Hip-hop has long been described as the voice of the voiceless, but, as a new group of Inner Mongolian rappers are beginning to prove, it can also provide an outlet for those whose language is under threat.
By Yuan Ye
There was once a time when the Mongolian legion was so feared in China’s capital that giant walls were constructed to keep it out. If such terror exists today, it’s hard to find any trace among the crowds gathered at Beijing’s MAKO club, where on July 16, a self-styled “Mongolian Legion” of a new kind, a hip-hop legion, wowed those in attendance with an intense bass-heavy display of unique prairie-inspired rhymes.
Despite having an average age of just 23, this group of nine Mongolian rap artists has already received the backing of some of the biggest names in China’s alternative music scene, including Zhang Fan, the founder of Midi Music Festival, the largest music festival in China, who has asked the band to perform at his next event.
Dressed in loose-fitting T-shirts, baggy pants, bling and stylish sunglasses, the group’s members are practically indistinguishable from their more MTV-friendly peers. Yet, having grown up amid the vast grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the young rappers have inherited a strong sense of their nomadic roots. While their stage persona is energetic and occasionally aggressive, their words flow directly from their mother tongue – Mongolian – a language so naturally imbued with a strong rhythmic feel, that conversation itself often turns into song.
Mother Tongue
In the minds of most Chinese people, Inner Mongolia, an immense yet remote part of northern China, remains a place of wild nomads and folk culture. The region’s rich musical tradition captures these feelings with styles such as the khoomei (throat singing) and the morinhuur (horse-hair fiddle) achieving nationwide fame.
However, such traditions, though still practiced, are no longer seen as relevant among younger generations, and while some have taken steps to merge traditional sounds with modern variants of pop and rock, Mongolian hip-hop is an altogether new phenomenon.
The Legion’s members refer to themselves as “CT,” an abbreviation of the Mongolian words cagaan tolgai, or “mother tongue.” Yet the group is in fact a union of three separate local hip-hop crews, the TST, the MNT and the PTS, or tsagaan tolgai (also meaning “mother tongue” in Mongolian), Minute and Partisan.
“We rap in our mother tongue, and we identify and distinguish ourselves from other groups with our own language. That’s why we chose the title CT,” said EB, one of the members of the two-person group the TST.
Having remained seemingly untouched for centuries, great changes are now underway across the ancient grasslands, with cultural assimilation between Mongolian and Han Chinese reaching unprecedented levels in recent decades. Many young Mongolians no longer communicate in their mother tongue, preferring instead to use Mandarin Chinese. Yet despite a growing sense of cultural assimilation, recent years have seen a move among young people working to reclaim their ethnic identity. TST has rapped about the trend, hoping to inspire ethnic pride among their fans.
Ethnic identity aside, another important consideration for these young rappers is the compatibility of their native language with the art of “emeceeing” or rapping. “There are many pronunciations in Mongolian similar to those found in English. Like the pronunciation of ‘R,’ ‘S’ and ‘Z,’” Legion member BD told NewsChina, while the language itself has a naturally heavy intonation, lending the groups rhymes a special darkened Mongolian feel.
Yet as members of the group were quick to attest, rapping, or “singing in a talking style,” has existed within Mongolian culture for a thousand years, with several forms still influential today.
Such traditions help to explain why the group’s members found modern hip-hop so exciting. Both EB and BD were first exposed to hip-hop in 2002 after hearing artists such as Eminem and P Diddy on the radio. “We had never listened to this kind of music before, and we just fell in love with it immediately,” they explained.
The Founders
“We are definitely the first group of rappers in Inner Mongolia,” said BD proudly, referring to the Legion. His real name is Bondoo. Yet he prefers his simple abbreviation, as does group member EB.
Like their Western counterparts, such “nicknames” are common among the Legion, similarities can also be found in the group’s method of creating samples and beats. While early Western rappers utilized and mixed others’ records or tapes, these young Mongolian rappers seek out samples on the Internet and match them with their lyrics.
“For one song, the price is 30 to 50 dollars,” members of the Legion told NewsChina. MC Svhbater, the tall thin lead vocalist of PTS, is a frequent visitor to Music.com. He explained how his group would first find suitable songs from foreign websites before browsing Chinese websites to look for their instrumental versions.