Jam No Peanut (MC 听不懂)
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Jam No Peanut (MC 听不懂)

New York City, New York, United States | Established. Jan 01, 2016 | SELF

New York City, New York, United States | SELF
Established on Jan, 2016
Solo Hip Hop World

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Press


"Watch: MC Tingbudong Gives a VR Tour of China’s Underground Rap Scene"

"Runaway" is a new VR music video that takes viewers on a dizzying journey across soundscapes from the fields of rural Yunnan to the hutong of Beijing

We first met MC Tingbudong in 2018, when the NYC-based rapper and multimedia storyteller was nearing the end of a two-month residency called Found Sound China that saw him making beats and writing rhymes across rural Yunnan province, Chengdu, Shanghai and Beijing. We invited him out to LA last year for RADII’s sold-out china.wav live music showcase, and have kept tabs as Tingbudong has plugged in with other artists in the RADII sphere of coverage.

Now he’s back with “Runaway,” a new track and VR music video that takes viewers on a dizzying journey through the Chinese hip hop underground through the eyes of Tingbudong: - Radii China


"MC Tingbudong Wants Chinese Hip Hop To Find Its Place in the World"

Digging out the roots of hip hop in China has been a lifelong mission for Washington, DC native Jamel Mims, who drew a blank from his high school Mandarin teacher when asking about the genre’s existence in China, and came to Beijing in 2008 to complete a one-year Fulbright project on the subject.

Mims took the resulting multi-media assemblage — entitled The Misadventures of MC Tingbudong (听不懂; literally “unable to make sense of what one hears”) — back to the US, where he’d spend the next decade developing his own work as a rapper, activist, and visual artist. Mims — who also produces work under the name Jam No Peanut, as well as the MC Tingbudong moniker — returned to China last year as part of the 2018 Found Sound China program, where he got a close look at how Chinese hip hop has evolved in the post-Rap of China era.

"...I’m out to create an international culture of revolt against this revolting culture, and tracing back on a path I began first as a student, then as a researcher, and now as an artist, defining an answer to the question I asked so long ago: “Where’s the hip hop in China?” - Radii China


"坐上 MC 听不懂的手扶拖拉机,在云南的林间国道边燥 “起来”"

“哟哟哟 干嘛呢/我是MC听不懂 aka ‘哩喽 Ting’ ” 当你看到一个黑人操着蹩脚的中文说唱 “民族大团结”,会不会来了兴趣? Jam No Peanut 就是 “MC 听不懂” 的大名,一个来自纽约的 rapper,也是多媒体VR艺术家,在他给我发的“看不太懂”的邮件里有条 视频链接,点进去看了三分钟,里边没他,就在我想关上并且拒绝他的时候,我注意到了视频左上角的图标,就像是智能手机出现之前的电子地图上的视角调整标志,随即便有了刚接触街景地图时不断移换视角时的惊喜 —— 这是我第一次看到可自助调试视角的MV。 2008年,他用一首主张民权以对抗右翼势力的激进政治说唱竟然申请到了 中美富布赖特项目 的奖学金,来到北京研究在地说唱,从此成为了一个双语饶舌歌手 “MC 听不懂”,这也是现在所有人对他的第一称谓。 - Noisey China


"Rapper's VR Music Video Gives You the Experience of a Live Protest"

Jamel Mims aka "Jam No Peanut" is a conscious rapper with a not-so severe nut-allergy whose work as an interactive media artist is bringing people to the frontline of political action. The 31-year-old and DC-native is now based in New York City where he runs a test prep program that uses hip hop to teach kids history. Mims also works as a tech and cultural consultant in low-income classrooms where students don't usually have access to high tech gear for learning materials.

In June, Mims was a part of Hip Hop Hacktavist a social coding event inspired by the music of Kendrick Lamar aimed at high-schoolers. "I take a lot of my professional work and put it into my artistic work. That really is about bringing trap music and youth culture to mass incarceration and state terror," Mims told VICE Impact an interview.

