Seven Years of 8 Mile Underground: Where Did the Freestyle Go?

So what is freestyle?

1

The first 8 Mile Underground battle took place on June 20, 2012, in a Xi'an nightclub called Guangquan.

The backdrop carried the crew's early logo: a black-and-white circle and a five-pointed star, with the character for "street" set in bold type at the center. The stage could not have been barer. Apart from the turntables propped up on it, there was just enough room for one contestant to stand on either side. The host hollered, all effort and strain. The club's dim lights washed in from far behind. It looked like an ordinary night of clubbing. Only when the contestants opened their mouths did it start to feel like a freestyle battle.

Seen now, that first battle looks very rough. The man who put the whole thing together was Nie Lei, a friend who ran with Ye Nan. Nie Lei found the people doing hip-hop in Xi'an at the time and shot a promotional video that looked thrown together: the background music drowned out the voices in it.

Nie Lei did little to promote it. He posted the information on Weibo and Renren and let it travel by word of mouth. On June 2 they sent out their first Weibo post. A day later, someone in the comments asked when and where the battle would be, and all he said was: mid-June, south Xi'an. Word of mouth was enough. About 100 people turned up, each paying a 10-yuan ticket, which came to just about the 1,000-odd yuan the venue cost.

There was no running order, no introductions, no judges. Wins and losses were settled entirely by cheering from the floor. Whoever drew the loudest noise stayed standing. Ye Nan thought the first 8 Mile Underground was "really just a very small competition," and that he had held it only because he and his friends had been swallowed up by work and daily life: "We had to go find the music we loved. We couldn't let the fire inside go out."

Only over a longer stretch of time does it become clear what that bare-bones battle meant. Among the fewer than 20 contestants was Ding Fei, who had already founded the Red Flower Society and helped Nie Lei organize 8 Mile Underground. The champion that year was Bei Bei, also a Red Flower Society member.

2

For most people, the freestyle battle that 8 Mile Underground stands for still means Kris Wu on The Rap of China, asking contestant after contestant, "Can you freestyle?" Inside hip-hop culture, freestyle carries far more than that.

Hip-hop was born as a music culture of Black Americans, and from the beginning it served to chase freedom and push back against the world as it is. The freestyle battle that grew out of it — two rappers going at each other one on one, improvising, on the attack — is the clearest expression of that spirit.

Most Chinese rappers learned what freestyle was from 8 Mile, the semi-autobiographical film starring Eminem. The first time Xiao Qinglong saw it, he did not yet know what hip-hop music was, but it grabbed him at once: "So you can curse someone out like that. Too cool." Nie Lei and Ye Nan watched the film too, and the idea of holding a freestyle competition came out of it. "Why can't China have this? We definitely can." The name 8 Mile Underground obviously comes from the film.

China already had contests like it. Dana Showtyme, from Detroit like Eminem, came to China in 1999, walked into a nightclub flying the hiphop flag, and found a Michael Jackson impersonation show. He wanted to bring the freestyle battle format over, and two years later he staged the first Iron Mic in Shanghai.

The scene was still small, but it was getting busier. Around 2000, rap crews and labels appeared in one city after another. Yin Tsang formed in 2000; its members included Wang Bo, who went on to win the first three Iron Mic titles. Zhu Youren formed in Shanghai in 2002; the rapper Lu1 has said Zhu Youren's approach to rhyme opened his eyes.

American hip-hop spread early through mass media. In China it did not, and freestyle became the main channel through which Chinese rappers practiced, met, learned and made things.

"Back then people had very little information, and there weren't many ways to spread music. WeChat and Weibo didn't exist; it was the age of BBS forums. Not many people could produce or record music either. So it was freestyle." Xiao Laohu, an elder in the rap scene, also started out as a battle MC, and won MC Battle: Dragon vs. Tiger twice.

"People met through underground contests, close contact with each other, sparring inside a small circle, and very real freestyle. Not the way it works now, where you write a song in your bedroom, add auto-tune or make your own version of whatever track is hot, put it online, shoot a video, and maybe people hear about you. That's now. Back then, the way you earned respect or got to know anyone was freestyle. Wherever you went, go battle, go rap. That was about it."

Contests also gave rappers something to be measured by, and drew them in one after another to sharpen their craft. PG One placed third in a national battle in 2013. "I couldn't take it. I wanted to be first and do it properly... When I was training freestyle, I kept it up for half a year, more than 10 hours a day. Anyone in that situation gets better at freestyle. Even if you have no talent, your head has piled up a certain vocabulary, right?"

In 2015, Xiao Qinglong met PG One in the 8 Mile Underground semifinal. They went at each other head-on, both hitting back off what the other had just said. Xiao Qinglong won, and went on to take the title.

