A close look at how Taiwanese musicians are using rap music as a
creative way to explore and reconcile Taiwanese identity and history.
Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a
cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of
martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a
multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration
and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political
transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their
identities. In Renegade Rhymes, ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig
shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian
period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic,
cultural, and political history of Taiwan.
Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to
concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show
how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important
aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions.
Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal
economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture
associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship,
making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present.