On Monday, July 24th, Mims released the music video for his new song "Hands Up." The video is a virtual reality experience that puts viewers on the streets of New Orleans and then in Washington DC just after the inauguration of President Trump. The video, which lasts a little over 4-minutes features real scenes from protests and marches without any actors or props. - VICE MEDIA, Aaron Barksdale


"Bridging cultures through hip-hop: Artists mix English and Mandarin"

MC Tingbudong is an African American artist from Washington D.C., where he studied Chinese in high school. He raps in Mandarin and English, and studied hip-hop in China as a Fulbright scholar.

“Tingbudong” is Chinese for “I can’t understand what you’re saying.” The moniker was born in Beijing around 2008.

Then the artist moved back to the U.S. to work on other projects, and last year, he did did an artist residency with Yehaiyahan in China. He’s planning to return to China for a tour. - KCRW


"Mixtape Monday Feature: Microphone Misdemeanor"

Fulbright scholar, rapper and Ratchet Revolutionary Jam No Peanut takes on fascism in America with his debut Microphone Misdemeanor EP – “a project that blends augmented reality and virtual reality applications, trap music, radical politics, and interludes of chinese rap.”

In an age where fascism is consolidating power in Amerikkka, Microphone Misdemeanor is a music project created to inspire millions to get in the streets to drive out this fascist regime and bring a whole new world into being. - OkayPlayer


"How Hip-Hop is Introducing Children to Coding and Technology"

WHEN Jamel Mims teaches young, lower-income minority students in New York, he doesn’t deploy traditional materials like a blackboard, a whiteboard or PowerPoint. He uses a microphone—turned up loud for politicised raps—and mobile phones with augmented-reality apps. Mr Mims’s “interactive hip-hop classroom” uses music as an entry point into discussions about politics, race, class and gender.

One lesson centred upon Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high school pupil who was arrested in 2015 on suspicion of building a hoax bomb when he brought a self-assembled clock to school. Mr Mims aims not for lecturing, but for dialogue. He puts printed pictures of Mohamed on the wall, and asks students to scan them via an app. A menu of items pops up instantly: Mohamed’s Twitter feed; a 360-degree view of an interrogation room (meant to simulate the one Mohamed was taken to); a SoundCloud song; a quiz; a hip-hop video produced by Mr Mims. The lesson takes about 30 minutes; students respond to what they’ve learned by posting about Mohamed on Instagram. “Schools usually say cell phones are distracting, but the world says cell phones and other technologies are a desirable aspect of youth culture. So we try to leverage that in the classroom whenever we can,” Mr Mims says. “Students who are disengaged and turned off by pen and paper tests need to feel reinvigorated.” - The Economist


"Captures from the US: Digital Protests in NYC"

Jam No Peanut’s upcoming EP, Microphone Misdemeanor, fuses tech and rap as combative tools of resistance. For a sample, check out a "jam-packed" (pun intended) 3-song preview with voice-note commentary on the current flow of fascism, and the future of protest. - Screen Shot Magazine


"Engagement Was The Name of the Game at The October New York Tech Meetup"

Continuing the trend of political activism, self-proclaimed rapper and revolutionary on front line of mass incarceration and police murder Jam No Peanut took the stage. Demoing his trap transmedia project ‘Ahmed Mohamed’, Jam No Peanut uses augmented and virtual reality to immerse his audience in the experience of 14-year-old Ahmed who was arrested last September on bomb suspicions for bringing a homemade clock to his school as well as highlight the school to prison pipeline. By scanning the cover art, users can select different multimedia experiences from the AR dashboard including a 360 VR reconstruction of the interrogation room Ahmed was held. Jam No Peanut then gave a live rendition of his single Ahmed Mohamed for what NY Tech Alliance CEO Jessica Lawrence Quinn declared “officially our first rapped demo.” - AlleyWatch | STEPHEN MALKOWICZ


"WATCH: The Story of Ahmed Mohamed Told Via Trap Music and Magical Realism"

Creator Jamel "Jam No Peanut" Mims says the video is part of a larger "'trap transmedia" project on young victims of police brutality.

