One of China's best rappers just took a job at a "big" company like LeEco. What for?

Xiao Laohu senses hip-hop is about to catch fire — and he may well be the one feeding it wood.

Xiao Laohu doesn't swear when he battles.

A battle is hip-hop's word for what is basically two people trading insults. Two rappers agree on a spot, or just run into each other, and it turns into a battlefield: one says how great he is, the other fires straight back about how dumb he is. It isn't a street quarrel, though — it runs over music, the words are made up on the spot, and the roar of the crowd decides the winner.

Profanity is standard in a battle: gutter talk, genitals, the nastier the better. Even on serious albums, R-rated and NC-17 words keep jumping into your ears. Hip-hop came out of the Black street, where drugs, prostitutes and guns overlap. Art comes from life, and a life like that produced art full of dirty words.

Once it crossed the ocean to China, some people decided hip-hop had to stay raw. They may have been born in a hutong and grown up under a southern arcade, never smoked weed, never been hauled into a police station — but when they rap, none of it can be missing.

Xiao Laohu doesn't agree. He says they haven't found their real selves. "Maybe once you really find yourself in hip-hop, you're not that gangster and you're not that by-the-book either. You walk down the middle, you walk your own way. I think that matters a lot."

It is also why English sets him off in a battle. At the 2007 Dragon-Tiger Duel MC Battle, he went after an opponent for rapping in English when the man wasn't a foreigner. In 2008 he opened with: "Let me ask you one last question — do you rap for yourself, or to speak English?"

He won both. Ever since, those two battles have been cited over and over as the start of his name. He became "one of China's best freestyle rappers," and won an Abilu Music Award.

Now he is also director of the hip-hop channel at LeEco Music. The title sounds grand, but he manages nobody. LeEco has several hundred "directors" like him; he is nothing unusual.

Still, the job puts an odd tint on a man who raps: "So what if you can say every word under heaven. Better to flip over this mahjong table and go listen to the waves." Inside a machine that big, can his style stay free?

In our interview he said he doesn't like the by-the-book life of a company — he even calls some of his old jobs a dark chapter. But when the talk turned to LeEco, he stopped being loose and stopped swearing, and started talking about counting things, surveying, pushing projects along. He wants to use LeEco to make hip-hop catch fire. He thinks it is close now and only needs a spark — though he doesn't know what the spark is.

Not long ago he also shot a documentary, Beating Children (《打孩子》). He went to six cities and filmed how six local rappers live. That, too, is part of pushing hip-hop along.

Borrowing commercial machinery, borrowing a big company's resources — that is clearly his most practical idea right now. He believes hip-hop's day will come. In the US it is already one of the hottest genres. And as hip-hop turns up more and more often on mainstream variety shows, and more and more people come to ask him about the business of it, that day keeps getting closer.

But—

"And after it catches fire?"

Hearing the question, Xiao Laohu lowered his head, rubbed his face, and said nothing for a long while.

We talked with Xiao Laohu about his life, his rapping, and what a big company feels like.

Below, T = Xiao Laohu, Q = QDaily

Q: When did you decide to make hip-hop the thing you chase?

T: I've always thought that deciding to chase it happened the first time I heard the music — I found out this thing existed and loved it on the spot. I was in high school. There was a teacher at school, a history teacher, who ran an elective on rock music and art-house film, teaching the history of a lot of art films and rock music. That's how I started to love music.

Because before that, when I was little, there was music class. Staff notation, and singing. I went up to sing with another boy. He was much cuter than me — a nice-looking kid with big eyes and thick brows, better with words, the teachers liked him. We sang together and I thought he was the one going off-key, but the teacher said I was off-key. I felt I hadn't been, but the teacher sent me down — you're not fit to sing with him, get off. After that I developed a huge aversion to music, and it has dogged me right up to today. Look at me: no music theory at all, no interest in most instruments. I like them but I can't do anything with them. Because whenever music class came round and I had to deal with a teacher, I got miserable, it annoyed me, so music held no interest. Even ordinary stuff, pop songs, I didn't much like. When I was small my brother bought a Michael Jackson cassette and I bought one too; I listened and thought it was pretty great, but I never really listened to anything else. Not until that teacher, that elective, did I get interested in music. And back then what you were getting was always bigger than music — it wasn't only the music itself. It taught you a wild way of living, or a rebellious set of values, gave you a defiant streak, and with it a lot of philosophy the textbooks never taught, new ideas, offbeat knowledge. Your head just blew open. You thought, this is fucking amazing.

