From Trap to Memphis Rap: The Incorporation and Reconfiguration of American Southern Hip-hop Music in China

Studies on the development of hip-hop music and culture in China share a common interest in hip-hop’s subservient role played in compliance with China’s strict censorship. But by tactfully tampering with this political intervention, the music has now transformed its pre-established aesthetics and concomitant subcultural influences to challenge the existing scholarly understandings. Chinese artists, inspired by hip-hop subgenres of trap and Memphis rap that originated in American southern regions, have incorporated and further reconfigured hip-hop’s subversive doctrines to challenge ideological regulations. By analyzing the music productions of quintessential Chinese hip-hop figures such as Higher Brothers and Dao Jiao, this study aims to demonstrate how artists draw from a global cultural art form to communicate their local beliefs. The findings suggest that the paradigm of hip-hop can be recontextualized when integrated into a new socio-cultural setting through translocalized adaptations.