3

By Ye Nan's account, he ran 8 Mile Underground partly to build a platform for hip-hop where none existed, and partly so that freestyle battle would have a Chinese brand of its own.

He grew up in a middle-class family and fell for hip-hop in middle and high school, then started trying it himself. Hunting for songs and instrumentals, he would sit in an internet café for a whole afternoon. Later he met a few local friends who liked hip-hop through forum posts, and they put a crew together.

Ye Nan's Luanzhan Men was the first Xi'an hip-hop label to carry any weight. Pact, who later founded Nous Underground and made a showing on The Rap of China 2018, was one of its members. In 2008 Luanzhan Men released its first album, 1506, with 18 full tracks plus an intro and an outro. The liner notes read: "A new studio, a new starting point. Turning a hobby into a career is a new starting point. Starting from zero."

But rap was still a niche thing, and rappers playing bars and similar venues earned almost nothing. One Luanzhan Men member's parent told him that as long as he brought in 1,000 yuan a month, they would leave his hobby alone.

"Call it the music being niche, call it conditions in China. And the internet was weak then, so we had no channels of our own to promote anything. All of it together meant you could not get anywhere. No rapper was living well before 2010," Ye Nan said.

So Ye Nan started thinking about running it as a business. In 2010 he founded OneTym Culture Communication Co., Ltd., which handled artist packaging, music production, corporate event planning and film and television production. Whatever the company earned early on went straight into 8 Mile Underground.

4

8 Mile Underground grew fast.

"Before 8 Mile, Xi'an maybe had three or four hiphop events a year. After 8 Mile, especially by 2014, Xi'an had three or four hiphop events a month," Ye Nan said.

As it gained weight, Ye Nan kept hearing from hip-hop fans elsewhere asking when 8 Mile Underground would come to them. He had never planned to make it big, but he started arranging contests in other cities. Then someone suggested calling all the regional champions together to settle it among themselves, and the national contest was born.

Xiao Qinglong was the first champion after 8 Mile Underground went national. By the time he entered, with contestants coming from all over the country, it carried as much authority as Iron Mic.

Xiao Qinglong prepared a great deal before entering. His first face-to-face battle was on the Iron Mic stage in Kunming in 2013. He had been practicing freestyle battle for more than four years by then, but almost entirely over YY voice chat, with no experience of standing across from anyone. He remembers that at his first offline battle his legs shook, his movements came out wrong, and he was knocked out in the second round.

After that he "entered contests like a madman." The contests springing up everywhere gave him the chances. He calls that stretch "the golden age of Chinese battle": before the 2014 Iron Mic final in Shanghai, he lived in Zhaotong, Yunnan, and never had to fly to a contest. He says he practiced freestyle two to three hours a day, and sometimes battled people online for an hour at a time.

In early 2014, Xiao Qinglong quit his job at the highway bureau and moved to Kunming. There he sang in nightclubs and worked as a shop assistant, taking a few days off whenever there was a contest. By the time he entered 8 Mile Underground in 2015, he was a fully formed battle MC. He was good at counterpunching: the moment his opponent finished, he was turning their own words into his punchlines.

Standing on the 8 Mile Underground final stage, Xiao Qinglong asked a staffer for a bottle of water, took a sip and set it on the floor. He paced with his head down. His eyes were off his opponent, but he was listening and working out how to hit back.

The beat cut. Xiao Qinglong took the mic. The California Love instrumental came in, and that classic beat alone had the crowd cheering and waving in time. "I can use my dialect to run you some flow right here, so you know my flow is Yunnan rap at its best." He opened his freestyle with two lines in Yunnan dialect, answering his opponent's charge that his freestyle had no flow. The crowd went up louder than before.

By the cheering during the battle and by the volume of the final verdict, Xiao Qinglong drew more noise than his opponent. That is how he became the national champion of the second 8 Mile Underground.

"I was thrilled. I actually did it. I'm the national champion." Four years on, that is how Xiao Qinglong remembers the battle. His tone is flat, but the second half of what he says explains the excitement: "I think a national title in my era really was worth something."

Xiao Qinglong is now signed to Banana Culture, and released his first solo album, He Cheng, this March.

"He came up from the bottom. The hiphop dream, and above all what he got on the 8 Mile stage, gave him the push and the biggest help he had at that point, so that today he can look at the world from an artist's position," Ye Nan said of what 8 Mile Underground did for Xiao Qinglong.

Xiao Qinglong agrees the contest brought him recognition, but he still puts himself where he always did, as a "rapper" rather than an "artist." He says he still misses the fight of those battles: "That feeling where all I had to do was get on stage and I wanted to slaughter everyone. Very un-peace."