Q: And you took it in during high school.

T: Exactly, that came first. Rap came when I went with a buddy to buy notch-cut CDs, those sawn-through imports, and he tossed me one: listen to this, it's rap. I took it — really? Let me hear. One listen and I knew it was nothing like the rock I'd been hearing: a simple drum, just a drum, just a guitar, the same two notes over and over, that feeling. And a few guys spitting hard on top. I thought, this is so interesting — it sounds so simple and it hits so hard, your head starts nodding on its own. Then came Eminem, another shock. He has that movie 8 Mile; listening to his music, I think that film was a shock for me too. I'd just heard about the film and had just fallen for hip-hop, and I thought Black guys all dressed sharp, platinum chains and so on. What I expected was lots of girls, all swag, a life lived with style.

But look at Eminem in the film — the guy's a total wimp. The whole picture is gray, that industrial city, the ruin and gloom of Detroit, and this man always repressed, failing, shy, living in a wrecked trailer, his mother getting fucked by someone his own age, nothing but his own rotten mess, his girlfriend fucked by his rival, all of that. And at the end he wins, and still turns and walks away, back to the factory, back to the repressed life. I still remember it. In high school I bought a pirated VCD, two discs, and when I finished watching I didn't feel much. I thought, this isn't the hip-hop I imagined — I'd just fallen for this music, thought it was this incredibly badass thing, how did it end up like this? But every time I've thought about it since, I've felt the film is great, and that it holds exactly what I love in hip-hop: the music pulls you out of a poor, dignity-less life, but only for that instant. That's art too, it's all the same. I don't believe art changes the world and I don't believe art topples governments. People always bring up the Plastic People of the Universe in Czechoslovakia, but I always feel that stopped being beautiful in the end. Once you've succeeded you're not beautiful anymore, right? So it doesn't have that much power. But it can at least yank you out of your life for a few minutes, and that's enough. That's why I've stayed with this thing. That's all it is.

Q: Literature is a bit like that. Part of it may change a little of reality, but the important thing is that while you're reading, you suddenly find none of reality matters — that feeling.

T: Right, it carries your soul off, or lets you look at the thing from another dimension. Really it should make you more detached, not more radical.

Q: You studied film in college, didn't you?

T: Film production. Though honestly it had little to do with film or television, because the teaching was bad, genuinely bad. It taught you nothing much about making things, and the teachers all had side jobs — they'd teach you a bit, then go off to other gigs. The good part was that all through college I kept playing music and kept rapping.

I was in the management school, studying production management. Production doesn't have much to do with making art; it's more of a business — how to run the process, how to invest in a cultural project and get a return in the end. I wasn't very interested in that. I loved film, but I didn't want to be a producer, and I felt I learned nothing real. The minute I got to college, during military training, I fell in with the recording arts school — the people who handle sound, arrangement, recording, the studio, making music, post-production — because that's where the creators were. Plainly speaking, I played music with them: bands, gigs outside, shows on campus. And in my junior year, or the second half of sophomore year, I entered an underground rap contest in Beijing, a bit like Eminem in 8 Mile, and took second. Anyway, I'd arrived. Who's this guy, where did he come from? After that I signed with a label and started putting out records.

Q: Did it feel like fame?

T: A little. I hadn't run with that crowd before, but I'd always loved it. I knew there were people in Beijing and around the country making this music, that there was a scene, and I followed all of it online, listened to it, and now and then went to a show. But at the shows I never wanted to mix with them — I don't like meeting people for the sake of it. I'd quietly buy a ticket, stand at the back, and watch the older generation of Beijing rappers spit while a crew messed around, everyone saying how cool it was. I'd watch, then take a cab home. But that one time I couldn't hold back. I went up, and I could spit. Then those guys started coming at you: who are you? Where do you get off?