The video, shot by Alex Seel (Al Jazeera, Borderlands) is a re-telling of Ahmed Mohamed's arrest—with elements of magical realism that blur the lines between documentary footage, satire and music video.
The music video forms one part of a bigger multimedia project (also titled "Ahmed Mohamed") that includes "augmented reality features" and "an interactive 'Fight The Power' Final Exam about police terror." The MC debuted the project in New York City last Wednesday (May 25).

Jam No Peanut previously garnered attention when, as he described in a Medium post, he went on trial in May for "climbs on statue" charges stemming from his arrest during the #RiseUpOctober anti-police brutality protests in New York. - Colorlines, Sameer Rao


"The Young Rapper Leading Protests With Verse"

"Jamel the rapper, poet of the group, became involved in activism as a reaction to constant profiling. Growing up in DC he says he had a lot of experience observing the inherent injustice in the difference between the treatment of rich and poor people. There was one particular incident that pushed him to make activism a part of his life permanently. "As recent graduate of Boston College - I received word that I would be the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship for a proposal I wrote to produce a multimedia ethnography about Hip Hop in Beijing," Jamel said, over the summer, however he attended a party that, at its peak, began to spill out onto the sidewalk. "We flooded out to the street, where cops began to harass the mulit-colored multi-ethnic crowd, shoving us down the street. At a certain point they begin grabbing people from the crowd, including a friend who is a photographer, who tosses me his camera. I grab it and they go after me, dragging me out into the street, kicking and punching me, tearing my clothing." He was arrested. "The Fulbright commission, which had thoroughly researched and interviewed me, who knew me and all of my accolades, immediately took the backs of the state and threatened the loss or possible delay of my Fulbright Grant until the incident is clear. It was this moment that things clarified for me on a certain level - and when I realized it was a system."

"James Brown wasn't singing 'I'm black and proud until after this shit happened," Jamel said, "before that he was praising America, and he got culture checked." Jamel believes that in order to inspire the number of people needed to make a change passion, involvement, and activism need to fuse with popular culture, making the strong show of support for the protests by athletes and music stars a really important thing."

... "Art is going to drive that, our cultural leaders have to show people that this is important." Jamel said as he compared the Millions March to the "Free Huey," movement in the 60's that changed music and brought some social responsibility to our entertainment industry.

We talked to the rapper/poet, Jamel Mims about why art is the only way to break down injustice. And he rhymes for us. " - Collectively; Alex Brook Lynn


"Talking With Jamel Mims"

I would say there’s a very direct link between hip hop culture and working on and looking at…the problem of mass incarceration. I guess in two ways. In one way, [both hip hop and mass incarceration] effect or deal with the same population, whether you’re talking about the youth that were trapped down in the ghettos and barrios of the 60s and part of the 70s in places like the Bronx where thousands were forced to evacuate with the cross-Bronx expressway, to kids who now have terrible schools, who are walking to school feeling like they’re criminals. It’s this same section of people who are treated as less than human. And then, on the second hand, “Fight the power”—that’s a hip hop phrase [the title of a song released by Public Enemy in 1989]. There is also this ethos in hip hop that is very much about on-the-ground reporting and giving a voice to the voiceless. “Broken glass everywhere, people piss on the stairs and they just don’t care,” that’s a Grandmaster Flash record, a powerful piece of truth-telling that exposed and helped to sharpen and focus [historical racialized inequality]. And I guess a third point that’s related, when you’re looking at where hip-hop culture came from and you look at the problem of mass incarceration, these things are very, very related. You have policies like stop-and-frisk and racial profiling, so common and prevalent for folks of our generation, [which] have very much to do with the experience of the system in reaction to the revolutionary upsurges of youth in the 1960s and 1970s. That was a time when the system got rocked back on its heels: black and brown youth who were forced into these conditions [working to undo] what’s called the “social order of America.” You have the answer to that threat, to that potential threat, when you look at a situation like now where there’s nearly 30% unemployment in the black community among males age 18-29 and a lot of the same social ambitions that existed in, even have been exacerbated since, the 60s. The answer [to this potential threat of social change] is mass incarceration. Hip hop really came of age right up under this New Jim Crow, and it speaks against a lot of what totally enveloped it. - The Nation