5

2017 was the turning point for 8 Mile Underground.

By then the contest had left the underground. It ran in 22 cities including Taipei, drew more than 1,000 entrants and joint sponsorship from more than 20 brands, and pulled a combined live audience of over 30,000. For a battle starting at 7 p.m., people were queuing at Xi'an's Dahua 1935 by 2 p.m. More than 2,000 people watched the final in the room, more than 1 million watched at once on Panda TV, and security alone ran to 60 people. The winner, Bao Yin, took home 100,000 yuan.

As it spread, Ye Nan worried: if an 8 Mile Underground stop in another region were run by a local organizer, results could be fixed. He counts the judging as one reason Iron Mic's reputation and reach slipped.

Unlike Iron Mic, 8 Mile Underground has no judges; the crowd's cheering is the only thing that decides a bout. To keep local connections out of it, wherever 8 Mile Underground goes now, the 8 Mile Underground team goes too, and not just the organizer but the photographers, the camera crew and the people handling food and lodging.

The other thing that changed 8 Mile Underground's situation was The Rap of China. The variety show that took over that whole summer pulled hip-hop music out of the underground for good, and words like freestyle carried it into the mainstream with them. Performance offers and commercial contracts poured in, and rappers who had been at the margins came into both fame and money.

Xiao Qinglong reached a mainstream audience too, with TIME, made on the show with Hui Zi. PG One was raised onto an altar overnight. The changed climate also made freestyle battle contests like 8 Mile Underground hotter. When the 2017 edition was held, The Rap of China director Che Che and contestants including MC Jin, Xiao Qinglong, Simba and Zhuo Zhuo sent video messages backing it.

8 Mile Underground has left behind the model of one man running around doing everything. "We work as an organizing committee now, ten people in all," Ye Nan said. Someone shoots stills, someone shoots video, someone looks after everyone's lodging and books the flights and cars, "plus the coordinators, and the stage people."

The format has changed as well. Alongside freestyle there is now a round for finished tracks. "We added that partly to see how the market reacts, and partly to see how good the rappers we're dealing with actually are."

6

"In real hiphop, only the MC battle will last. However much money gets thrown at you, however dope you are, the two of us go one by one, face to face. If the MC battle is good, it's good. If it's not, it's not." Pact said this on the Iron Mic stage, because freestyle is seen as the one form commerce cannot steer. But more and more rappers are noticing that freestyle, now that it has broken out, is changing.

"I won't accept that I'm an MC who only plays with rhymes. I think I play with punchlines," Xiao Qinglong said. As he sees it, too many people now rhyme for the sake of rhyming, which makes their lyrics formulaic and leaves battles without the freedom they once had.

After The Rap of China aired, Xiao Laohu began shooting a video series called Freestyle Is Dangerous. He wanted to run an experiment in freestyle. The people who appear might be singers, producers, dancers or passers-by; Xiao Laohu appears every time and has to rap off the top of his head over the beat. The episodes vary — one gives out prompt words, another runs as question-and-answer improvisation — but either way it has to be freestyle, shot once, with no second take.

"Television and the media like things that are polished, simple, symbolic. Freestyle throws all of that out. It draws on your instinct and demands more technique, but the most important part is that it's anytime, anywhere, once only, never repeated," he said.

Freestyle needs freedom, and that is exactly its biggest risk.

Fans still treat the 2015 8 Mile Underground semifinal between Xiao Qinglong and PG One as a great moment, but when people dug the video back up, they found, to their fury, that PG One had rapped a line: "I'll send you off to meet Yao Beina." Insulting the dead is off limits in traditional Chinese culture.

The part of freestyle that traditional culture calls dirty cannot be stamped out either. An 8 Mile Underground freestyle battle is an attack between two people. The attack can carry profanity and even go after the person, but reacting off the mood in the room, or landing a punchline that answers the other side head-on, is what draws the bigger cheer.

On March 15, 2019, a few hours before the Chengdu stop of 8 Mile Underground, the organizers received a notice from the Ministry of Culture banning the performance, even though they had already secured the six licenses and cleared the five levels of approval the ministry required.

Three days later, organizer Ye Nan posted on social media that the entire 2018–19 season of 8 Mile Underground was suspended.

Ye Nan says 8 Mile Underground will come back with new content and a new format, and that the new format has nothing to do with pressure from the censors: "It's entirely because we know we have to make this thing more fun, more interesting, true to the audience and true to what hiphop is. We have to go find something new, which is to say, innovate."

"Chinese rap has been going more than 20 years. Which year was ever easy?"

Cover image and banner image: a still from 8 Mile.