來自美國加州的Mercury News(聖荷西水星報) 原文連結 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/music/16502688.htm Taiwanese Rappers Build Worldwide Audience In a dingy underground club where hipsters congregate, there are rappers getting ready to lay down some rhymes. They're surrounded by walls of stylized graffiti and dressed in the hip-hop staples: baggy clothes and the classic New York Yankees baseball cap. But this isn't New York, or even the United States. It's Taipei, Taiwan. Above the club, appropriately named Underworld, is a night market selling such local delicacies as stinky tofu and spicy fried chicken patties. Below in the club is the rap crew Kou Chou Ching. Although Kou Chou Ching has no budget to tour outside Taiwan -- four out of five members are college students -- the rappers have an international following, powered by the Web and their use of MySpace. Fans across the world have been listening to the band, pronouncing the group's name with different accents. An Americanized pronunciation is ``cow-cho-ching.'' The name refers to agriculture and the autumn harvest. That's appropriate for a band that takes a seed -- hip-hop -- from foreign roots and plants it locally. ``Hip-hop is an African-American culture (whose) artists sample their parents' music . . . a lot of jazz and funk,'' says Kou Chou Ching rapper Fish Lin, speaking in Mandarin. ``But we are Taiwanese, and we can't copy everything African-American,'' adds Lin, who takes inspiration from his father's collection of Taiwanese folk records. ``Though we are playing hip-hop, we are sampling our own.'' Kou Chou Ching's music and look represent the globalization of hip-hop. The group's members rap in three dialects -- Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka. And their lyrics focus on Taiwanese politics. Their influences are based in a lot of early East Coast hip-hop: Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Nas, Common and Dilated Peoples. Part of their inspiration is RZA, DJ Premier and 9th Wonder -- harder beats with socially conscious and highly political elements. Their music mixes not only the usual record scratches, plus the blings and bloops taken from random songs and video games, but also Taiwanese music. Kou Chou Ching features two rappers, a DJ and two traditional oboe players. ``There are differences and similarities but the two types of music work together quite well,'' says Lin, 27. ``A lot of other countries do the same with their hip-hop. In Japan and Korea, their local hip-hop also mixes in their local music as samples.'' Kou Chou Ching first got together in ``Eminem 8 Mile'' style, says Kou Chou Ching's other rapper, Fan Chiang, also speaking in Mandarin. After starting in the freestyle rap circuit, Lin and Chiang moved into music production and started sampling traditional Taiwanese music and opera. ``In Taiwan, (traditional) music is harder to find,'' says Chiang, 27, `` because people don't have the patience to listen to it anymore. Many will sell (recordings) to secondhand stores, who won't take it seriously. So we have to look at eBay and Yahoo.'' Many of the hip-hop bands in Taiwan are more derivative of the ones in America and don't sample traditional music, Chiang says. ``Much of the younger generation feel that traditional music is old and lame,'' Lin says. ``They would rather listen to rock, hip-hop or electronica. We hope to use the popular hip-hop and add the traditional to teach the younger generation the value of their traditional music.'' Chiang adds, ``For our parents and grandparents, these songs were hits in their day, but to us, they're traditional, so we're making them `re-hits.' We're making the songs contemporary again.'' -- 只是想發揚台灣文化 http://www.kou.com.tw [拷秋勤] --

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