Not long ago, the phrase "Xie Di, Xie Di, I want to diss you" became a phenomenon-level hot meme on the Internet. With the Internet effect brought by abstract memes, Nomi, a grassroots rap youth from the Yi ethnic group in western Sichuan, broke out of the circle overnight and started playing abstract The grassroots rapper suddenly became the top icon of the subculture. "Abstract" (a series of parody, nonsensical, ironic, and other hot memes/jokes on the Chinese Internet) is a signifier, and the referent is the structural social appeal reflected in contemporary youth subculture. Nomi's work "Apu's Missing" reflects her experience of growing up with the grandfather of a left-behind child in a mountainous area. Her simple love for Yi relatives and land has moved countless netizens, and has also been copied by CCTV Culture and Tourism and became the official video dubbing . The unique Yi cosmology and the tension of modernity in "Dead Trees Bloom" have aroused widespread resonance among migrant youths. As netizens discovered Nomi's story, they spliced together the legendary story of a young man from a small town who came from a lower class background, worked hard, and pursued his dreams. Nomi’s number of fans on Douyin has already surpassed that of Xie Di, and she has counterattacked into the ranks of top rappers, becoming a myth among contemporary subculture creators. Holding the retro spear of Yi culture in hand, Nomi rode her own grassroots-style frontier horse, like Don Quixote, launching sincere and clumsy charges against the giant windmill - the cultural industrial system. Fortunately, this time, Don Quixote won.
The audition controversy of "New Rap 2024" and the multi-level interaction of the hip-hop community
History is made by those who say "no".
——jon savage
Everything starts with the audition of "China New Rap 2024". This spring, Wuxi gathered more than 400 rappers from all over the country. Nomi also received an invitation. He used the money borrowed from his mother to book a plane ticket and go to Xi'an to take the exam. Nomi signed up for Xie Di's judge selection group, but was eliminated. Afterwards, the audition rapper circle protested against the possible black-box operation of Xie Di's group and the power relationship of the judges. A blogger at
analyzed the rules of the audition process and believed that the organizer called too many contestants and conducted auditions at a concentrated time. The judges' attention was allocated unreasonably. From morning to night, the judges were exhausted and faced with the contestants who appeared in the evening. At that time, my physical strength was exhausted, and I may not understand the basic information of some players. Emperor Xie even made the mistake that "Apu's Missing" was sung to his grandfather. Nomi repeated the American boy's catchphrase in the video and said with red eyes, "He said he wanted me to make it a hobby, but this is my dream, why should I make it a hobby?"
Nomi was disappointed with her former idol, so she wrote "Thank God, Thank God" to express her dissatisfaction. Diss songs in the rap circle usually feature swear words, beautiful cars, beautiful women, and money coming to town, but Nomi's entire song is exactly the opposite. This is a low-cost MV. All shots were shot in a neighborhood park in Yulin Qixiang, Chengdu. The only interactive props are public fitness equipment in the old community, which also becomes the abstract and refreshing point of the entire song. Nomi seems to be declaring that I am impoverished and all I have is community and public space. This is a deconstruction of the video content.
Nomi MV screenshot
lyrics have two key points, "Community and community, I am a black gang is not enough community" and "I blame me for not being able to live in Chengdu because I am from a mountainous area." In the promotional video for "New Rap 2024", judge Xie Di claimed that one of his selection criteria was community. Hip-hop music originated in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s, a poor, multiracial community. Here, hip-hop has become a way for community members (which means gang) to express their life experiences, social issues and cultural identities. Therefore, hip-hop is more than just music, it is a street movement that reflects the voices and struggles of communities to promote social progress. Therefore, "community" in the context of hip-hop means taking root in the community, helping each other, cooperating, and supporting new people. Nomi's lyrics bluntly stated that I am a dark-skinned gang from the Yi ethnic group, coming from the bottom, but I am not from the Chengdu faction but from an ethnic minority in the mountains of western Sichuan, so Emperor Xie did not think highly of me.
