[Hip-hop artist Junsheng.Dec 09, 2015. Photo courtesy of Gamy Wong]
“I’m not like Chinese tourists everyday acting like pretentious pricks, without rhyme or reason I might be added to the blacklist.”
That was the bit of freestyle rapping by rising hip hop star Junsheng on CTi’s (中天電視台) variety show Here Comes Kangxi (康熙來了) that not only earned him death threats from Chinese netizens but also elicited grovelling apologies from the show which hosted his performance. According to the report …
His one-off diss sent the producers of Here Comes Kangxi into crisis mode, later apologizing for Junsheng’s “offensive behavior” on the show’s Facebook page, and on its Sina Weibo page in China.
So what happened?
During the taping of Here Comes Kangxi, many of the young rappers were cued by co-host Little S (小S), also known as Dee Hsu (徐熙娣), to perform a freestyle rap performance.
At which point Junsheng performed his provocative lines. However, somewhat in contradiction to the ‘Taiwanese yoof stand tall for TW indie identity’ theme of the piece, it seems Junsheng wasn’t entirely proud of what he had done …
Feeling uncomfortable about the lyric, Junsheng asked producers of the show to delete the lyric in question.
“I emphasized to them over and over, delete it,” he said. “When you invite ordinary people with no TV experience onto a show, they don’t know what opinions are alright to express on air,” he said.
Here Comes Kangxi producer Lee Kuo-chiang (李國強) confirmed that the discussion did take place. “It was communicated after filming that the lyric would have to be deleted,” said Lee in a phone interview with the Taipei Times. Lee also confirmed that a production error led to the diss lyric still making it to air.
Yes. A ‘production error’. Excuse me while I pretend to cough and the word ‘bullshit’ comes out instead. Either Kangxi producers wanted the ‘controversy’ to raise flagging viewership figures or someone in the production team executed their own unilateral wet dream by failing to edit the line out. Bizarrely for a hip hop artist, rather than profitably capitalise on the incident, Junsheng tried to walk back his actions …
Junsheng says he had no intention of creating a stir, and mentions that freestyle rapping requires a constant flow of lyrics with a new and original rhyme at the end of each line. Rhymes that reveal hard truth’s about a person or society have a resounding effect with the audience.
“When we perform, we say anything and everything,” said Junsheng. “If you start saying ‘you can’t say this, you can’t say that,’ then it’s not impromptu, it’s not freestyle.”
Wait, what? Does he not get the immediate and glaring contradiction between saying everything and anything but especially rapping on hard truths to have a resounding effect on the audience, and having no intention to create a stir to the point of asking producers to censor his own material? What kind of hip hop artist is he? I couldn’t imagine Tupac ever being so defiantly apologetic. This is all the more confusing since following criticism from Chinese netizens and diss tracks aimed at him, Junsheng released a reply track, effectively doubling down on his lack of ‘intention to create a stir’ …
Junsheng said there has been about 20 diss tracks directed at him, but he does not pay them much heed. “All their lyrics make no sense, and have really stupid rhymes. Some of them can’t even keep a rhythm.”
In contrast, Junsheng’s rebuttal diss track hits back at his critics in language many Chinese fans may not be used to hearing about their political leaders.
“The bait’s too easy to take, I’m like Wu Song (武松) riding a tiger on the prowl, y’all can suck mine but y’all be too used to sucking Chairman Mao’s (毛澤東),” raps Junsheng in Glass-hearted Babies.
But the story takes another twist …
As the controversy continued to brew over the following week on Facebook and Weibo, Here Comes Kangxi co-host Kevin Tsai made a surprise announcement that he would resign from the show in order to pursue other interests. Co-host Little S followed suit with her own resignation, citing a lack of interest in hosting the show if Tsai did not stay on.
Kudos to Junsheng though for spotting what was more likely going on behind the scenes …
Because the incident with Junsheng and the resignations occurred less than one week apart, Taiwanese media reports suggested a link between the two, a theory Junsheng has reservations about. “If you do a program for so many years, winding down is only natural,” Junsheng said. “I think this incident conveniently presented itself, and they used it as a springboard to end the show.”
But wait, didn’t Junsheng frame himself as “ordinary people with no TV experience”? That claim looks pretty weak when you’re able to see through the layers and provide such a nuanced analysis. He’s obviously someone with experience of performing and experience of dealing with professional level media environments. Again, another contradiction. Excuse me if I don’t join in the rush to hail him as some paragon of new Taiwanese identity just yet. Perhaps we should wait until he has a consistent narrative and the courage to stand by it in public.
Aside from suggesting that CTi used this non-controversy to end a show that its hosts and audience had tired of, what this story does highlight though is the way much media in Taiwan has censored itself in the past eight years in order to grab a slice of the Chinese media market …
But the incident says much of the shift CTi programming has made over the last decade in order to cater to the larger Chinese television market. Once Taiwan’s most popular TV talk show in the mid-2000s, Here Comes Kangxi has avoided topics and guests that explore Taiwanese consciousness and identity in order to avoid angering it’s Chinese audience.
“Kangxi has a lot of sponsors with Chinese brands, and CTi’s parent company — Want China (旺旺) — has really influenced the content of their TV shows,” said Jessica Chang Chi-ling (張芷菱), an organizer of the Youth Alliance Against Media Monsters group (反媒體巨獸青年聯盟). “But the more they change the content to be pro-China, the more Taiwanese young people don’t want to watch their shows.”
But the key problem the show faced may lie in the show’s paradox of having to serve two viewing audiences that are evolving two distinctive identities. All it took was a spat between Junsheng and Chinese rappers to shine a light on the contradiction.
It’s not just CTi though. SET, once a solidly pro-Taiwan TV station, castrated its own talk show after 2008 so it could sell its mediocre Hoklo language TV dramas to Chinese audiences. For many Taiwanese media outlets the Taiwanese market is so small as to be insignificant. This paradox is not a problem for them or their profits. I’m not entirely convinced they would care if no young Taiwanese people watched their shows at all, as long as there are a steady flow of them naive enough to willingly come on to perform tricks and sing Edelweiss. You know, talent show artists like Junsheng.