The Rap of China and Hip-Hop's Cultural Politics

The success of the reality show The Rap of China relies on a certain balance between the “real” and the “show”. The key to achieving this balance is hip-hop’s claim to “keep it real”, which catered to the public’s appeal for “personality”. Hip-hop culture has a long tradition of political resistance, and the “noise” it creates can also be regarded as a subculture’s resistance to mainstream culture. However, The Rap of China carried out a subtle depoliticization of hip-hop, making the show without resistance, and everything was presented as entertainment. Firstly, it passed a rigorous political review of the participants and performance; secondly, it especially emphasized the “technical” dimension of Rap and weakened its “expressive” dimension. After excluding the dimension of resistance, the rappers from The Rap of China even find it hard to resist the “pan-moralism” in online public opinion. This kind of compromise is the only way for China’s hiphop to move from “underground” to “mainstream”. However, it is unfair to criticize it only from a dualism of politics-capital, entertainment-personality. There is no fundamental conflict between the materialism of hip-hop and its commercialization. Commercialization is also the important pusher for the politicization of hip-hop, and hiphop itself has revolutionized the entertainment industry. Hip-hop itself contains plenty of paradoxes, so we need to jump out of the framework of dualism to analyze it. For today’s China, the greatest significance of hip-hop shows is to provide young people in an age