In his early years, Xie Di has been the representative figure of the hip-hop group "Chengdu Group (formerly known as the Rap Club)" after his "I won't go to work tomorrow" became popular. Chengdu is now the center of rap in China, including: Beijing rock, Wuhan punk, Yunnan reggae, and Sichuan rap.Even when Boss Xie appeared on the Chinese Good Songs stage in 2014, the baseball cap he wore on his head still had the logo of the rap club printed on it. At that time, Boss Xie was wearing a baseball cap and a baseball jacket in an American boy's outfit. He was about the same age. , just like Nomi today. Back then, Emperor Xie used Chengdu dialect to attack Mandarin, and "I won't go to work tomorrow" won the Best Original Dialect Song Award. The energy and humor of Sichuan dialect perfectly expressed young people's dislike of going to work. Now, Nomi once again brings a new shock to Chinese rap in Yi language.
Rap means resistance, if you don’t accept it then diss. The MV of "Thank God, Thank God" expresses a mockery of the existing cultural industrial system in the rap circle. Abstraction is on the surface, and criticism is at the core. Xie Emperor has not forgotten his original intention, and has now transformed from a young boy who slays dragons into an evil dragon and an adult. Become a vassal of the power of capital, "Once you become successful, you no longer need to worry about the bills of living."
Canadian scholar Michael Blake believes that “subculture is a set of meaning systems, expressions or lifestyles developed by groups in a subordinate structural position in response to the dominant meaning system; it indicates that they are in a subordinate structural position. Subordinate groups attempt to resolve structural contradictions arising from the wider social context." The
subculture often consciously deviates from the norm in public, breaking the rules of everyday life. The abstract segment of fitness equipment is full of funny and magical jokes, which caused viral spread and netizens rushed to imitate it. "Chengdu Disney" has been on the hot searches many times and has received hundreds of millions of views. What’s further interesting about the incident is that Chengdu Culture and Tourism properly handled this Internet hotspot, forming a win-win situation for all parties. During the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday, thousands of people came to the old community to check in at the fitness equipment every day. The street office organized the flow of people in an orderly manner, and community residents’ volunteers had positive interactions with young tourists who checked in. It even gave rise to cultural peripherals and cospaly, as well as the “official” Chengdu Disney landmark, forming a national meme that integrates youth subculture with local residents’ communities. situation. Netizens marvel at the inclusiveness and human touch of Chengdu’s citizen culture.
Nomi, who comes from Daliang Mountain, used Yi to challenge the veteran rapper Xie Di of Chengdu dialect. With her sincere emotions and works, she won the recognition of the cctv label and the majority of netizens. After a series of events enthusiastically fermented by netizens, her fans exceeded Xie Di completely overshadowed the popularity of "New Rap 2024" and challenged Xie Di's "patriarchal" image.
Nomi’s grassroots style and Liangshan Yi’s cosmology
All the advertisements describe it as paradise. Many people died trying to make that useless piece of stone valuable. If you ask me, it's more like a prison camp than some kind of paradise.
- Anime "Cyberpunk: Edgewalker" David
Some Internet celebrities rely on fabricated stories to create drama, while some people's stories are drama. At first, netizens recognized Nomi as abstract, absurd, and funny. As the story of Nomi was discovered, he was in a similar dilemma between survival and ideals as many ordinary young people and literary and artistic creators, which made netizens lament that "it's not funny." Laughter, Nomi is a real man.”
b site up owner’s mixed-cut video screenshot
Nomi was born in Meigu County, Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan, which is also the source of American boy memes. When Nomi was a child, she herded cows for her partner's family, but lost the cows. She went to a construction site with her father to work as a shelf worker, but lost a piece of her little finger due to a work-related injury. She worked as a chef and security guard, but like Sanhe, she didn't like to go to work and be controlled by her boss. ; Selling fruit on a tricycle, but kept chatting about music with people on the road; I held a solo performance with a 19 yuan ticket, but cried and said that no one from my relatives and friends came to see it; I hawked sales for a clothing store, but the boss suddenly took away the microphone . When I got the invitation for the new rap audition, my mother was working as a cashier in a convenience store. The mother who appeared in Nomi’s video squatted in the corner of the camera, wiping tears behind the cashier...
