Political rallying cries in the West – “Blowing in the Wind” by Bob Dylan, “Imagine” by John Lennon, even “Winds of Change”, by Scorpions (especially ironic, given allegations about the song’s provenance) – were lyrically reconstructed in a way that government censors found conducive to maintaining power. They offered the enjoyment and distraction of Western music without any of the potentially damaging messaging. Jane Ferguson, a cultural anthropologist at the Australian National University, has argued that copy songs in the 1960s were, in part, a result of Myanmar authorities realising that, with government-approved Burmese lyrics, they might prevent international hits with subversive lyrics from gaining traction in Myanmar. But, like so much in Myanmar, the roots of copy thachin are inextricable from the country’s political history. Myanmar’s so-called “copy songs”, known in Burmese as “copy thachin”, have been common for decades.įor one, early hip hop artists in the country lacked the equipment and know-how to make their own beats. The beat for Acid and Sai Sai’s “Kyi Nay Ya” (Looking at You), for instance, is the 2000 Eminem single “The Real Slim Shady”.Īs anyone who’s wound up at a Myanmar KTV will know, this isn’t unique to hip hop. While Western hip hop pioneered the technique of sampling older songs, the borrowing in early Myanmar hip hop might sound more like straight-up theft to Western ears. To most readers’ ears, the songs of that generation may seem strange. Acid, together with a regular collaborator, the rapper Sai Sai, are now considered the grandfathers of Myanmar hip hop, which has itself gone through multiple, distinct phases, or “ generations”, distinguished not just chronologically but also stylistically. Despite going against the pop-heavy sound in vogue in Myanmar at the time, the album was hugely successful. The pioneering hip hop group Acid released their first album, Sa Tin Chin (Start), in 2000, under the heavy hand of the government censorship board. Hip hop has always been political in Myanmar. Successive generations of Myanmar hip hop have pushed back against a repressive government and a conservative culture – at least, until the National League for Democracy came to power.
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