Kou Chou Ching

Taipei Times 2005.6.3 Friday P.13
Report By Max Woodworth

A fusion of tradition and modernity

"Beiguan' is a form of traditional Chinese music. The "Old Styles, New Grooves" festival aims to make it contemporary
The young three-piece hip-hop group Kou Chou Ching are rappers who deliver rhymes over samples from traditional and popular Chinese and Taiwanese music. The result is an unmistakably Taiwanese hybrid without coming off as a musical mutt.
The fusions will get especially creative, however, with the foreign acts that are set to play. Ome have no experience with the beiguan tradition and will be learning on the fly to incorporate the local style into their own. - 2005.6.3

Taipei Times 2005.12.1 Thursday P.14
Report By Gavin Phipps

CD Reviews

If you're fed up with local acts that lamely attempt to sound like they come from a North American ghetto, then Kou Chou-ching's debut album is worth a listen.
Aptly titled Taiwan Traditional Music Style, the album takes listeners on an interesting journey through Taiwan's traditional music scene via scratch and rap.
If it sounds a bit odd then you'd be right as the material is so far removed from any and all other types of localized rap that it actually takes some getting used to.
Listen to it once and you'll hate it, give it another listen after you've had time to digest what you heard the first time around, however, and you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Kou Chou Ching employs a host of earthy local musical styles, such as nakashi, classical opera and temple music, as well as recording several of the tracks in a gnarly KTV manner.
Vocally the combo waxes lyrical, albeit it in a tongue-in-cheek manner, about everything from noodles to red envelopes.
Sure, not all the tunes are musically pleasing, especially when the group dabbles with instrumentation more commonly associated with funerals, but if your eardrums can withstand the nanguan and cringingly kitsch call-in KTV radio moments then it's well worth it. - Taipei Times

Taiwan Panorama No.11 November 2006 P.34

Report By Chang Shih-lun
Photos By Chuang Kung-ju
Translated. By Geof Aberhart

Kou Chou Ching¡XTaiwan's Hip Hop Ambassadors

A group of young men clad in baseball caps and oversized T-shirts bob around excitedly on stage, rapping in a mix of Taiwanese and Hakka, denouncing shoddy workmanship that threatens everyday people; mixed with their Western hip hop rhythms lie elements of traditional songs, with occasional mournful strains of suona¡XChinese oboe¡Xmusic drifting out across the audience. The band¡¦s music is a unique mixture of traditional, modern, local, and foreign.
This is Kou Chou Ching, and it is one of those rare animals in the Taiwanese popular music scene¡Xa hip hop group. Most of their tracks incorporate elements of traditional music, and their lyrics skewer current events to a rapturous response. They are icons for Taiwan¡¦s local brand of hip hop.
Formed in 2003, Kou Chou Ching is led by fishLIN and Fan Chiang; offstage the two are as quick of mind and word as their beats onstage, and while they may dress in a very Western fashion, they¡¦re still traditionalists at heart.
The two, who share writing and lyrical duties, first met during a freestyle rap battle on a basketball court on Taipei¡¦s Civic Boulevard. Freestyle battles are exercises in unrestrained improvisational creativity, like the scenes in Eminem¡¦s semi-autobiographical film 8 Mile. Generally a DJ first lays down a beat, and then the two competitors clash lyrical swords, occasionally engaging themed ¡§battles¡¨ to sharpen their rapping skills.
These two strangers soon realized they shared similar attitudes to music and decided to form a band, calling it Kou Chou Ching. The name is a pun; on the face of it, it is a reference to the agricultural proverb ¡§plough in spring, weed in summer, harvest in autumn, store in winter,¡¨ where the ¡§harvest in autumn¡¨ in Mandarin is qiuqin. The boys chose to romanize this as ¡§chou ching,¡¨ adding the word ¡§kou¡¨ (kao) in reference to the hacking action involved in harvesting rice, making their band name a paean to the hard work of farmers.
But when pronounced in Taiwanese, the name quickly drops its cultured pretensions, sounding like a particularly vulgar slang term for masturbation. In this name Fan Chiang and fishLIN found a perfect representation of their music¡¦s combination of seriousness and irreverence.
When the band first formed, Fan Chiang and fishLIN were the only two members. Last year they added three new members¡XDJ j.little, who handles the computers and is the band¡¦s turntablist, and A-Chi and You Pao, who play traditional Chinese instruments¡Xbut they only perform as a five-man band for bigger, more formal gigs.

Musical enlightenment

Fan Chiang and fishLIN form the creative heart of Kou Chou Ching. Both were born in 1980, and both experienced similar formative experiences with music.
While they were still in junior high, when cable television was just beginning to sweep across Taiwan, MTV would screen a variety of shows on black music from America; these shows would play hip hop, rap, and R&B, which opened the two youngsters¡¦ eyes to the wider world of music. ¡§I thought the music was awesome, but since all the tracks were in English, I never considered trying to emulate the singers,¡¨ says fishLIN.
At the same time, a wave of hip-hop groups were being formed in Taiwan by American-born Chinese, such as LA Boyz, made up of Jeffrey Huang, his brother, and one of his cousins; and Jerry Lo¡¦s band The Party. These bands made a splash, but their distinctly Western style of music and lyrics still left local Taiwanese feeling distanced from them. Fan Chiang says that he would stumble his way along with the English lyrics, not entirely sure what he was actually saying, and never thinking that one day he would be able to use his own native tongue to create his own hip hop.
The hip-hop artist that both fishLIN and Fan Chiang feel has best demonstrated the success that can come from hard work is Taiwan¡¦s MC Hotdog. Now a major celebrity, Hotdog released his own EP in 2001 for NT$39, on which he rapped in Mandarin with lyrics that caustically attacked the flashy and superficial ¡§idol singers¡¨ that saturated the market. This was the first time Fan Chiang, then a junior at college, had heard Western-style rap done with Chinese lyrics, and he would practice rapping along with the instrumental versions of two tracks on Hotdog¡¦s EP. ¡§It was then I discovered I could actually rap, keeping perfect time with the beat.¡¨
Following MC Hotdog¡¦s debut have come the Southern Taiwan band Dog-G, with their Taiwanese-language ¡§Taiwan Song¡¨ and the ¡§Funny Rap¡¨ series of albums from Chu Yue-hsin (of the band Joy Topper Jr.), which humorously attack and mock various social issues while mixing Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English lyrics in tracks with elements of hip hop, rock, and Taiwanese folk music. All of these have had a tr - Taiwan Panorama