These specific details of life are the same. Frequent’s life experiences form an intertextual installation with Nomi’s works. Isn’t this exactly what most young people experience in life? Left-behind children, young people in small towns, urban workers, and grassroots literary and artistic creators living on the streets have never given up on their dreams.After Nomi became famous, her fist-bumping video at the performance became a scene transition template on Douyin, symbolizing the prototype of the inspirational story of a boy chasing dreams. Nomi collaborated with the Yi Niuniu Chorus on a children's version of "Apu's Missing" and planned to donate part of the royalties to left-behind children.
b station up owner’s mixed video screenshot
Nomi’s Douyin homepage video has consciously assembled its own subcultural symbols and created its own unique style: clumsy, simple, sincere, Yi culture and street community, revealing the lack of urban mainstream (Imported from hip hop) The sense of contrast in cultural capital and poor English have become a real feature, which is the result of the inequality of cultural capital brought about by the former uneven development of urban and rural areas. Many of Nomi's videos are shot casually on the streets in a down-to-earth manner. Yi ethnic minority and community rappers are common tags. The label "Xie Tian Xie Di" cooperates with is called "Black Star", and its brand positioning is Liangshan rap of the Yi ethnic group.
"Apu's Missing" talks about childhood, implying that Nomi was raised by her grandfather when she was a child. Her parents went out to work, and her father was an alcoholic. Nomi was a left-behind child, and she followed her parents to move bricks on construction sites in her early years. "Spring Comes from Dead Trees" refers to youth, expressing the ecological outlook, cosmology and family model of the Yi people, as well as young people's separation and wandering from their homeland.
The Yi people are a nation that respects fire. They were born in a fire pond and died in a cremation (lyrics of "Withered Wood Blooms in Spring": burn next to fire and die in the fire). Traditionally, Yi families would build a fire pit in the middle of the house, where they would cook, boil water, discuss affairs, keep warm, and sleep by the fire pit. They would live around the fire for long days. In the cycle of life and the fusion of all things, the wandering Yi youth will eventually become a part of nature like their ancestors. Shuonuo Mountain, where the MV was filmed, is the sacred mountain of the Yi people. It is located in Jingye Texi Township, Meigu County, Liangshan Prefecture, and is the hometown of Nomi. The words "Three fogs rising to the sky and three fields of red snow" in the lyrics come from the Twelve Branches of Snow in the Yi nationality's creation epic "Leotei", "The paulownia trees fell from the sky and fell on the earth, and three fogs rose and rose to the sky. "Three rounds of red snow have fallen." The Yi language calls azalea "Soma", which means the flower that welcomes guests. In the eyes of the Yi people, the Soma flower is a symbol of beauty, kindness, simplicity, purity and magical admiration. (Quoted from https://www.zhihu.com/question/651985023?write)
Lyric fragment of "Spring Comes from Dead Trees"
ꄿꏀꈧꌠꈍꄮꀱꇁꄏ
(When will the young people return)
꒜ꌠꈧꌠꈀꈄꏢꁮꑌꄉꎧꅝ
(The old man is drinking by the firepit)
Nomi:
ꉈꂾꌩꍗꆹ ꍆꍆꈌꏓꀋꇁꀑ
( Magpies no longer build nests in the tree in front of the house)
ꉈꊂꌩꄩꆹ ꀉꐚꇬꀋꃮ
(Crows no longer crow in the big tree behind the house)
ꀒꋏꑳꅉꇬ ꌺꇐꃅꃅꇴꇬꀋꋊꁧ
(The ancestors’ residence is no longer smoked by descendants)
Young people
Your child is destined
to have a wandering life
Nomi:
Please take the clothes I have at home and chant for me
I am waiting for you to pray in a place with no pastures and no forests
I am afraid of getting lost in this city
So I left marks along the way
Get rid of the hype, just As for the work itself, "Spring Comes from Dead Trees" rhymes in Chinese, Yi and English, and combines multi-linear narratives, such as Guevara's journey in the Odyssey of time, and the confusion and entanglement of the Yi wanderers in the process of modernity. Through rediscovering the relationship with the village, The connection between ancestors, myths, nature, and gods can revive the dead trees and continue to thrive. The Yi cosmology heals the contemporary themes of urbanization, migrant youth, and rural development. The new generation of Yi rappers such as Nomi and Shen Xuefeng have once again interpreted the dialectical relationship between the nation and the world, subculture and innovation, and the edge and the pioneer.
