For years, China’s hip hop community was thin and disparate. Early acts like Six City from Xinjiang and Yin Ts’ang from Beijing propped up the skeleton of a scene, but without muscles or organs, hip hop as a cultural force never managed to penetrate the mainstream.

But now in the era of smash hit reality TV show Rap of China, hip hop is battling for a position at the head of China’s pop cultural identity. The frontline is Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province and home to the new generation of Chinese rap — in no small part due to the work of Kafe Hu.

Kafe is a rap pioneer, whose expansive catalogue has seen him go bar-for-bar with other rap greats, while also managing to diverge into untread territory. In the infancy of Sichuan’s scene, inspired by his father’s bootleg VCDs of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and by Korean hip hop TV segments, he took up the popping dance style. Shortly after that he started to record his own raps on a cheap USB mic. More recently, he’s released an entire album over a live jazz band, collaborated with producers and artists across every genre, and had a son.

We sat down with Kafe at Eating Music to talk about Sichuan’s hip hop origins, artistic purity in a commercial industry, and the growth that comes with starting a family.

Early Rap in Chengdu

RADII: So first off, when did you start listening to hip hop, and when did you start rapping?

Kafe Hu: I was 14 when I first heard hip hop. And since we’re on this topic, I have to mention my hometown. Everybody thinks I’m from Chengdu, but I’m actually from a smaller city called Jiangyou. The only culture there was food and tourism, so everything around me was just buses and restaurants — there was basically zero hip hop there.

One day my friends and I saw a Korean show with people doing hip hop dance — but we didn’t know that term back then. They were dancing to some rhythmic music, which I later learned was Eminem’s Slim Shady LP. It left a lasting impression on me, and that was the first time I heard rap music. Well, almost. When I was young, my dad bought some illegal VCDs… some Fresh Prince, De La Soul… so really, by the time I was 10, I had already listened to a lot of old school rap. But the first time when I actually knew it was hip hop, it was Eminem.

The reason I started rapping was because I realized my body wasn’t good for hip hop dance. It looked awful (laughs), so I wanted to do something else that was cool. That was around the time we got a computer in my house, and I started searching online for rap albums. 50 Cent, T.I., Jay-Z….

Eventually I found a Chinese rap forum online. A lot of people rapping on there sounded terrible, but the feeling was there. Other users showed me how to download a cracked version of some recording software, so I could record raps over instrumentals. You didn’t even need a VPN back then, so I downloaded a ton of beats. That was the start of me rapping.

The first mic I used was a 25 dollar computer microphone. Our computer didn’t have a headphone jack, so I turned the volume way down and put my ear next to the speakers to record. The first songs I recorded were probably trash, and the lyrics were meaningless. At least I didn’t try to say I had a gun.

The first songs I recorded were probably trash, and the lyrics were meaningless. At least I didn’t try to say I had a gun.

Word, humble beginnings. What kind of hip hop dance did you do back then?

I did popping, but it was like… super ugly, man. You could never imagine how fucking terrible my popping was.

Any videos still online?

You want a video? I’ll do it right now.

Related:

No worries, I’m playing. What was the scene like in Sichuan and in Chengdu back then?

Well at the start it wasn’t rap that was popular, but breakdancing. It was really big in China back then, so when I got to Chengdu there were already a lot of hip hop fans, wearing oversized clothes, dancing. There was one group that was always doing street performances for 100RMB a pop. Meanwhile, rap was really overlooked. People brushed it off — it seemed like an infant learning how to walk. When I see my son walking, he can’t walk well, and sometimes he falls. Rap that I saw in Chengdu twelve years ago was like that.

When I first went to Chengdu, there were only a few people who were rapping. Later there were ten, then twenty, now Chengdu probably has over a thousand rappers. So it grew like that. The hip hop dance era is over, the rock era is also over, but rap is still pushing on. More and more people started coming to our shows — I remember one performance with Chengdu Rap House, the first time the audience was over 1,000… that was when we realized that rap could be successful in Chengdu.