Q: And then you slowly joined the scene?

T: Not really. I've kept a certain distance the whole time. Once you're in, people know you, but pretty soon I wanted to make things again, to say something; I wasn't much good at all the relationships. Rap is interesting to me partly because it makes a point of unity, of belonging to a group.

Say you're a well-behaved kid but you listen to that vicious rap, and you feel like a thug yourself, or you feel you have some force in you — that's art doing its hypnosis. Or you hang around with a crew and feel you're somebody: you were shy and unsure, but with a crew you feel you have face, you feel bright. I've always been a bit averse to that. It's not that I don't lean on it at all. The moment it might prop up my character is the moment I most want to push it away, because I don't think that's genuine, independent ease. So the aversion keeps me from settling into the scene and enjoying the ease that comes out of relationships.

Q: Right — your documentary mostly shows them alone, how they live on their own.

T: Yes, and I think that matters, because what's interesting about hip-hop is that you find yourself, and then you find how you differ from other people. Those two things are really important. A lot of people, once they find hip-hop, have only found a way to rebel against the rules, against the good-student life. And they fall into a different huddle and a different blindness — I'm just mixed into another crowd.

Q: Pretending to be a gangster and so on.

T: Right — because maybe once you really find yourself in hip-hop, you're not that gangster and you're not that by-the-book either. You walk down the middle, you walk your own way. I think that matters a lot.

Q: What jobs did you do after graduating?

T: For a long time after graduating I didn't much want to work. I'd put out records while still in school, but I kept writing pieces for magazines, music pieces. Writing got me a few hundred yuan a month — a tiny fee, not enough to live on. Fresh out of school I was naive about it. I thought, why not just pick up some job, work by day for a bit of money, then peel off the suit at night and go rap. I was in love with that fantasy. I found a job selling apartments. I even went to the interview.

Q: Selling apartments?

T: Something like Wo Ai Wo Jia, the estate agency.

Q: You really would have worn a suit to work.

T: I went, and they said, what are you doing at this interview? Aren't you from the Communication University? I said never mind that, it's a job, can I do it or not? He said you can, you can, just sit the qualification exam in June. He was telling me this with a white wall behind him, and I watched a cockroach crawl up it. It was honestly a bit revolting, you know? So I left. The room was tiny, one man behind a desk talking at me, cockroaches behind him. Quite surreal, like Naked Lunch — you know that film? Then I left. On the way out I said I'd think it over, and I never thought about it again. I stayed home for a few months, then went to Time Out, the lifestyle magazine.

But that was right when the financial crisis hit, so even if you went, they wouldn't take you on; only an internship. I interned for half a year and never got paid, you know? Brutal. The first three months I just uploaded content to the website, purely mechanical work. They gave you a 200-yuan meal allowance. In the last three months I started writing a few pieces, and they said, you can write? Why didn't you say so? I said I can write a bit. So I wrote, and made maybe one or two thousand yuan a month in fees. Then I did a stretch of a really strange job. It was a magazine group, and I worked on the group's internal bulletin — the kind of thing a neighborhood committee puts out to pass information around. Exactly that. Interviewing people every day about what they were doing. A drifting sort of life. Very little money, but I stayed on, had lots of time, and nobody bothered me much.

Q: So you still had time to keep making your own work.

T: On the whole I never went through that struggle, where real life stops you from playing music and you have to do something about it. Because I found I couldn't throw myself into making money — taking a job and working hard at earning. At most I'd do other things on the side, but I was certainly going to make music, certainly going to rap. It was the thing I loved most, so there wasn't much of a struggle. And later on I didn't ask much of life either.

Q: How did you end up on Very Close Distance (《非常静距离》)? I heard that counts as a dark chapter.

T: It really is a dark chapter. The other day my girlfriend sent me a clip from Very Close Distance and I said, that's rotten. Back then a senior alumna — they were all in television — came to me and said, don't you rap? We're doing a Chinese version of the Ellen show, Li Jing is the host, she wants that variety feel. So: rap. They asked if I was interested. I found a DJ I knew, we auditioned once, they said fine, great, let's start. And we started.

