Born in the US, played in Xinjiang

Sit back, close your eyes, open your ears and brace yourself for the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region as you've never imagined it.

By all means, if you want to hold on to those images of stunning scenery and a unique culture and let the fragrance of the food dance in your mind, feel free.

But let all of that slip to the background as you turn up the volume on your ears and wait for an amazing show to begin.

Firkat Bahadeer, who has been devoted into street dance for over two decades, is one of the main forces promoting hiphop culture in Xinjiang. Photos Provided to China Daily

Wang Han, a Shanghai-based teacher, dancer and choreographer, has been training dancers from Xinjiang since early 2000s.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of Xinjiang Uygur ... rap music."

Perhaps we should not be surprised that a musical form born in the 1970s in the melting pot of New York should eventually wash over distant Xinjiang, a region bubbling with cultural diversity and that has eight other countries, including India, Mongolia and Pakistan, dancing on its doorsteps.

Out of this has come a form of music that would not feel out of place in the Bronx, but that has enough of Urumqi and the rest of the region in it to sound and feel distinctly different.

Over the summer, the second season of the popular online reality show The Rap of China, said to have been viewed more than 800 million times, has ensured that the voices of Xinjiang rappers could be heard in many more corners of the internet. Reinforcing that marketing power, anecdotes and snippets of news about them have been the daily staple of social media chitchat, thus swelling even more the ranks of those who have switched on to Xinjiang rap.

Xinjiang rappers were among the outstanding performers in this year's The Rap of China and performers who have helped Xinjiang hip-hop music find its voice, include Air, Chen Jiashen, Duo Lei, Ma Jun and Nawukere.

Chen, 26, whose stage name is After Journey, finished third in last year's The Rap of China and since then has been busy touring and producing a new album as well as singing for movies and modeling for magazines.

In May he and another Xinjiang rapper, Huang Xu, joined forces to make their first foray into the West, playing in five cities in the United States, including Boston, New York and Chicago. In addition, the pair attended several concerts as audience members, which helped them gain an appreciation of the current state of hip-hop and rap in the country.

"The rappers sang in various languages, including Chinese, and there was a huge range of themes," Chen says. "Hip-hop music is very open to different cultures, which is one reason that it has grown so fast in Xinjiang."

Chen, who was born in Korla, about 340 kilometers southwest of Urumqi, now has more than 3 million followers on his Sina Weibo account. He caught the hip-hop bug at high school when he played basketball, he says, and gained further exposure to it when at age 15 he went to Australia to study. He stayed there for three years, and during that time started creating his own songs. One of the songs he performed in The Rap of China was Korla, dedicated to his hometown.

The origins of hip-hop culture in Xinjiang predate Chen's discovery of it by about 10 years - the late 1990s, when young people in the region became interested in street dance.

One of the pioneers was Firkat Bahadeer, 40, a Uygur who was born and grew up in Urumqi. His father, who taught mathematics at Xinjiang University and studied in Japan in the early 1990s, showed Bahadeer a video of Japanese street dancers.

Bahadeer graduated from the law school at Xinjiang University and held down a stable job briefly, until 2001, before deciding to quit and travel to Shenzhen and then Shanghai looking for opportunities to learn with professional street dancers.

Bahadeer recalls the first time he attended a hip-hop party in Shanghai, after having traveled alone and with just a backpack to the city, which in those days would have been a shadow of the modern metropolis it has since become.

"Even before I entered the room I was overwhelmed by the loud music and the hip-hop beat. My body moved to the boom bap rhythm, and everything I saw - the dancers, the DJs and me in the mirror - seemed like scenes from a slow-motion movie. For someone like me, a young guy from remote Xinjiang, it was like an amazing dream."

There Bahadeer met Wang Han, a teacher, dancer and choreographer.

"It was amazing because I'd never come across dancers from Xinjiang," says Wang, a Shanghai native who got into dancing 33 years ago and received training from Ohji, a well-known Japanese hip-hop coach.

In 1999 Wang opened a street dance studio, Dragon Dance, in Shanghai. Then Bahadeer started dancing with Wang and more dancers from Xinjiang traveled to Shanghai to learn street dance with him.

Soon after, Bahadeer opened his own street dance studio, DSP, standing for dream, soul and passion, in Urumqi.

In April this year Bahadeer, with the help of Wang, who is the head judge of Hip-Hop International China, took the street dance competition Hip-Hop International China to Xinjiang. In two days street dance lovers from all over the region attended, as competitors and as spectators.

Hip-Hop International is a competition that represents the most talented hip-hop dancers. It was founded in 2002 and has branches in more than 50 countries and regions, all of which send teams to the world championships, this year's edition of which was held in Phoenix, Arizona, in August. It was held in Shanghai three years ago.

"Xinjiang dancers are really impressive, particularly the younger ones who have developed a strong passion for hip-hop and street dancing," Wang says.

"Xinjiang's population comprises people from many different ethnic groups, and they have an innate talent for dancing and singing. It's a wonderful melting pot."

A Shenzhen company, Hip-Hop Fusion, has staged the Listen Up Rap Performance Contest nationwide for three years, and next year the contest will be held in Xinjiang for the first time, says the company's founder, Li Haiqin, a veteran Chinese hip-hop culture promoter also known as Come Lee,

"More than 20 Xinjiang rappers have taken part in the Listen Up Rap Performance Contest over the past three years and they've shown great promise. Some, including Air, who won the contest's Shenzhen leg, have broken into the top-three lists."

chennan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 10/05/2018 page1)