Traffic algorithm driven by mass attention and production mechanism of subculture "abstract memes"
When life itself seems abnormal, who knows what is crazy and what is not crazy? To be too sane may be to be mad... To see life as it is rather than as it ought to be is the madness of madness.
——dale wasserman "Don Quixote" 1965 musical
Most of the current mainstream short video platforms use collaborative filtering (collaborative filtering) algorithms as the basis for user content recommendation systems, such as #foryou officially released by tiktok (https: //newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-videos-for-you) recommendation logic. This algorithm can be summarized as personalized interest-oriented content recommendation shaped by user attention and interaction behavior. On this basis, other mechanisms are superimposed: hierarchical traffic pool testing, diversity of unpopular hot topics, vertical accurate community recommendations, etc. It can be inaccurately called the "mass line algorithm". It recommends similar content to whatever the people like to see, and comes from the masses to the masses.
In addition to violations that require review, the algorithm connects all users and all content into a system. All push flows depend on user behavior: attention span, likes, collections, comments, forwarding, etc. Therefore, as long as the creator’s content and products attract and infect users and allow users to generate the behavioral data needed by the platform, then the platform will distribute more traffic and create hits. This is how short videos can become the basis for ordinary people to become Internet celebrities’ counterattacks. mechanism. The
mass line algorithm brings the Internet voice into a decentralized situation. The right to interpret public issues is no longer monopolized by traditional cultural elites. Cultural marginalized people, grassroots, ordinary people, and non-professionals can also take cultural leadership at certain moments. The mass line algorithm encourages content with fixed labels, niches, and niches, which is naturally suitable for the creation of subcultures. The various hot memes/memes/symbols/jokes contained in the
subculture are created, disseminated, and re-created spontaneously, flexibly, and diversified in the decentralized algorithm ecosystem. When creators flexibly assemble subcultural symbols to form unique styles and narratives, this style often spreads among the public, grassroots, and marginalized groups at an exponential rate, and may challenge traditional concepts and systems. Therefore, every hot meme satisfies the emotional value of the group’s subconscious and is a reflection of social symptoms. American scholar Diana Crane predicts that the future Internet culture will no longer be divided into high culture and popular culture, but should be divided into national culture and urban subculture. Similarly, McLuhan believed that electronic media would re-tribalize human cultural production.
The "abstract style" of contemporary Chinese Internet is a kind of deconstruction of cultural hegemony, using techniques such as parody, contrast, ridicule, nonsensicalness, and irony to ridicule the mainstream cultural capital system. Playing with abstract memes means a flash mob assembly of subcultural symbols, which are ridiculous, funny, devilishly brainwashing, and create hot memes in response to public issues.
Abstract memes are produced under several circumstances:
1. The creator lacks cultural capital or various capitals. Abstraction is the weapon of the weak in the field of cultural capital. There is no way to fight for capital, luxury or medical beauty. You can only fight for an interesting soul. You can only play with abstraction and create ridiculous and funny effects. The essence of comedy is to ridicule power. Therefore, grassroots youth's play with abstraction is the result of a lack of cultural capital. Assembling subcultural symbols is a nonsensical way to fight back against the hegemony of mainstream cultural capital.
2. The creator’s personal style or the drama of the shooting process. Improvisational, random, metaphysical personal style and the ever-changing life creation process itself, creators who are good at integrating work are called abstract icons, which are rare to find.
