Comments on: [Help], [Help], [Help] the Police!

By: Ben Ross

Ben Ross — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:07:16 +0000

Yup, just more of the same old lazy US journalists preying upon the public’s reflexive political views. Alleged stories of descent in a society shaped by a Confucian value system never seem to get old, do they? From my experience most young Chinese people are listening to music more along the lines “I love you. I’m loving you. Like a mouse loves rice.” Pretty pugnacious stuff indeed.

By: Herbie (HERBZ)

Herbie (HERBZ) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:13:38 +0000

Btw, someone wrote that the first political rappers were Public enemy, I’ll vote “the Last Poets” 1972 .

By: Herbie (HERBZ)

Herbie (HERBZ) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:05:13 +0000

Greetings, well I’m the engineer – writer of many wonderous and mystical beats for Yin’ Tsang (never could spell that right) on their first album “serve the people”, the wonderous and mystical beats thing was a joke btw, Chill!

They never intended the album to be some assault on anything, it was their first time in a studio, well I say studio….. my living room, complete with pimped out zebra pattern sofas and stuff, nobody was punching their hands in the air, the machines were pretty crap as well as a whole host of other problems, it got done though.

censorship on the first cd

Here’s the reason why, there was virtually nothing out there in Mandarin regarding hip hop, they had a fiercely tight budget and if their disc got pulled or rejected, it would have left them and myself without the tiny amount of money we were making in other ways.

Ideas were put forward that might have taken the album to another level but it was self-censored so as to not make any problems. If they’d gone all “angry” at the start, there’d be no shows, no experiences to pass on to others getting into it or on the way up.

So it might be cool to cut them some slack because at the end of the day, they were there first and did it first, the critics are an afterthought.

btw, the final track on the cd is the first Mandarin Jungle choon.

I still write and produce, so if anyone’s got ideas and MONEY, you can email me…. beijingbass@yahoo.com

Peace and thanx to Bokane for bringing up the topic

Herbie

By: JamesD

JamesD — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:19:55 +0000

Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting

By: richard

richard — Mon, 25 May 2009 08:51:54 +0000

“Orientalist extraordinaire.” I gotta remember that. Let me know if the CIA pays well, Brendan, and if so, are there any openings?

On a more somber note – time to update this slumbering giant.

By: Viola Chang

Viola Chang — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:10:19 +0000

[Help], [Help], [Help] the ORIENTALIST ATTACK DOGS!

LOOK OUT EVERYONE!

The New generation of Orientalists have arrived!!!

Long gone are the days of dishonest Western bloggers and reporters who can’t speak the local language!

This is a NEW BREED! They’re advanced. They’re sophisticated, they can speak putonghua better than yo Chinese Chicken Mama!

Featuring Brendan O’kane!!! Orientalist extraordinaire! Who flaunts his skills in Chinese to make you believe. . .WHATEVER IT IS HE WANTS!!!

He can give you evidence in Chinese symbols he knows you can’t read! He’s committed; he loves the poor colonized people of China who are just too ignorant to realize the wisdom of freedom and democracy and the freemarket system!

The CIA has payed him and his friends to produce an authoritative orientalist blog.

But here’s the catch!!!

Chinese people don’t give a fuck what he says! Because they CAN’T READ ENGLISH!!!!!

By: Maggie

Maggie — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:33:00 +0000

I have to agree that it seems weird that Brendan is asking different people who contributed to this post to write articles “in counter” to this Times article. Maybe he is, in fact, part of a network of spies! CIA spies who have infiltrated all of the west’s top newspapers! And maybe, following this logic, the times journalist who wrote this article refused to join the CIA and so they, the united CIA spies of the world, collaborated to discredit him permanently and for eternity in order that they could maintain tight control over every word western readers read representing and misrepresenting china!!! maybe the writer of this article represented a threat to the CIA and NSA old boy colonial networks of the world!!!

But WAIT! That wouldn’t make sense–if all the top journalists are spies, than the writer of the hip hop article must be a spy too! AHA!!!

This article, is proof, then, that with the financial crisis came a critical rift in the CIA brotherhood; this is proof that they have a lack of solidarity!

FIGHT THE POWER!

By: Yi

Yi — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:13:28 +0000

I read all the comments here, finally. I am a rapper in Beijing, and I thought that, contrary to what Bokane says, this article really did a service to Chinese youth by actually putting the spotlight on a scene that had been, up until the point it was published, completely ignored. Of all the articles published by The Times that have questionable reporting–that overexaggerate the state of Chinese censorship and the degree of freedom people have here-it seems strange that O’Kane singled this one article out. On the harder, hot-topic issues regarding China: pollution, detainment of dissidents, and religious intolerance, amongst others-Bokane never ventures to challenge the reporting of western journalists (especially journalists from the Times). What does O’Kane have to say about western journalists’ uncorroborated claims of genocide by the Chinese police against Tibetans during the Tibetan uprising? While there were casualties on both sides, it seems interesting that on a REALLY controversial topic like that, Mr. O’kane remained silent. He doesn’t have his magnifying glass out on any of Joseph Kahn, Edward Wong, or Andrew Jacob’s articles, which establish the basis for the west’s misunderstanding of China and bash China on a weekly basis. Sure, China’s government is really intolerant on certain issues, but if you look at the article that Mr. O’kane singled out, it was probably the most positive of the articles published in western media of late because it actually showed that young Chinese kids are hip! His arguments concerning the examples the writer chose seem totally piecemeal and subjectively thrown together. And he seems to have immense beef with the writer of the article, which I thought was one of the few articles doing a service to China in that it highlighted a real subculture here (how many Times articles do you see that do that? How many English language articles published by the mass media do you see do that, period?)They’re mostly focused on dissidents and farmers in order to give people in the west the impression that China is still living in the cultural revolution. I have to say that after reading the hip hop article in the Times, I feel it is one of the few articles in the past year that broke through the firewall in perception on China in the last two years; so I think it’s strange that it is also the article that B’okane decided to fact check (wrongly, and subjectively). I can’t really see why he would target this article when there are so many other articles that distort the truth on harder issues in China. Maybe Mr. O’kane has dozens of journalist friends and academics who, for some reason, targeted this journalist in order to discredit him. I thought the article was really strong, and did more to bring the reality of China’s youth to western readers than almost anything I had read before. The thrust of O’kane’s argument seems to be that this writer is misrepresenting the state of the music scene by saying that there is very little political rap in China. That’s not true-Andreas, who posted earlier in this conversation, has tons of political rap critical of the government, and the only reason he hasn’t been shut down is because he isn’t Chinese. I think the amount of self-censorship that goes on by Chinese rappers is significant; how many songs they don’t publish because they know they will be targeted if they do publish them. I can’t tell if O’kane is simply an attack dog for other people, or whether he simply enjoys portraying himself as an educated objective academic who, through this post, has actually attacked one of the only decent articles on China I’ve read in the last two years. I suspect he mostly simply enjoys the attention– his attack post has been up for like half a year. Anyway, I couldn’t just help but notice how agenda-driven O’kane’s blog post is. I wonder what the real motivations behind his article were, since his arguments are completely piecemeal and ignore the real facts of the underground hip-hop scene. While I don’t agree with some of the posts accusing him of being a spy or making uncorroborated claims against him, the fact that he has so many journalist friends suggests that he is part of a tertiary network of self proclaimed China experts who might have targeted this one writer (for what reason, God only knows) with the intention of discrediting him. That may sound a little bit conspiracy theory, but if it is true, than B’okane is in fact part of the very forces that misrepresent China he claims to be fighting against. It seems strange that all of his friends who write china blogs simultaneously referenced this one article; a coordinated attack. Journalists and academics sure are damn competitive and cutthroat. I even saw a wall street journal article reference this post. Damn. I think it just goes to show how much of the media coverage on China is controlled and fought over.

By: Sophia

Sophia — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:00:24 +0000

I’m not sure if you have seen it yet, but Sexybeijing.tv put out a documentary concerning the subject of the Chinese language and rap: http://www.sexybeijing.tv/new/default.aspx

By: hsknotes

hsknotes — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:27:46 +0000

I think my favorite is the racism. Nothing like racism to win the debate and smear your opponent. Stay classy.

I think it fits in quite nicely with the interesting situation where a lot of the ’scene’ in china is has a lot of ‘western-born or raised’ people either performing, attending, supporting, or ‘dating’, at least in some of the larger cities. It touches on the bomb that is the notion of ‘identity’ in china. I think people (foreigners mostly） don’t write about ‘odd’ things like 王力宏 being one of the major faces of Taiwan or the rap and punk scene in china having these ’sprinklings’, to say the least, of ‘not born and raised in china’ influence, because it’s kind of clear what’s up and how identity and ethnicity operates in greater china, but I’m still surpised I haven’t seen a longer article, or even a long and involved blog write-up talking about this.

Also, isn’t it true that most of the MSM out of china is usually bad? Isn’t that just sort of a rule these days? Don’t the ’serious’ people just comb the sites like Rconversation and zonaeuropa, or occasionally go out on expeditions to the ‘countryside’ or the ‘cityside’ to write ‘hard-hitting’ stories, that kind of ring hollow or ‘off’ to people who aren’t nytimes reporters?