The job was very easy for me. Easy how? I felt rap was being used as a tool, and in the process I understood something about myself: I can't do entertainment, not that kind. It's not that I can't be entertaining at all, it's that the television brand of entertainment is beyond me. One, I had to be made up every day. Two, they thought my face looked stiff. Three, the target they finally set for me was: you have to be a Chen Handian — you've got to be able to move, you can't just spit one verse, you've got to play with people, you've got to be shameless, you know? I don't think Chen Handian is an idiot. I think he's pretty great.

But I realized I'm not that person; I don't have that talent. What interests me is the thing I love. Maybe I think about it a bit differently from other people, maybe I can improvise a view nobody else has. But asking me to entertain myself for real — I don't enjoy it, so I couldn't keep going. The standoff dragged on quite a while, until they said, if you can't do it, then let's leave it.

It was part of my income too. I'd go there and record three episodes in a day, each opening only 15 or 30 seconds, where I'd improvise an introduction of that day's guest — say he's a singer, sort of neither male nor female, looks like a donkey, but you've got to say he's Li Yuchun, that kind of thing. Very simple, but the producers kept making me write a script. I said I can't write one, just let me improvise. They couldn't be bothered with me.

Every time, I'd trek out to Daxing, a very long way, and record. One episode, 30 seconds, done, and I'd lie down backstage with a book, play a game, rest. Two or three hours later another episode, another two or three hours, another, then home for dinner.

Q: Not much work overall, it sounds like.

T: Very little, and at that age the money was plenty to get by on. Super easy. Record a dozen-odd episodes a month, take home several thousand, maybe ten thousand yuan, roughly. That was all I did, no office to go to, I was fine. The thing is I still had the magazine job then and fitted the recording into the gaps. It went on like that for a while and then it ended, because the show was reformatted later; I heard they got a Black guy to do the talking. Ratings, anyway.

Q: You joined LeEco just this year?

T: Yes.

Q: And before LeEco, you were at that magazine the whole time?

T: Yes. I left the magazine around 2013, because I'd made the record Wanderer (《逍遥客》) and wanted to do a national tour. I figured I'd be away from Beijing a long time, and the job, though it didn't take much out of me, left me wanting to be alone every minute of the day. So I thought, this isn't fair to them either; they shouldn't have to keep tolerating my slackness. I left for good.

Q: And after that—

T: After that, nothing.

Q: No proper job?

T: Right.

Q: So when did LeEco's invitation come?

T: Around last year. A good friend of mine is at LeEco, and he came to me: are you interested in building a hip-hop platform here? He said, I think you're a good fit, your head is clear, you can rally people, and you know all the grassroots hip-hop people and where they are. Do it. I thought, OK. But at the end of last year I was making my new record Color Weakness (《色弱》), the album with Soulspeak, and a national tour was coming up. Two ideas came to me then. One was a tour documentary called Bullshitting Animals (《扯淡动物》) — the one that came out. The other was the Beating Children series: I was going to more than ten places around China, so why not shoot a set of documentaries about how the people making hip-hop in each place live? The tour was taking me there anyway, so I filmed along the way.

Q: Dropping in on the local people, local friends, while you were there.

T: Yes. And LeEco Music gave a lot of support, basically covering all the shooting costs. That's how our cooperation started — with work and with making something, rather than with management or big-platform talk from day one. That way of starting felt comfortable to me. Let's do something, and stop talking about empty things all the time, right?

Q: So what exactly is your job there now?

T: The grandest version of the job is to build a real hip-hop ecosystem in China. Not just running the website. At the base, you bring in good content from abroad, you shoot and create good content at home, and you turn it into a video platform first of all, where people can see the freshest hip-hop, Chinese and foreign. Another part is bringing musicians, Chinese and foreign, onto the platform, so you can get their latest news there directly, see what they make, even take part in buying their work. Then there's a lot of live work offline. This year we brought Stones Throw, the legendary Los Angeles hip-hop platform, to China, and brought Jingqishen, a legendary Guangzhou label, to Beijing. It pulled together interesting poetry collections by young people, talks, sharing sessions, conversations, shows and exhibitions — both labels have ten or twenty years of history, countless records, a lot of design work, a lot of precious archive material including films, so we gathered all of that into one exhibition.