3. Abstraction is the breaking point that creates ideological hegemony. Marcus believes in "One-Dimensional Man" that consumerism, technical rationality and capital supremacy exert a comprehensive and hidden control on individuals, and the Great Rejection is the fundamental action against this control. The anti-system, anti-secular, and anti-authority nature of abstract memes makes traditional mainstream thinking no longer consistent. Abstract memes become a deconstructive toolkit, providing a way of thinking about the big rejection to restore the individual’s rebellious potential and drive for change.
returned to the "New Rap 2024" audition. Abstract rappers from all over the country gathered together. The aggregation effect of intensive rehearsals and living together for days and nights, and the community atmosphere of collective creation formed an "abstract ecosystem", and Nomi was just one of them. One member.These young rappers who were eliminated by the selection system of the cultural industry of "New Rap 2024" have assembled a new rap program on their own - "Rap Monster Spawner", which is known as "China New Abstraction" and is also broadcast every Friday. Hard work "New Rap 2024".
https://weibo.com/5886158017?refer_flag=1001030103_Weibo poster source
The characters in this poster can be called the contemporary abstract rapper universe. One of Nomi's famous scenes is "It was also the first time I saw each other dissing each other and they had to be recorded in the same studio." The other rapper who met the reverse dissing in the recording studio of "Thank God" is also a member of the abstract universe. Member b-sh1. Why are they all in a recording studio? Because this recording studio is affordable, and many abstract rappers complete the recording of their masterpieces in similar music studios. Due to the lack of cultural capital, people gathered together to form a subcultural community, and "Rap Monster Spawner" became a social practice to seek recognition.
Eighty years ago, the Birmingham School pessimistically believed that subcultures arise from social structural symptoms. However, after various subcultures caused turmoil, they could not escape the fate of being absorbed by the fashion industry and entertainment industry. The contemporary significance of "Asian hippie" lies in the fact that East Asian economies have experienced similar rapid industrialization cycles. David Harvey calls it "time and space compression", and the life cycle and energy of subcultures have also been compressed and ejected. In contemporary Chinese society, the materiality of creative media, the political and economic logic of data labor, and the specific social and cultural context create diverse possibilities for the birth, popularity, and counter-incorporation of subcultures. Yabi, from spontaneous symbol production to conscious social practice, is slowly unfolding. Perhaps, in a future possibility, in which everyone develops comprehensively and freely, data labor creators no longer need abstraction.
Even when Boss Xie appeared on the Chinese Good Songs stage in 2014, the baseball cap he wore on his head still had the logo of the rap club printed on it. At that time, Boss Xie was wearing a baseball cap and a baseball jacket in an American boy's outfit. He was about the same age. , just like Nomi today. Back then, Emperor Xie used Chengdu dialect to attack Mandarin, and "I won't go to work tomorrow" won the Best Original Dialect Song Award. The energy and humor of Sichuan dialect perfectly expressed young people's dislike of going to work. Now, Nomi once again brings a new shock to Chinese rap in Yi language.Rap means resistance, if you don’t accept it then diss. The MV of "Thank God, Thank God" expresses a mockery of the existing cultural industrial system in the rap circle. Abstraction is on the surface, and criticism is at the core. Xie Emperor has not forgotten his original intention, and has now transformed from a young boy who slays dragons into an evil dragon and an adult. Become a vassal of the power of capital, "Once you become successful, you no longer need to worry about the bills of living."
Canadian scholar Michael Blake believes that “subculture is a set of meaning systems, expressions or lifestyles developed by groups in a subordinate structural position in response to the dominant meaning system; it indicates that they are in a subordinate structural position. Subordinate groups attempt to resolve structural contradictions arising from the wider social context." The
subculture often consciously deviates from the norm in public, breaking the rules of everyday life. The abstract segment of fitness equipment is full of funny and magical jokes, which caused viral spread and netizens rushed to imitate it. "Chengdu Disney" has been on the hot searches many times and has received hundreds of millions of views. What’s further interesting about the incident is that Chengdu Culture and Tourism properly handled this Internet hotspot, forming a win-win situation for all parties. During the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday, thousands of people came to the old community to check in at the fitness equipment every day. The street office organized the flow of people in an orderly manner, and community residents’ volunteers had positive interactions with young tourists who checked in. It even gave rise to cultural peripherals and cospaly, as well as the “official” Chengdu Disney landmark, forming a national meme that integrates youth subculture with local residents’ communities. situation. Netizens marvel at the inclusiveness and human touch of Chengdu’s citizen culture.
