Straight in at No. 1 on the Chinese government’s banned songs chart is IN3 (陰三兒), a trio of brash, tattooed rappers who mix the earthy language of Beijing’s streets with classic hip-hop beats. And No. 2. And three. And so on, down to No. 17.
They have played packed houses in Beijing for a decade, but all three were detained after the Chinese Ministry of Culture published the list of 120 songs barred from the Internet for “trumpeting obscenity, violence, crime and harming social morality.”
The hard knocks came as the Chinese Communist Party tightens regulation of culture under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who has called on artists to “serve socialism.”
Photo: AFP
IN3 always had a confident swagger, but avoided strictly banned topics such as condemning the party leadership — preferring to namecheck Nike trainers and Playstations, but now they may never be able to perform in their home city again following the online ban.
Their best-known song, Beijing Evening News (北京晚報), third on the government’s list — chronicles the capital’s night life, touching on drunken driving, chasing women and brawls with bar owners. It also contains broadsides against high medicine costs and school fees, heavy traffic and even poorly soundproofed apartment blocks — topics generally acceptable to state censors.
“Some sleep in subway underpasses, others eat out on government expenses,” the group chant, obliquely referencing official corruption.
Wearing a black baseball cap labelled “Compton” and brown Converse shoes, band member Jia Wei (賈偉) said: “We don’t want just to criticize society, we want society to progress.”
“I’m not giving up hip-hop,” he said.
The group saved their harshest rhymes for China’s strict education system, which Jia has called the country’s “biggest problem.”
It was pilloried in probably their most outspoken track, Hello Teacher (老師好) — where they threaten to draw sexually explicit doodles in their exercise books, and call on “shameless” instructors to “die quickly.” It was No. 1 on the ministry’s Top 120.
Relations with authorities were not always as tense.
One band member, Chen Haoran (陳浩然), studied clarinet at China’s prestigious Central Conservatory of Music.
When the Olympics arrived in China’s capital in 2008, local television filmed the group in the city’s ancient hutong (衚衕, alley), rapping: “Beijing is your home, even foreigners speak like Beijingers, they will cheer team China on.”
The same year they won praise from the state-run press which dubbed them the “bling dynasty’s bad boys,” but their flow has been interrupted by ever-tighter limits on expression. Official approval for shows has been harder to come by in recent years, Jia said, while others have been shut down at the last minute.
In 2014 Xi urged artists not to chase popularity with “vulgar works.”
“Art and culture will emit the greatest positive energy when the Marxist view is firmly established,” he said in a speech which drew comparison with the diktats of Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
Their new blacklisted status means IN3 are unlikely to grace Beijing’s stages again.
“Of course I’m upset. They rap about the kind of stories which happen every day to my friends,” local fan Amy Wang said.
Searching for an alternative venue, IN3 held a gig in Yunnan Province, about 3,000km from Beijing, but just minutes after they landed back in the capital police boarded their flight to handcuff and hood them, Jia said.
The band — whose members have previously been open about consuming cannabis — were all held on drug-related charges, Jia said.
Beijing has stepped up a campaign against celebrity users which in January last year saw Jackie Chan’s (成龍) son, Jaycee Chan (房祖名), jailed for six months.
Jia said he was released after a week when police found no evidence he had dealt the drug, but added he believed their music was a factor in the detention, just weeks after the blacklist was released in August.
“I think we were taken in because of our songs,” he said. “We were locked into interrogation chairs, and they kept the hood on us. They wanted to scare me.”
Police did not respond to a request for comment.
Since their release, IN3 — who cite The Clash and Bob Marley as influences — travelled to Atlanta, Georgia, to record at the studios of hip-hop legends Outkast.
The genre is still marginal in China’s music scene, dominated by love songs, imported pop and patriotic tunes dating from the era of Mao.
China’s first major rap collective Yin Tsang (隱藏) released their first album in 2003, shunning politics in favor of goofball intonation and uplifting anthems, and their songs still receive regular airings on Chinese radio.
There are now dozens of similarly commercial acts, but IN3’s lyrics “are reflections of our generation and are real,” said DJ Wordy, a mainstay of the Beijing scene. “In hip-hop, if you don’t talk about the government and real stuff, you can do whatever you want.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS