International Journal of Literature and Arts

| Peer-Reviewed |

A Linguo-Cultural Approach to the Integration of Hip-hop Culture with Chinese Culture---Taking Rap Music as an Example

Received: 08 November 2019    Accepted: 27 November 2019    Published: 06 December 2019
Views:       Downloads:

Share This Article

Abstract

Cultural integration is an inevitable trend of the development of cultural globalization. With the rapid development of mass media and frequent communication among people from various cultural backgrounds, hip-hop culture with its exotic musical form and its unique themes, interacts with other cultures by confronting, adapting and integrating different worldviews and lifestyles. This paper attempts to explore how the hip-hop culture (rap music in particular), which originated from American-African people, realized cultural integration in China, and what manifestations this integration had. Drawing on Cultural Acculturation Theory and making detailed textual analysis, we found that the integration of rap music with Chinese culture takes three approaches, i.e., transmission, localization and adaptation, and transformation. The integration mainly manifests itself in four aspects: form of lyrics, content of lyrics, language use of rap and dress-up of rappers, all of which are illustrated with concrete examples. Further discussions reveal that hip-hop culture is largely accepted by the majority of Chinese teenagers, for it is constantly mitigating and even discarding the violent and negative characteristics during the integration with China’s mainstream values. This study is believed to shed light on the nature of cultural integration, musical integration in particular, and to convince people that taking advantage of hip-hop culture critically to inject new vitality into Chinese traditional culture will promote the further development of Chinese culture in new era.

DOI 10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16
Published in International Journal of Literature and Arts (Volume 7, Issue 6, November 2019)
Page(s) 165-171
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Cultural Integration, Hip-Hop Culture, Rap Music

References
[1] Berry, J. W. (1997). Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation Applied Psychology, 46 (1), 5-34.
[2] Mandaville, P. (2010) The Rise of Islamic Rap [EB/OL]. [Online] Available: http://yaleglobalyale.edu/content/rise-islam
[3] Robertson, R. (1994) Globalisatio or glocalisation? [J]. The Journal of International Communication, 1: 1, 33-52.
[4] Philip, X., Halifu, O. and Awad I. (2007). Gazing the hood: Hip-Hop as tourism attraction [J]. Tourism Management, 452-460.
[5] Jaspal, S. & Ethiraj, D. (2016). Cultural Intervention: Repositioning hip hop education in India [J]. Linguistics and Education, 55-64.
[6] Matt, G. (2014). Seen and not heard: The relationship of orthography, morphology, and phonology in loanword adaptation in the German hip hop community [J]. Discourse, Context & Media, (3) 27-36.
[7] Athena, E. (2013). Greek hip hop: Local and translocal authentication in the restricted field of Production [J]. Poetics, 41 (1) 75-95.
[8] Ashish, P., Katherine, B., Biftu, M. and Andrea, V. (2017). Abortion and contemporary hip-hop: a thematic analysis of lyrics from 1990–2015 [J]. Contraception, 96 (1) 30-35.
[9] Mattew, W., Mario, A., Leah, H. et al (2018). The Hip Hop peer crowd: An opportunity for intervention to reduce tobacco use among at-risk youth [J]. Addictive Behaviors, 28-34.
[10] Katy, K. (2007) Cultural authenticity or cultural contamination: American musical influences on South African hip-hop culture [J]. Muziki, 4 (1).
[11] Barrett, C. (2012). Hip-hopping Across China: Intercultural Formulations of Local Identities [J]. Journal of Language, Identity & amp; Education, 11 (4).
[12] Omoniyi, T. (2009). “So I choose to do am naija style”. In Global linguistic flows: Hip-hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language. (A. 113–153). New York, NY: Routledge.
[13] Ping C. (2014). Chinese and American Hip-hop Culture and Educational Strategies from the Perspective of Youth Sub-culture [J]. Overseas English (09): 197-198+203.
[14] Ruiying, S. (2017). The Enlightenment of the Localization of Hip-Hop Culture from The Rap of China [J]. Southeast Communication. 2017 (11): 41-43.
[15] Hong, J. J. (2019). Design for Hip-hop Cheerleading Micro-lecture Teaching and Its Construction of Digital Platform under the Background of “Internet+” [J]. Journal of Changchun University, 29 (08): 106-110.
[16] Li, J. & Guan, B. G. (2019). An Analysis of the Success or Failure of Double Hip-hop——In 2018, the FLY Cheerleading Team at Serayshan Normal College is an Example [J]. Education Teaching Forum, (20) 242-243.
[17] Wang, L. and Zhu, X. L. (2018). The Analysis of the Youth Values behind the Phenomenon of “Chinese Hip Hop” [J]. Contemporary Youth Research, (02): 12-17.
[18] Gu, C. L. & Qiu, L. Q. (2018). On the Value Guidance of Hip-hop Music to Young Students from the Perspective of Education [J]. Journal of Jiamusi Vocational Institute, (06): 203-204.
[19] Terry, F., Mark R. & Chunmeizi S. (2019). Culture, Communication and merica [M]. New York.
[20] Jin, L. (2014). Alternative Voice and Local Youth Identity in Chinese Local-Language Rap Music [J]. Positions: Asia Critique, 22 (1).
[21] Ke L. (2017). Analysis on the Youth sub-culture heat in The Rap of China [J]. Research on Transmission Competence, 1 (08): 84+109.
[22] Mesquita, B. & De Leersnyder, J. & Jasini, A. (2018). The cultural psychology of acculturation [M]. Guilford Press.
[23] Redfield, R., Linton, R. and Herskovits, M. (1936) Memorandum for Acculturation. American Anthropologist, 38, 149-152.
[24] Fuyi, Xing. (1991) Modern Chinese [M]. Higher Education.
[25] All lyrics are from online, available: www.xiaomi.com
[26] Kitawana, B. (2002). The Hip-hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture [M]. New York: Basic Civitas.
Author Information
  • Department of English for Law, School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

  • Department of English for Law, School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

Cite This Article
  • APA Style

    Zhanghong Xu, Xiaolin Liu. (2019). A Linguo-Cultural Approach to the Integration of Hip-hop Culture with Chinese Culture---Taking Rap Music as an Example. International Journal of Literature and Arts, 7(6), 165-171. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16

    Copy | Download

    ACS Style

    Zhanghong Xu; Xiaolin Liu. A Linguo-Cultural Approach to the Integration of Hip-hop Culture with Chinese Culture---Taking Rap Music as an Example. Int. J. Lit. Arts 2019, 7(6), 165-171. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16

    Copy | Download

    AMA Style

    Zhanghong Xu, Xiaolin Liu. A Linguo-Cultural Approach to the Integration of Hip-hop Culture with Chinese Culture---Taking Rap Music as an Example. Int J Lit Arts. 2019;7(6):165-171. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16

    Copy | Download

  • @article{10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16,
      author = {Zhanghong Xu and Xiaolin Liu},
      title = {A Linguo-Cultural Approach to the Integration of Hip-hop Culture with Chinese Culture---Taking Rap Music as an Example},
      journal = {International Journal of Literature and Arts},
      volume = {7},
      number = {6},
      pages = {165-171},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16},
      eprint = {https://download.sciencepg.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijla.20190706.16},
      abstract = {Cultural integration is an inevitable trend of the development of cultural globalization. With the rapid development of mass media and frequent communication among people from various cultural backgrounds, hip-hop culture with its exotic musical form and its unique themes, interacts with other cultures by confronting, adapting and integrating different worldviews and lifestyles. This paper attempts to explore how the hip-hop culture (rap music in particular), which originated from American-African people, realized cultural integration in China, and what manifestations this integration had. Drawing on Cultural Acculturation Theory and making detailed textual analysis, we found that the integration of rap music with Chinese culture takes three approaches, i.e., transmission, localization and adaptation, and transformation. The integration mainly manifests itself in four aspects: form of lyrics, content of lyrics, language use of rap and dress-up of rappers, all of which are illustrated with concrete examples. Further discussions reveal that hip-hop culture is largely accepted by the majority of Chinese teenagers, for it is constantly mitigating and even discarding the violent and negative characteristics during the integration with China’s mainstream values. This study is believed to shed light on the nature of cultural integration, musical integration in particular, and to convince people that taking advantage of hip-hop culture critically to inject new vitality into Chinese traditional culture will promote the further development of Chinese culture in new era.},
     year = {2019}
    }
    

    Copy | Download

  • TY  - JOUR
    T1  - A Linguo-Cultural Approach to the Integration of Hip-hop Culture with Chinese Culture---Taking Rap Music as an Example
    AU  - Zhanghong Xu
    AU  - Xiaolin Liu
    Y1  - 2019/12/06
    PY  - 2019
    N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16
    DO  - 10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16
    T2  - International Journal of Literature and Arts
    JF  - International Journal of Literature and Arts
    JO  - International Journal of Literature and Arts
    SP  - 165
    EP  - 171
    PB  - Science Publishing Group
    SN  - 2331-057X
    UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20190706.16
    AB  - Cultural integration is an inevitable trend of the development of cultural globalization. With the rapid development of mass media and frequent communication among people from various cultural backgrounds, hip-hop culture with its exotic musical form and its unique themes, interacts with other cultures by confronting, adapting and integrating different worldviews and lifestyles. This paper attempts to explore how the hip-hop culture (rap music in particular), which originated from American-African people, realized cultural integration in China, and what manifestations this integration had. Drawing on Cultural Acculturation Theory and making detailed textual analysis, we found that the integration of rap music with Chinese culture takes three approaches, i.e., transmission, localization and adaptation, and transformation. The integration mainly manifests itself in four aspects: form of lyrics, content of lyrics, language use of rap and dress-up of rappers, all of which are illustrated with concrete examples. Further discussions reveal that hip-hop culture is largely accepted by the majority of Chinese teenagers, for it is constantly mitigating and even discarding the violent and negative characteristics during the integration with China’s mainstream values. This study is believed to shed light on the nature of cultural integration, musical integration in particular, and to convince people that taking advantage of hip-hop culture critically to inject new vitality into Chinese traditional culture will promote the further development of Chinese culture in new era.
    VL  - 7
    IS  - 6
    ER  - 

    Copy | Download

  • Sections