"The New York Regents Exams Are Tough, But a New Program Uses Hip-Hop to Help NYC Students Pass"

In December, I visited Mr. Flanagan’s global history class at the High School for Health Careers in Washington Heights. As the class started, a dozen students interacted with four Fresh Prep performers, Jamel Mims, Shyvonne Sanganoo, Imani Shanklin Roberts, and James Miles. Roberts began, “We’re gonna go back thousands of years.... You are now your great, great, great, great, great grandfathers and mothers….”

Over the course of the class period, the performers and students presented an interactive overview of the history of civilizations, without once opening a textbook. An inflatable globe that doubled as a talking shell/mic got tossed around the room, and through rhymes (“What makes a savage civilized?/Is it when our government is centralized?/Our social class and labor is organized?/Communication and religion is organized?”) and role-playing (the students were divided into teams of growing civilizations), the Fresh Prep performers taught the test in a way the students seemed to grasp. - COMPLEX, Jack Erwin


"Preparing for State Tests, to a Hip-Hop Beat"

The team of six high school girls new to America sat frozen waiting for the next missing lyric, whiteboard and marker at the ready. They glanced toward their classmates, who sat nearby, in two competing teams. One of their instructors, Sam Sellers, otherwise known as Rabbi Darkside, started a beat. Then Jamel Mims, otherwise known as M.C. Tingbudong, began rapping the lyrics of a song whose rhymes did not contain the familiar curses or boasts, but the vocabulary that New York high school students need to pass their Regents test in American history. - Sharon Otterman, New York Times


Discography

Microphone Misdemeanor

"Fulbright scholar, rapper and Ratchet Revolutionary Jam No Peanut takes on fascism in America with his debut Microphone Misdemeanor EP – “a project that blends augmented reality and virtual reality applications, trap music, radical politics, and interludes of chinese rap.”

In an age where fascism is consolidating power in Amerikkka, Microphone Misdemeanor is a music project created to inspire millions to get in the streets to drive out this fascist regime and bring a whole new world into being."

- OkayPlayer
https://open.spotify.com/album/3lCofWhOyiP8CHXTX3luep

Photos

Bio

Jam No Peanut aka MC Tingbudong is an African American  bilingual chinese rapper, interactive media artist, and revolutionary .   From being Fulbright Scholar who studied hip hop in Beijing, to a Found Sound China artist in residence and headlining a eight-city mainland China tour, he has over a decade of experience using hip hop music to bridge cultures between east and west. 

 Born and raised in Southeast Washington, DC, Jam No Peanut began learning mandarin in high school, and in 2008 was awarded a  Fulbright Scholarship to study hip hop culture in China. His internationalist politics resonate in his music, as he switches between English and Mandarin in politically charged verses over lo-fi, trap and experimental beats.  His projects use interactive technology and rap music to create immersive sound experiences, such as “Runaway,” a virtual reality music video that takes you on an underground tour of China's underground music scene, and “Qi Lai (起来),” a bilingual call to action against the global rise of fascism.  

Recently selected as a Found Sound China artist in residence, he returned to China in 2018 with a cohort of six US and Chinese artists to create  and perform original music on tour. Since then, he has performed with Found Sound China in New York City, as Official Showcasing Artists at SXSW Music Festival (2018,2019) China Week Los Angeles (2019), and headlined a nine-stop tour of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in summer 2019.  His work has been featured in the  New York Times, The Nation,VICE, XXL, Complex, RadiiChina , Noisey China and more. 

Band Members