Prospero | International music

Why Burmese hip-hop is inevitably political

Under Myanmar's military junta, hip-hop was seen as transgressive and rebellious

By N.G.

IN APRIL, a government dominated by Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) took over in Myanmar, ending decades of oppressive military-only rule. For both the music world and Burmese millennials, one re-elected member of parliament, Zeya Thaw, stood out. The political-prisoner-turned-NLD-politician is a founding father of one of the most popular forces in the country today—Burmese hip-hop.

It began in the mid-1990s, when a group of Yangon teenagers fell in love with an American style of music they could now regularly consume through the increasingly prevalent satellite dish. They wanted to be modern, cosmopolitan and connected, and hip-hop encapsulated everything they longed for: the technology, lifestyle and new art of a world that their underdeveloped, closed-off state had failed to bring them. At that time, Burmese popular music was rock’n’roll heavy, consisting mostly of love songs. For the soon-to-be hip-hop stars, those songs full of imaginary, poetic dream-worlds seemed divorced from reality. But portraying reality was no easy task when words like “truth,” “reality,” and “politics”—anything that could hint that the government wasn’t doing its job—were strictly taboo.

Localising American hip-hop was antithetical to the military’s trumpet that the glorious, traditional Burmese culture remain pure and supreme; it was local traditions that they understood, and could control, more easily. Rappers were told that parties weren’t “part of our [Burmese] culture”. Acid, Zeya Thaw’s group, was the first group to rise to nationwide stardom in 2000. Others quickly followed. Hip-hop became a platform of, for and about youth even though talking about youth realities—sexy girls, drinking alcohol or poverty—remained difficult. The music industry did not take the young artists seriously, and viewed their computer-made beats with derision. As Saw Nyi Nyi, a famous early rapper, explained, “we are criticised as ‘tha yote pyat’”: rebellious, rude, outrageous and with tattoos unsuitable to be seen in public.

Unsurprisingly, just releasing hip-hop at all was a hurdle. Censors rejected Acid’s ground-breaking album on first submission. They had to remove songs, rewrite lyrics and submit “a thousand times” before the work gained approval. And with its direct lyrics about life and even struggle, what came out was, by Burma’s standards, revolutionary. A younger group of teenage artists, dubbed the “second generation”, managed to push through slang in their lyrics, and were beloved for it. To artists of the Myanmar Hip-Hop Association (MHA) like J-Me and Cyclone, speaking the truth meant they had to speak the everyday language of youths. They got into a protracted fight with censorship authorities over the name of their first influential album and won; “Street Rhymes” came out in 2006.

Yet a fault line soon emerged between these artists, who felt that hip-hop should shine a light on truth and reality, and those who mainly sought to entertain. To the “real” hip-hop artists (such as MHA), hip-hop was more than music, it was a culture and a lifestyle. The values of hip-hop—truth and reality, personal ideals, resourcefulness and autonomy—applied to how they lived their lives, too. It was an undeclared statement of independence from military and parental rules.

Commercial or “sell-out” artists were more likely to accept military constraints on lyrics, clothing and performances, but even the most commercial faced ongoing problems. It was, after all, still hip-hop. Back in 2003, Sai Sai Kham Leng, a heartthrob and, to many, the epitome of commercial rap (see video below), was invited to perform on live television—only to be barred at the last minute. Rap was still unsuitable for broadcast. Clothing was continuously contentious, slang a sticking point.

Growing up meant facing the reality of the censors, but also realising, as one artist put it, that “the censorship board cannot check every single word in the lyric books”. It was an ongoing process of give and take, appeasement, sparring and negotiation. Over time, what artists imagined possible and managed to push through kept widening. By 2010, even before the political thaw and the end of censorship, what was acceptable in the (now hugely popular) genre of hip-hop and public culture more generally, was miles away from where Acid began in 2000.

Despite years of mistaken reports, Zeya Thaw is the only hip-hop artist ever incarcerated as a prisoner of conscience. But over the years, parachute journalists frequently over-emphasised fringe and explicitly political hip-hop with little societal impact in Burma to glorify a kind of blatant resistance, or to conclude that all hip-hop was political. Conversely, one parachute academic, Ward Keeler, latched on to commercial rap full of bravado, girls, and parties, to conclude that Burmese hip-hop was politically irrelevant. Many journalists cite his work.

But casual outsiders, unfamiliar with the norms artists were continuously breaking and changing, missed the larger story by focusing on lyrics and assessing by the standards of Western free speech. So many aspects of hip-hop were resistive to the junta’s dictates on society, challenging the rules and the idea of who could and should have the power to make them. Unco-ordinated acts of agency became a movement that upended the norms for youth, youth culture, music and the public sphere more widely. The entire institution of Burmese hip-hop—that it exists at all and thrives in popular Burmese culture today—is political. And it is a testament to how hard these rappers fought for a sliver of autonomy in a police state that tried to give them none.

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