Related:

Now Chengdu’s hip hop influence is huge, like Higher Brothers who have signed with American labels. Masiwei is very smart, and DZ is a great singer. They have the skills and planning to get to where they are, so I congratulate them. That kind of thing is why everyone thinks Chengdu is the pioneer of hip hop in China. But I don’t like to talk big like that — I think hip hop is good everywhere.

The most important thing isn’t just the rapping, but also that the audience is willing to listen to the music, and not just care who’s holding the mic. If they just care about the artist, it’s the same as how we all liked [pop star] Andy Lau when we were young.

A culture’s progress isn’t from one person, but from a group of people. It’s probably not the answer you were looking for, but I think it’s my responsibility to explain that hip hop is the same throughout the whole country. The internet reaches everywhere, and hip hop has reached everywhere in China. It’s better to say that hip hop has developed in all of China, rather than just in Chengdu.

So is an educated audience more important for the development of the genre than the rappers themselves?

Always. The audience is always more important than the artists. Everyone wants to be a rapper — if you’re hardworking you can be one. But for the audience, there’s no handbook that teaches you how to be aware, or “here are the things you’re supposed to understand.”

You mentioned before about breaking and hip hop dance being the first aspects of the culture to really take off here, starting off small in parks or community centers. But now in Shanghai, everywhere you look there are dance studios, instructors, classes at universities. So that’s a big change from a small grassroots thing to a big commercial thing. Do you think rap and the music side will go through a similar transformation?

They’re doing it right now! Rap here is going through that same thing that breaking did. At the beginning, everyone just did it in the streets. When they had money, they made a studio, opened a company, taught students. In the beginning, rappers didn’t have money either, so we’d just freestyle on the street.

Later when we had money, we could buy microphones, open studios, and form labels. Nowadays, there’s no rap in the streets. Can you see rapping out in the streets of China? When a culture develops, and money starts coming in… well, just look around us. Even Eating Music is already set up in a fancy space like this!

The Meaning of Art

You’re known by a lot of your fans for your meaningful, true-to-life lyrics. What’s your writing process like? And is it important to you that you don’t write about overly commercial subjects like cars and money?

I don’t really choose. I don’t think about what to say or write, it’s just an extension of my personality. I don’t have cars, jewelry, or women hanging at my side — if there are women with me, they stay there for an hour, then they leave with other guys. So my life isn’t like that. I can only write about what happens in my life. I can’t lie and say that I was driving a really expensive car, with a girl with basketball-sized boobs.

I’ve never thought about what to write. It’s not like cooking, where I have to choose what recipe I’m going to make. Sometimes inspiration is like taking a dump. You sit on the toilet for half an hour and nothing comes out, but when you’re walking around unprepared, you might nearly shit yourself.

People say my lyrics are kind of poetic, or hard to understand. I think that’s a big misunderstanding. When you’re good at something, you won’t do it in a normal way — you’ll do it in a meaningful way. If you don’t understand the lyrics, don’t try to understand them.

If you go to a museum and look at a painting and say, “what is this trying to represent?”, then you won’t get the meaning, no matter how hard you try. Why not look at rap like we do paintings? To me, rap is a form of art. And if that’s the case, sometimes you don’t need to understand the lyrics.

If you don’t understand the lyrics, don’t try to understand them. If you go to a museum and look at a painting and say, “what is this trying to represent?”, then you won’t get the meaning, no matter how hard you try. Why not look at rap like we do paintings?

Well said. How do you feel about artists who do rap about more commercial things? Especially if it’s not true. If an artist doesn’t have a nice car and women all over him, but he raps having a nice car and women all over him, is that acceptable, or artistically dishonest?

I’d say they’re the same as me. We all have to “keep it real”… but keep what real? It’s whatever you want — that’s what’s real. Sometimes I rap about the dreams I want to achieve, and my dream isn’t about cars, jewelry, and women. But maybe for others it is.

Before, there was the American dream. Now there’s the Chinese dream. It’s the same idea — these rappers are all speaking their Chinese dream. You might say they’re imitating the American dream, or the African-American dream. But at our core, we’re all the same. I think there’s no difference between these rappers and myself.

On his Discography

Your album Kafreeman — that was all live bands and instruments, no samples or electronic beats. What was that experience like, and what made you want to take on a project with all live musicians?