Written by: Fiona Stokes
Edited by: The Taiwan Gazette
“Everybody calls me notorious struggle life,” sings Taiwanese hip hop group MJ116 (頑童) in their song “Everyday Iz My Birthday (每天都是生日).” While grammatically incorrect, this ill‑constructed English phrase gets the point across: Everybody knows them for their life of struggle.
Nonsensical English phrases such as this one are sprinkled throughout Taiwanese rap, a genre that has sought to make sense of itself in a country far from the rap origins of the Western world. The topics of racism, police brutality, poverty, and inequality that are often critiqued in Western rap are not nearly as significant issues in Taiwan. Yet, Taiwanese rap borrows these English terms from Western rap as a way to associate itself with—and flaunt accessibility to—Western culture, the highly glamorized mainstream.
English Words as Accessories of American‑ness
Unsurprisingly, life in Taiwan is very different from life in New York City, the origin of rap. Because of the different cultures that accompany rap produced in each environment, Taiwanese rap and American rap form two distinct fields of cultural production. Professor Alexander Dent writes in *River of Tears*, “...the concept of fields allows one to trace out the way in which that practice participates in, and represents, mutually reinforcing components of social life.”¹
Rap is a prime example of a field that can be traced through its social commentary and socially reinforcing practice. In Taiwanese rap, the Chinese‑English mix of lyrics reflects a Taiwanese society that glamorizes the Western world, especially America. However, the glamorization only extends to using English as a *brand*, not as grammatically correct or culturally attuned language. English in Taiwanese rap is a boast of one’s access to Western culture, displayed through familiarity with English slang and recognition of what is trending in American culture.
The English phrases connect Taiwanese rappers to a foreign culture and the origin of their art form. Yet this is distinct from a desire to reach a Western audience. Rather, Taiwanese rappers attempt to impress Taiwanese listeners, who themselves aspire toward Western cultural capital. English becomes a token of Westernness, not a communicative tool.
We Are All Locals, Somewhere
Taiwanese society—the subject of Taiwanese rap—exists on a relatively local scale compared to its American counterpart. Dent writes about “locality” as a structural position in the musical field of Brazilian country music, a framework borrowed here to analyze Taiwanese rap.² Locality exists on regional, national, and international scales, each reinforcing the others. The use of English in Taiwanese rap, though reinforcing a Taiwanese local culture, simultaneously references an international culture through the global spread of English.
The grammatically incorrect or arbitrary English in Taiwanese rap is best understood within a linguistic environment where Chinese is dominant and English is used casually to signify familiarity with Western culture. For example, Taiwanese hip hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) repeats the phrase “local sense” in their song “LOCAL,” a celebration of rural Taiwanese life. Though confusing in a Western context, the meaning is clear within Taiwanese Chinese usage: “local” describes someone deeply rooted in their community, and “sense” describes good taste or judgment. Together, “local sense” praises familiarity with and commitment to one’s local environment.³
The Cosmopolitan Cow Whip
In Nine One One’s song “Xi Ha Zhuang Jiao Qing (嘻哈庄腳情),” they compare riding a cow in the field to a lowrider: “The cow immediately becomes a lowrider.” The comical image highlights the cosmopolitanism expressed through English in Taiwanese rap. Riding a cow signals rural Taiwanese life, while the lowrider invokes a romanticized Western image rarely seen in Taiwan.
Discussions of cosmopolitanism often critique “cultural imperialism” and “cultural subservience.”⁴ But the lowrider comparison is not an expression of Western superiority. Dent explains that not all references to a dominant culture imply imperialism. Brazilian country music, for example, draws from Nashville’s sound without adopting American country culture. Brazilian fans enjoy their own music for its reflection of Brazilian life, even when some of its musical tools originate elsewhere.⁵
In the same vein, English in Taiwanese rap is frequently renovated into Taiwanese cultural meaning while retaining the sonic accessory of English. The “lowrider” example is not evidence of aspiration toward Western life; it is a humorous reference used to describe Taiwanese rural experience. Ultimately, the song “LOCAL” is about Taiwanese culture, including its shallow awe of the West.
Stepping Inward to Look Outward
Cosmopolitanism relies on a grounded understanding of one’s local community before reaching outward. According to Dent, cosmopolitanism requires a “developed understanding of cultural intimacy” and is “often transnational in its focus while instantiating highly localized ways of thinking and doing.”⁶
To understand the English in Taiwanese rap, one must understand Taiwanese cultural intimacy as well as the Western references filtered through Taiwanese experience. Ironically, fluency in English or Western culture without Taiwanese background knowledge makes these English phrases harder—not easier—to interpret.
It is through cultural intimacy and a Taiwanese vantage point on the West that nonsensical English in Taiwanese rap begins to make sense.
Endnotes
Alexander Sebastian Dent, River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 90.
Ibid., 91.
Discussion of the term “local sense” in Taiwanese conversational and cultural context.
Dent, River of Tears, 211.
Ibid., 214.
Ibid., 212.
MJ116 (頑童) and 187INC謀殺有限公司, “Everyday Iz My Birthday (每天都是生日),” SIN CITY (萬惡城市), 2016.
Nine One One (玖壹壹), “LOCAL,” LOCAL, 2020.
Nine One One (玖壹壹), “Xi Ha Zhuang Jiao Qing (嘻哈庄腳情),” 玖肆伍參, 2015.
