China’s ‘king of reality TV’ on The Rap of China, and how indie music could be next genre to go mainstream

Following the smash-hit success of The Rap of China, China’s top video streaming company is trying to bring rock music to the Chinese masses. Since its launch in 2017 by Chinese streaming giant iQiyi, The Rap of China has become a cultural phenomenon, propelling China’s previously underground rap culture to the mainstream and making stars out of several of its contestants. Other subcultures linked to hip hop, such as break dancing, graffiti and street fashion have also enjoyed a boom, and in 2018, iQiyi launched Hot Blood Dance Crew, a reality-TV street dance contest show produced by the same team behind The Rap of China, which recently returned for its third season. Chen Wei, the senior vice-president of iQiyi and executive producer of both The Rap of China and Hot Blood Dance Crew, says The Rap of China has become a hugely profitable franchise spanning video games, virtual idols and fashion products. “After each season, we launched several hundred spin-off products including jewellery, lighters, skateboards and even spectacles,” says Chen, known in China as the “king of reality TV”. To nurture the career of budding hip hop artists, iQiyi set up the specialist hip-hop agency Hedgehog Brother Entertainment, in collaboration with Yige Media. Chen says Hedgehog Brother had signed 73 singers from the 2018 season of The Rap of China. “We brought in vocal teachers and composers. Some of the kids don’t have any formal music training or understand musical notations. They might have talent in singing and writing lyrics, but they don’t have a strong musical foundation. This will present obstacles for their music careers in the future.” Having popularised hip hop in China, the next mission for iQiyi, which had racked up 100 million paid subscribers by June, is to make indie rock mainstream through new reality show The Big Band. Co-produced by iQiyi and MeWe Media, The Big Band sees 31 Chinese bands competing in various stages to reach the top five. Since the show’s launch in May, the hashtag #TheBigBand has seen more than four million posts and three billion views on Weibo. With both young fans, and older ones nostalgic for bands from their generation, plugged in to the weekly show, The Big Band has given Chinese indie bands their biggest stage yet. When Beijing rock band New Pants sang an adaptation of rock star Wang Feng’s song Hua Huo live on the show in June, the live audience went into a frenzy. Touched by their rousing delivery of the song about life’s burning passions, internet users left a sea of messages. One wrote “This is real rock music”; another said, “Their performance made me want to cry.” New Pants’ story is typical of the bumpy career path of many indie bands in China. Founded in 1996, the band released their first album, New Pants, full of three-chord punk songs, in 1998, and continued to follow their musical dreams against the odds. In 2000, its three members took on side jobs to make ends meet. During the episode of The Big Band, the band’s 43-year-old lead singer, Peng Lei, talked about how New Pants’ struggles had led to a midlife crisis. In China’s fiercely competitive music industry, dominated by young, mainstream pop stars, it’s unusual for a bunch of middle-aged rock musicians to become the talk of the town. A spokesman for iQiyi says some of the acts featured on The Big Band come from China’s biggest independent music labels Modern Sky, Taihe Music, Caotai Music and Street Voice. “Bands featured on the show represent a diverse range of styles. They include rock metal band The Face, dating back to the late 1980s, alternative rock band Hedgehog from the mid-2000s, and promising new acts such as Britpop band Penicillin.” The spokesman says indie music in China is undergoing a revival, of and live concerts, and points to the 2018 China Live Music Industry Report, which showed revenue from live music concerts reached 4.85 billion yuan (US$703 million) in 2017. “The report shows big growth in the revenue from live indie concerts, with millennials born in the 1990s and early 2000s making up the bulk of the audience. The story of A$AP Rocky, rapper Donald Trump wants out of Swedish jail “Against this backdrop, iQiyi saw an opportunity to revisit the rich history of China’s indie music scene and bring indie and rock music culture to the mainstream.” Still, The Rap of China remains the biggest success so far for iQiyi and Chen, who is not involved with production of The Big Band. The Rap of China’s 2019 season started in June and features five judges – Chinese superstar Kris Wu, Taiwanese singer-songwriter Zhang Zhenyue, rapper MC Hotdog, American-Chinese singer Will Pan and Hong Kong singer Gloria Tang Tsz-kei, better known as G.E.M. Buoyed by the spectacular success of its first two seasons, season three is the biggest yet in scale. Chen says the number of applicants jumped from 700 in the 2017 season to more than 10,000 for season three. “We looked at more than 1,000 candidates [during the initial selection] held at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai [for the latest season]. Due to [the vast increase in the number of applicants], we needed new competition formats to eliminate more people more quickly. One format puts candidates in pairs for a 60-second performance and only one from each pair advances to the next level.” Chen joined iQiyi in 2015. From 2000 to 2015, he worked for Zhejiang Satellite TV and produced other hugely popular music reality-TV shows including The Voice of China and I Like Lyrics. Chen explains how he came up with the concept for The Rap of China back in 2016. “There have been many reality TV shows over the years, but those that involve singing are [the most popular]. After knowing what is the most in demand, we needed to figure out iQiyi’s target audience. Most of our users are under 30 years old, which is a totally different demographic than [traditional] TV users. “For this [young] age group, hip hop [is the most popular form of music]. If you look at the global music charts, at least 12 songs out of the top 20 will be hip hop tracks.” Sustainable music festivals: the plastic-free, carbon neutral events making a big difference Apart from Mandarin hip hop, The Rap of China has also featured artists rapping in various dialects including Mongolian, Shanghainese and Hokkien. For the latest season, applications were also welcomed from North America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Oceania and Australia. “No matter whether they are Chinese or Western, anybody who can rap in Chinese has a chance to join our show,” Chen says. Season two of The Rap of China was broadcast simultaneously on Hong Kong’s Now TV and Malaysia’s Astro TV. This season, overseas broadcast networks have expanded to include American video streaming website Viki and Singapore’s StarHub. Chen says that while hip hop originated in the United States, the quality of Chinese hip hop now measures up to that of the West. “We want to bring the culture of Chinese hip hop to different parts of the world,” he says.