Nomi, who comes from Daliang Mountain, used Yi to challenge the veteran rapper Xie Di of Chengdu dialect. With her sincere emotions and works, she won the recognition of the cctv label and the majority of netizens. After a series of events enthusiastically fermented by netizens, her fans exceeded Xie Di completely overshadowed the popularity of "New Rap 2024" and challenged Xie Di's "patriarchal" image.
Nomi’s grassroots style and Liangshan Yi’s cosmology
All the advertisements describe it as paradise. Many people died trying to make that useless piece of stone valuable. If you ask me, it's more like a prison camp than some kind of paradise.
- Anime "Cyberpunk: Edgewalker" David
Some Internet celebrities rely on fabricated stories to create drama, while some people's stories are drama. At first, netizens recognized Nomi as abstract, absurd, and funny. As the story of Nomi was discovered, he was in a similar dilemma between survival and ideals as many ordinary young people and literary and artistic creators, which made netizens lament that "it's not funny." Laughter, Nomi is a real man.”
b site up owner’s mixed-cut video screenshot
Nomi was born in Meigu County, Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan, which is also the source of American boy memes. When Nomi was a child, she herded cows for her partner's family, but lost the cows. She went to a construction site with her father to work as a shelf worker, but lost a piece of her little finger due to a work-related injury. She worked as a chef and security guard, but like Sanhe, she didn't like to go to work and be controlled by her boss. ; Selling fruit on a tricycle, but kept chatting about music with people on the road; I held a solo performance with a 19 yuan ticket, but cried and said that no one from my relatives and friends came to see it; I hawked sales for a clothing store, but the boss suddenly took away the microphone . When I got the invitation for the new rap audition, my mother was working as a cashier in a convenience store. The mother who appeared in Nomi’s video squatted in the corner of the camera, wiping tears behind the cashier...
These specific details of life are the same. Frequent’s life experiences form an intertextual installation with Nomi’s works. Isn’t this exactly what most young people experience in life? Left-behind children, young people in small towns, urban workers, and grassroots literary and artistic creators living on the streets have never given up on their dreams.After Nomi became famous, her fist-bumping video at the performance became a scene transition template on Douyin, symbolizing the prototype of the inspirational story of a boy chasing dreams. Nomi collaborated with the Yi Niuniu Chorus on a children's version of "Apu's Missing" and planned to donate part of the royalties to left-behind children.
b station up owner’s mixed video screenshot
Nomi’s Douyin homepage video has consciously assembled its own subcultural symbols and created its own unique style: clumsy, simple, sincere, Yi culture and street community, revealing the lack of urban mainstream (Imported from hip hop) The sense of contrast in cultural capital and poor English have become a real feature, which is the result of the inequality of cultural capital brought about by the former uneven development of urban and rural areas. Many of Nomi's videos are shot casually on the streets in a down-to-earth manner. Yi ethnic minority and community rappers are common tags. The label "Xie Tian Xie Di" cooperates with is called "Black Star", and its brand positioning is Liangshan rap of the Yi ethnic group.
"Apu's Missing" talks about childhood, implying that Nomi was raised by her grandfather when she was a child. Her parents went out to work, and her father was an alcoholic. Nomi was a left-behind child, and she followed her parents to move bricks on construction sites in her early years. "Spring Comes from Dead Trees" refers to youth, expressing the ecological outlook, cosmology and family model of the Yi people, as well as young people's separation and wandering from their homeland.