In the long run I really want to turn this into something bigger. We may well do a talent-search show later, and more documentaries, all about hip-hop — build it into a place where hip-hop culture actually gathers, and a brand that can do what a record label does, for this new era.

Q: You said before that you wanted to bring Show Me the Money to China.

T: The import is already done. Whether we do a Chinese version, whether it would be Show Me the Money or a local project borrowing its format, is still being planned and argued over.

Q: So there's no firm plan yet.

T: We'll definitely do it, but what shape it takes isn't settled, because a reality show is a huge project and very complicated, so it has to be thought through properly.

Q: How many people work under you?

T: Just her. (laughs) You can't call it working under me — we work together. There are quite a few colleagues, because LeEco is one whole thing; it isn't necessarily split by department, with so many people in your department. Everyone works on all the projects together.

Q: You said you're loose about work. Does that affect the job at LeEco?

T: It's all right, I think. I've grown up.

Q: Do you still have time to tour?

T: I think that's understood on both sides. In one sense I'm a manager, even an operator, but more than that I'm an independent musician, and on that point LeEco Music is respectful; it respects the individual, and that counts for a lot in the future.

Q: When LeEco Music came to you, or before that, were there other offers?

T: I don't think I ever gave it much thought. Plenty of people came with offers, to make me an artist, a more professional musician, and I turned them down more or less across the board. This is an era when the big record companies have all collapsed, an era for holding on to yourself, making the effort to be your own person, knowing clearly who you are, and not handing yourself over lightly to an institution or to anyone.

Q: LeEco Music doesn't interfere with your work, or your art?

T: No, definitely — it's relatively free. A lot of people at LeEco Music used to work in rock media, that kind of music media, and they really know music; what they know is the pure mainstream — rock, hip-hop. Even the women I work with listen to the newest music. They all understand what youth culture is, and that isn't something rigid dogma or a company rulebook can hold on to; that way you get nothing with any charm to it.

Q: How much time do you need for making music?

T: It runs on inspiration and on doing the work, most of the day. On this I believe what Haruki Murakami says: you can't just wait for inspiration to arrive one day like lightning. You feed it four or five hours every day. Maybe you feed it for a week and nothing comes out, like a monster, a blob of chaos, but you've given it the time, and one day a thread suddenly comes out of that chaos and you grab it in that instant. You have to hand over the time regularly, every day. That's far more reliable than waiting for a force to appear all at once.

Q: How do you feed it?

T: You sit there. You can freestyle, improvise a lot, or you sit and think. Music — dare to think, to work at it, to write.

Q: What do you usually listen to?

T: Basically everything.

Q: Including mass-market pop?

T: Very little Chinese mass-market pop, apart from Taiwanese pop from the Teresa Teng and Fong Fei-fei era, and some Hong Kong pop I heard early on. Current stuff, not much, truly not.

Q: Because ballads still dominate.

T: It's way behind the times. People keep asking me when hip-hop will break through. In the US it isn't even a question — for 20 years, seven of the top ten on the charts have been hip-hop. And we're still discussing it, still going from square-dancing music to love songs. I think people can see it now. A lot of kids born in the 90s tell me, your time is nearly here. I ask why they say that. They say, all the students I know, all the people I know, listen to people like you, music like yours, certain rock, certain folk — nobody listens to that pop anymore, that stupid packaged pop. I think that's completely normal, it should have happened long ago. This is an era with so much information, and everyone wants something a little distinctive, a little more real and in step with the times, so what you need is that kind of creation, not the packaging of an outdated pop.

Q: American hip-hop is bound up with rebellion, but Chinese hip-hop is a bit different.

