Hong Kong's Hip-Hop & Heterogeny

In the past decade, the Internet has entirely revolutionized the transborder flows, consumption, and production of Hong Kong’s hip-hop culture. Social networking services such as online channels, fandoms, and forums have created a distinct facet of Hong Kong’s musical identity—though it shifts and morphs throughout history, the core idea of resistance against authoritarian governmental and institutional control withholds the passage of time.

Having grown up and lived in Hong Kong for the first nineteen years of my life, I have participated in over twenty hip-hop dance festivals and competitions while frequenting distinguished hip-hop spaces such as Studiodanz, Infinity Dance Studio, and BeDREX. From my personal experience and encounters, what hip-hop means to the Hong Kong community is not just technical precision, ingenious lyricism, or polished skills. What Hong Kong’s hip-hop means is the freedom of expression, the process of internalizing original thoughts, and the reflection of personal beliefs. Much like New York, Hong Kong is known for its mishmash of Eastern and Western cultures—borne as a former British colony and home to a vivid tapestry of nationalities, languages, and religions, Hong Kong is uniquely an international melting pot of diversity and complexity.

Consequently, I believe that Cantonese hip-hop provides empowering answers to Asian marginalization in the global sphere and socio-political oppression in Hong Kong: 

“For a sense of innovation, surprise, and musical substance in hip-hop culture and rap music, it is becoming increasingly necessary to look outside the USA… where strong local currents of hip-hop indigenization have taken place. Models and idioms derived from the peak period of hip-hop in the USA in the mid to late 1980s have been combined in these countries with local musical idioms and vernaculars to produce excitingly distinctive syncretic manifestations of African American influences and local indigenous elements” (Mitchell 3).

The nine-toned language of Hong Kong, Cantonese, can be likened to a “linguistic Rubik’s Cube” that resonates with the rhythms and flows of hip-hop diction (Mitchell 6). In Sam Hui’s song「半斤八兩」(a Chinese idiom meaning half a catty and eight taels), he produces a cuss-ridden, vehemently hybrid sound that merges musical influences from Cantonese opera with hip-hop to salute Hong Kong’s working-class street subculture.

For example, in Verse 1, Hui sings:「我哋呢班打工仔 / 通街走糴直頭係壞腸胃」and expresses how “the working folk scurry around in the streets so arduously that we get stomachaches.” Here, Sam Hui creates social dialogue surrounding lower-class struggles and economic racism and ultimately contributes to reverting the glamorously inaccurate “Crazy Rich Asian” stereotype and the model minority myth—Canto hip-hop actively constructs Asian characters who are no longer boxed in as caricatures of wealth or villainhood and functions to expand the visibility and versatility of Asian representation into the universal cultural consciousness.

Additionally, Mitchell suggests Hong Kong citizens’ emphasis on local culture and distinguishment from the mainland Chinese since the 1997 British handover to China (6). For Wilfredo Alconaba, a Hong Kong-born Filipino rapper also known as Jiggie Boy or JB, his journey into Hong Kong's Canto-rap scene began with his dance talents in popping, hip-hop, and boogaloo. In his song「潮共」(“Idolize”), he criticizes the themes of materialism and self-aggrandizement in contemporary society and comments on the shallow nature of Chinese nouveaux riches idolizing superficial possessions and external appearances. In particular, the lyric「著住Yeezy Kanye West 係邊個都唔知」translates to “Wearing Yeezy, but you don’t even know who Kanye West is” questions the authenticity and individuality of wealthy mainlanders who blindly follow trends and brand names without appreciation for or knowledge of international pop culture.

Displaying elements of self-conscious rap, this song not only communicates an aversion to consumerism, but also promotes the values of hybridity, multiplicity, and heterogeny, highlighting the different national identities of Hong Kong and China. For example, the line「不好意思你們有沒有 Superme?」translates to “Excuse me, do you guys have Superme?” and mocks the typo in fake Chinese replica goods of the clothing brand Supreme. Jiggie Boy’s deftly integrated political mockery and his characterization of the culturally unsophisticated nouveaux riches in「潮共」exemplifies Canto hip-hop’s formation of Hong Kong identity and unique self-expression, as well as its rhetoric of distaste against the structures of power and greed.

Overall, Hong Kong hip-hop is a land of sonic stimulation and synthesized Eastern and Western sounds. It explores the diversification of music styles and focuses on the repetition of catchy melodies and the narrative role of lyricism—it neither bows down to the musical cultural diplomacy of the Chinese government nor Western imperialism. Rather, Hong Kong hip-hop, and by extension international hip-hop, elevates genres ranging from classical Chinese music, Hong Kong opera, hip-hop, techno, and traditional pop with vibrant modernized flairs, and ultimately works as a globally focused local project for the enunciation of idiosyncratic subcultures and ways of life.

Works Cited

Boy, Jiggie.「潮共」(“Idolize). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jot0ev7VPMs

Hui, Sam. 「半斤八兩」(“Half a Catty, Eight Taels”). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzk7QJtHxec

Mitchell, Tony. “Another Root: Hip-hop Outside the USA.” Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Wesleyan University Press, 2001, pp. 1–38.