It's a Hip-Hop World

Inside the steaming walls of a nightclub in the heart of one of the world's most dynamic cities, you can hear the sounds of the future. Hundreds of people gyrate rhythmically as a DJ spins hot beats. On stage, a pair of rappers face off, microphones in hand, trading verses of improvised rhyme. They look like typical hip-hop artists, dressed in baggy pants and baseball caps. But listen closely and you notice something unusual: They're performing in Chinese. One rapper spits out words in a distinctive Beijing accent, scolding the other for not speaking proper Mandarin. His opponent from Hong Kong snaps back to the beat in a trilingual torrent of Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, dissing the Beijing rapper for not representing the people. The crowd goes wild, raucously voicing delight and dismay.

This annual rap battle, called the Iron Mic, isn't taking place in New York or Los Angeles, but in Shanghai, where its founder, 32-year-old Dana Burton, has unexpectedly found fame and fortune. The Detroit native arrived in China in 1999 to take a job teaching English. During his first week in town, he went to a nightclub that advertised hip-hop music. But the closest thing to hip-hop was a Michael Jackson impersonator. So, Burton embarked on a mission to bring the real thing to the Middle Kingdom. "I thought about what I could offer China," he says. "It was hip-hop." Burton began to moonlight as a rapper and developed a following. He not only performed himself but also helped others -- foreigners and Chinese -- get their own acts off the ground by hosting parties and hip-hop nights such as Iron Mic. Admirers called him "the godfather of Chinese hip-hop."

Burton soon began to promote tours for famous hip-hop artists visiting from the United States. Today, multinational corporations including Intel, Coca-Cola, and Adidas turn to him when they want help in marketing their consumer goods to China's booming youth market. Burton then taps into his pool of more than 300 Chinese rappers, DJs, dancers, and graffiti artists.

In a recent campaign for Wyborowa vodka, Burton took his crew on the road, presenting 150 shows in 40 Chinese cities. His artists performed a mini history of hip-hop, from its urban American beginnings to its Chinese apotheosis. It was the perfect brew -- an African-American entrepreneur promoting a Polish vodka owned by a French corporation using Chinese performers practicing an Afro-Latin-influenced art form that originated in the inner cities of the United States. Welcome to hip-hop's new world.

A SERIOUS BUSINESS

To the uninitiated, hip-hop hardly looks or sounds like a brave, new art form. It's more like a sonic jackhammer, a visual eyesore, and a conceptual nuisance. Critics often call hip-hop materialistic, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, vulgar, and violent. It's a hot mess, the roar of total chaos.

Some of that is true. But rap music is only a part of the movement, and if you look beyond stereotypes, it's clear that hip-hop culture has become one of the most far-reaching arts movements of the past three decades. The best artists share a desire to break down boundaries between "high" and "low" art -- to make urgent, truth-telling work that reflects the lives, loves, histories, hopes, and fears of their generation. Hip-hop is about rebellion, yes, but it's also about transformation.

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