T: A big part of it is that, though — there's something you can't stand. There are many ways to say you can't stand something, but hip-hop's strong gene is this: I think something here is wrong, and I say it with humor, or I say it makes me uncomfortable. I think that's good, and it's one of the most important things about the music. So this music has to be made by yourself; nobody can write your lyrics for you, you have to say your own ideas. Complain, show off, brag — fine — but what's behind it all is you, and what I remember is you. If we have to talk about consumption, I'm not only consuming your face or your body, not even necessarily your voice. I'm consuming the fact that you, as a person, are interesting.

Q: Does China have cultural traits of its own it can bring to hip-hop?

T: Strictly speaking, none. The old traditional culture has all but vanished, and the new things haven't been learned properly; the Great Firewall stands in your way and countless people climb over it just to read some news. Stop trying to graft on Chinese characteristics from the start, sticking in a bit of Beijing opera, a bit of folk song, always thinking that way. You're both self-abasing and self-important. Self-abasing because you can't keep up with the world, self-important because you keep believing you carry some unique dragon soul of the Chinese nation. Drop all that. Sink into the thing and learn: listen to whatever you like, take it in, take yourself in, look at a few more interesting things, that's all. Talking to the world comes much later.

Q: You also know the state of thought and speech in China — no need to spell it out, everyone knows. It must affect how hip-hop develops.

T: Enormously.

Q: Including the songs banned recently.

T: If the grip stays this tight, this thing will turn into kiddie bubblegum, and there'll be no way around it. But I believe nobody can truly ban a culture and choke it off. It's the same with rappers: grab them by the throat, cut out their tongues, and new ones will still come.

Q: Hip-hop isn't really niche — in China it may be, but its commercial potential has been proven elsewhere. LeEco is turning to it partly to use commerce to push the music along. So what are the concrete plans now? You've mentioned reality shows, concerts, your own label. Anything more specific for the next step?

T: Next step: probably a hip-hop reality show next year. And we'll keep going around China, continuing the documentaries, because in every one of those places, even though it hasn't entered the mainstream view, or only partly has, there are a great many kids who have already made a lot of work, and a huge number of people lying low. I want to keep going out there, finding them, watching their wonderful music and their interesting ways of living — rappers, producers, even people connected to extreme sports, like the street-dance crowd. The other part is seeing the different character of hip-hop in each city, the labels that stand for a place, their whole way of life, the music they make, and bringing that fresh information back. I think all of it is a valuable reference. A bit like after the country was forced open in 1840 — going out to fetch the scriptures. It's the same, and that process never stops. It isn't only about bringing good things back, either; it's about taking interesting things out. It's an exchange.

Hip-hop is a unity. Levels of development differ from place to place, but hip-hop works like a password: you turn up, you find the other person is hip-hop and you're hip-hop, and there's an instinctive closeness, a shared language that needs no explaining, because you're both inside the culture. Each has his own life and his own particular things, but that shared part runs on understanding. Traveling this year — Spain, the US, France, Switzerland — I met a lot of local rappers and musicians and found there was no barrier at all. It's fascinating.

Q: On Weibo, someone attacked the documentary: "this platform is really just for that group of people to promote themselves — it has nothing to do with hip-hop."

T: That's an interesting thought — I'd say the comment is very hip-hop. First, hip-hop really is what I said about the scene: people huddle together and keep each other warm, they play inside the group, it's music among good buddies. And second, the way that person put it is very hip-hop too, because hip-hop is naturally about me — I pay attention to me, I'm greater than everyone, I'm cooler than everyone. Why did you film them and not me?

Q: You said hip-hop is one spark away. What could the spark be?

T: I don't know either. It's just a hunch, because more and more people have started asking me about it. Before I began doing this, nobody paid any attention to it. In all my years of making music I honestly never once thought that music would make me rich or famous, or turn me into a star, let alone into an industry or a trend. I only felt that it pulled at me hard on one side, and on the other it was the best way I had to express anything. But now people keep asking me about the industry, about the culture, about whether this music can become a social phenomenon, whether by taking over the charts or by changing the way young people live. All these questions and all this attention make me wonder why so many people are curious about it. And if you really are that curious, then maybe what it's missing isn't a commercial thing, but attention that understands more, is more accurate and goes deeper.

Q: How long do you work each day now?

T: Not fixed. I'm pretty freestyle about it.

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