The Yi people are a nation that respects fire. They were born in a fire pond and died in a cremation (lyrics of "Withered Wood Blooms in Spring": burn next to fire and die in the fire). Traditionally, Yi families would build a fire pit in the middle of the house, where they would cook, boil water, discuss affairs, keep warm, and sleep by the fire pit. They would live around the fire for long days. In the cycle of life and the fusion of all things, the wandering Yi youth will eventually become a part of nature like their ancestors. Shuonuo Mountain, where the MV was filmed, is the sacred mountain of the Yi people. It is located in Jingye Texi Township, Meigu County, Liangshan Prefecture, and is the hometown of Nomi. The words "Three fogs rising to the sky and three fields of red snow" in the lyrics come from the Twelve Branches of Snow in the Yi nationality's creation epic "Leotei", "The paulownia trees fell from the sky and fell on the earth, and three fogs rose and rose to the sky. "Three rounds of red snow have fallen." The Yi language calls azalea "Soma", which means the flower that welcomes guests. In the eyes of the Yi people, the Soma flower is a symbol of beauty, kindness, simplicity, purity and magical admiration. (Quoted from https://www.zhihu.com/question/651985023?write)
Lyric fragment of "Spring Comes from Dead Trees"
ꄿꏀꈧꌠꈍꄮꀱꇁꄏ
(When will the young people return)
꒜ꌠꈧꌠꈀꈄꏢꁮꑌꄉꎧꅝ
(The old man is drinking by the firepit)
Nomi:
ꉈꂾꌩꍗꆹ ꍆꍆꈌꏓꀋꇁꀑ
( Magpies no longer build nests in the tree in front of the house)
ꉈꊂꌩꄩꆹ ꀉꐚꇬꀋꃮ
(Crows no longer crow in the big tree behind the house)
ꀒꋏꑳꅉꇬ ꌺꇐꃅꃅꇴꇬꀋꋊꁧ
(The ancestors’ residence is no longer smoked by descendants)
Young people
Your child is destined
to have a wandering life
Nomi:
Please take the clothes I have at home and chant for me
I am waiting for you to pray in a place with no pastures and no forests
I am afraid of getting lost in this city
So I left marks along the way
Get rid of the hype, just As for the work itself, "Spring Comes from Dead Trees" rhymes in Chinese, Yi and English, and combines multi-linear narratives, such as Guevara's journey in the Odyssey of time, and the confusion and entanglement of the Yi wanderers in the process of modernity. Through rediscovering the relationship with the village, The connection between ancestors, myths, nature, and gods can revive the dead trees and continue to thrive. The Yi cosmology heals the contemporary themes of urbanization, migrant youth, and rural development. The new generation of Yi rappers such as Nomi and Shen Xuefeng have once again interpreted the dialectical relationship between the nation and the world, subculture and innovation, and the edge and the pioneer.
Traffic algorithm driven by mass attention and production mechanism of subculture "abstract memes"
When life itself seems abnormal, who knows what is crazy and what is not crazy? To be too sane may be to be mad... To see life as it is rather than as it ought to be is the madness of madness.
——dale wasserman "Don Quixote" 1965 musical
Most of the current mainstream short video platforms use collaborative filtering (collaborative filtering) algorithms as the basis for user content recommendation systems, such as #foryou officially released by tiktok (https: //newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-videos-for-you) recommendation logic. This algorithm can be summarized as personalized interest-oriented content recommendation shaped by user attention and interaction behavior. On this basis, other mechanisms are superimposed: hierarchical traffic pool testing, diversity of unpopular hot topics, vertical accurate community recommendations, etc. It can be inaccurately called the "mass line algorithm". It recommends similar content to whatever the people like to see, and comes from the masses to the masses.
In addition to violations that require review, the algorithm connects all users and all content into a system. All push flows depend on user behavior: attention span, likes, collections, comments, forwarding, etc. Therefore, as long as the creator’s content and products attract and infect users and allow users to generate the behavioral data needed by the platform, then the platform will distribute more traffic and create hits. This is how short videos can become the basis for ordinary people to become Internet celebrities’ counterattacks. mechanism. The
mass line algorithm brings the Internet voice into a decentralized situation. The right to interpret public issues is no longer monopolized by traditional cultural elites. Cultural marginalized people, grassroots, ordinary people, and non-professionals can also take cultural leadership at certain moments. The mass line algorithm encourages content with fixed labels, niches, and niches, which is naturally suitable for the creation of subcultures. The various hot memes/memes/symbols/jokes contained in the
subculture are created, disseminated, and re-created spontaneously, flexibly, and diversified in the decentralized algorithm ecosystem. When creators flexibly assemble subcultural symbols to form unique styles and narratives, this style often spreads among the public, grassroots, and marginalized groups at an exponential rate, and may challenge traditional concepts and systems. Therefore, every hot meme satisfies the emotional value of the group’s subconscious and is a reflection of social symptoms. American scholar Diana Crane predicts that the future Internet culture will no longer be divided into high culture and popular culture, but should be divided into national culture and urban subculture. Similarly, McLuhan believed that electronic media would re-tribalize human cultural production.
