip-hop in Taiwan as a medium for knowledge exchange. It is striking how many of the scene’s high-profile figures are well-educated. Several have completed doctorates or postgraduate studies, and even those who didn’t generally attended reputable universities and high schools. Through workshops, online discussion forums and lectures, these elder statesman have inculcated a new generation of politically aware b-boys (and, yes, they are — as Schweig notes — overwhelmingly male and, often, preoccupied with exuding machismo).
While some of the aspects of Taiwanese hip-hop that Schweig identifies do not seem culturally specific, there is enough here to get a sense of an art form and cultural movement that has cemented its own separate identity. Based on more than a decade of research and fieldwork, Renegade Rhymes touches on a wide range of sociopolitical themes. As such, it would be a shame if its readership was limited to hip-hop heads.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the country’s other political groups dare not offend religious groups, says Chen Lih-ming (陳立民), founder of the Taiwan Anti-Religion Alliance (台灣反宗教者聯盟). “It’s the same in other democracies, of course, but because political struggles in Taiwan are extraordinarily fierce, you’ll see candidates visiting several temples each day ahead of elections. That adds impetus to religion here,” says the retired college lecturer. In Japan’s most recent election, the Liberal Democratic Party lost many votes because of its ties to the Unification Church (“the Moonies”). Chen contrasts the progress made by anti-religion movements in
Taiwan doesn’t have a lot of railways, but its network has plenty of history. The government-owned entity that last year became the Taiwan Railway Corp (TRC) has been operating trains since 1891. During the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule, the colonial government made huge investments in rail infrastructure. The northern port city of Keelung was connected to Kaohsiung in the south. New lines appeared in Pingtung, Yilan and the Hualien-Taitung region. Railway enthusiasts exploring Taiwan will find plenty to amuse themselves. Taipei will soon gain its second rail-themed museum. Elsewhere there’s a number of endearing branch lines and rolling-stock collections, some
Could Taiwan’s democracy be at risk? There is a lot of apocalyptic commentary right now suggesting that this is the case, but it is always a conspiracy by the other guys — our side is firmly on the side of protecting democracy and always has been, unlike them! The situation is nowhere near that bleak — yet. The concern is that the power struggle between the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and their now effectively pan-blue allies the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) intensifies to the point where democratic functions start to break down. Both
This was not supposed to be an election year. The local media is billing it as the “2025 great recall era” (2025大罷免時代) or the “2025 great recall wave” (2025大罷免潮), with many now just shortening it to “great recall.” As of this writing the number of campaigns that have submitted the requisite one percent of eligible voters signatures in legislative districts is 51 — 35 targeting Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus lawmakers and 16 targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The pan-green side has more as they started earlier. Many recall campaigns are billing themselves as “Winter Bluebirds” after the “Bluebird Action”
RSS