Cultural Political Economy of Hip Hop in Taiwan : Discursive Trajectories of’’ Keeping It Real’’ in Black Hollywood, East Asia Hip Hop and Chinese-Black Rap

• Main Authors: Tang, Hung-Ting, 唐弘廷
• Other Authors: Tang, Wei-Min
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/uk57y5

博士 === 國立交通大學 === 社會與文化研究所 === 106 === This dissertation, borrowing critical concepts from Political Economy of Culture, Popular Music Studies, Black Studies, Global Hip Hop Studies, aims to explore the discursive formation of “Keeping It Real” trajectory coined within the identity-hybridized processes and market-driven dilemma of a globalizing, localized Hip Hop/Rapping as inner/outer interface of popular culture. The research, targeting at the contextual histories of local regeneration from the perspectives of music, race, community, media institution, affection and historical narrative, appropriates textual analysis and field observation as major research methods to better examine and interpret the multiple-layered faces of Black Hollywood among Chinese and Inter-Asian societies immersed with the flow of globalized capital. Specifying the wave of “New Taiwanese Song” influenced directly and indirectly by Hip Hop culture/music in Taiwanese society, this dissertation then points out the appropriation and extraction of the energy of post-Martial Law period in the 1990s. Furthermore, by reviewing the image of black people, the dissertation intends to suggest how the formation and interpretation of local mainstream media, under the manipulation of transnational media, influence the knowledge of the general public in Taiwan after the abolishment of Martial Law. In order to explore how the aesthetic politics (inclusive of body movement, sounds and music, and costumes and make-up) in the texts of Black Hollywood influencing the younger generation in Taiwan and countries in East Asia in the 1990s, this dissertation focuses on Hip Hop culture/ Hip hop Music to explore how this American popular culture has been transformed into the localized culture in Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea with the methodology borrowed from theories of Culture Studies, Black Studies, discourses on globalization, cultural political economy, glocalization and Historiophoty. From different societies and historical contexts, this dissertation intends to show how the localized discourses impact languages, affection, memories, and popular music culture, as well as how the combination of the old and new generations, modernity and local cultural imagination can speak for the synchronous cultural syndrome/connection taking place among the younger generations in the East Asia where musical creation is connected to their local consciousness and civic society and becomes the mental building of evolving local history. This dissertation adopts the Historiophoty to map the Hip Hop culture/Hip-Hop works in a chronicle order and to pave the track of “New Taiwanese Song,” “New” music after the lifting of Martial Law and the localization of “new” body movement. Under the control of mainstream media, street dance becomes a popular dance, and the appearance of L.A. Boyz in 1992 opens the first wave of bodily “blackization” in Taiwan. At the same time, transnational on media industry and entertaining industry introduce the video and music of black athletes and entertainers, which constructs a series of blackized commodity and builds up the understanding and apparition of black culture and body of Taiwanese youth. With this background, this dissertation discusses the process of making Taiwanese Hip Hop, stressing on how Hip Hop, as an American popular culture, becomes a local culture and on how the creation of Taiwanese Hip Hop utilizes words, sounds and languages to create Taiwanese Hip Hop with local imagination, concern and ideology under the control and interruption of mainstream society and elite class. One of the findings of this dissertation is that various dimensions and elements of Hip Hop culture such as topics of Hip Hop music, clothing style, and singers’ image can be transformed into merchandise and can be used in an interweaving form with local elements and music styles. In other words, the process of commercializing Hip Hop consumption/consuming Hip Hop can be regarded as a process of appropriating, absorbing, translating, localizing the localization, branding, hybridization and metamorphosis of the politics of black bodies and musical aesthetics politics—it is a means of selling and money making for the capitalists. This dissertation uses “KAO!INC,” a local Hip Hop brand in Taiwan, as a case to reflect how the local brands and the underground rap circle package, endow and construct the local consciousness and look of Taiwanese Hip Hop with the opinions and reflection of Delafat, KAO!INC’s founder, of Soft Lipa, Miss Ko, GorDoN and DJ Didilong. To sum up, through political and economic soft power under the name of “Keeping It Real,” a frame of Western black culture, Hip Hop culture/Music is packaged as “black” ideology so as to dominate and incite the local teenagers in East Asia to connect themselves with Hip Hop thinking and movement in order to be at the intersection of globalization and local societies. The international music industry “intermediating” the activities which determine the appearance of the blackness of Hip Hop is the cause of the dilemma and limitation of local Hip Hop culture’s development. However, the body politics of street dance, as well as the response to the social reality Hip Hop music makes, is transformed into the process in which the local teenagers continue, re-approach and care the local condition and their self-identification. Through popular music, bodily movement and cultural hybridity, the shift re-opens the possibility of interconnecting, communicating, hybridizing, understanding, and re-understanding of Asian areas in terms of cultural practice. Keywords: Hip Hop culture, Keeping It Real, Black Studies, Historiophoty, political economy of culture