The "abstract style" of contemporary Chinese Internet is a kind of deconstruction of cultural hegemony, using techniques such as parody, contrast, ridicule, nonsensicalness, and irony to ridicule the mainstream cultural capital system. Playing with abstract memes means a flash mob assembly of subcultural symbols, which are ridiculous, funny, devilishly brainwashing, and create hot memes in response to public issues.
Abstract memes are produced under several circumstances:
1. The creator lacks cultural capital or various capitals. Abstraction is the weapon of the weak in the field of cultural capital. There is no way to fight for capital, luxury or medical beauty. You can only fight for an interesting soul. You can only play with abstraction and create ridiculous and funny effects. The essence of comedy is to ridicule power. Therefore, grassroots youth's play with abstraction is the result of a lack of cultural capital. Assembling subcultural symbols is a nonsensical way to fight back against the hegemony of mainstream cultural capital.
2. The creator’s personal style or the drama of the shooting process. Improvisational, random, metaphysical personal style and the ever-changing life creation process itself, creators who are good at integrating work are called abstract icons, which are rare to find.
3. Abstraction is the breaking point that creates ideological hegemony. Marcus believes in "One-Dimensional Man" that consumerism, technical rationality and capital supremacy exert a comprehensive and hidden control on individuals, and the Great Rejection is the fundamental action against this control. The anti-system, anti-secular, and anti-authority nature of abstract memes makes traditional mainstream thinking no longer consistent. Abstract memes become a deconstructive toolkit, providing a way of thinking about the big rejection to restore the individual’s rebellious potential and drive for change.
returned to the "New Rap 2024" audition. Abstract rappers from all over the country gathered together. The aggregation effect of intensive rehearsals and living together for days and nights, and the community atmosphere of collective creation formed an "abstract ecosystem", and Nomi was just one of them. One member.These young rappers who were eliminated by the selection system of the cultural industry of "New Rap 2024" have assembled a new rap program on their own - "Rap Monster Spawner", which is known as "China New Abstraction" and is also broadcast every Friday. Hard work "New Rap 2024".
https://weibo.com/5886158017?refer_flag=1001030103_Weibo poster source
The characters in this poster can be called the contemporary abstract rapper universe. One of Nomi's famous scenes is "It was also the first time I saw each other dissing each other and they had to be recorded in the same studio." The other rapper who met the reverse dissing in the recording studio of "Thank God" is also a member of the abstract universe. Member b-sh1. Why are they all in a recording studio? Because this recording studio is affordable, and many abstract rappers complete the recording of their masterpieces in similar music studios. Due to the lack of cultural capital, people gathered together to form a subcultural community, and "Rap Monster Spawner" became a social practice to seek recognition.
Eighty years ago, the Birmingham School pessimistically believed that subcultures arise from social structural symptoms. However, after various subcultures caused turmoil, they could not escape the fate of being absorbed by the fashion industry and entertainment industry. The contemporary significance of "Asian hippie" lies in the fact that East Asian economies have experienced similar rapid industrialization cycles. David Harvey calls it "time and space compression", and the life cycle and energy of subcultures have also been compressed and ejected. In contemporary Chinese society, the materiality of creative media, the political and economic logic of data labor, and the specific social and cultural context create diverse possibilities for the birth, popularity, and counter-incorporation of subcultures. Yabi, from spontaneous symbol production to conscious social practice, is slowly unfolding. Perhaps, in a future possibility, in which everyone develops comprehensively and freely, data labor creators no longer need abstraction.
