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Julesy just keeps getting better and better:

Title of the YouTube video:  "Why Chinese Isn’t Built for Rap (But That’s Changing)" (1 day ago)

Here are some of the fundamental Sinitic linguistic problems / issues Julesy addresses and, in most cases solves or explains more clearly than heretofore, while referencing the best contemporary scholarship and resorting to quantitative, empirical studies:

1. She cites Korean-Chinese singer-songwriter and musician, Cui Jian 崔健 / Choi Geon 최건 (b. 1961), veteran Chinese rock musician and rap pioneer, who regards the four tones of standard Mandarin as a paramount technical obstacle for rapping in Chinese..  Emphasizing the genre's rhythmic complexity, Cui said, "If you don't use syncopation and polyrhythms, you aren't really rapping".  Later in 2012, Cui still recognized that it is "very hard" to adapt lyrics in Chinese to fit this "very Western genre".

2. Even the "King of Mandopop" himself, