Meet The Chinese Rappers Bringing Hip-Hop To The Middle Kingdom
of Chinese. The languages spoken in China comprise a sprawling family of tongues, some of them as unintelligible to each other as French and Romanian. Today, speaking in dialect or with a regional accent is often seen as a sign of poor education. Ambitious young Chinese men and women work hard to scrub such inflections out of their speech. But Fat Shady and Melo are proud of their hometown, and when they rap, they don’t try to disguise where they’re from. “Every city has its own personality, and the personality is in the dialect,” Fat Shady said. “When you hear the Chengdu dialect, it has a kind of ‘whatever’ feeling to it. Standard Mandarin just doesn’t give you that feeling.” Staying true to his roots paid off: Fat Shady has managed to turn his song about quitting his job into a lucrative career in and of itself. During a typical week he bounces between corporate events, doing short sets that always end with “Daddy Ain’t Going to Work Tomorrow.” Last month, he performed at a local mango festival and the opening of a real estate development called Golden Paris. Although Fat Shady still believes most Chinese listeners can’t really handle hip-hop with attitude, he was able to support himself with these shows while putting together his new album, “People, Society, Money.” The album is inspired by trap music, a genre that developed in the American South and takes its name from a slang term for drug houses. That world might seem light-years away from
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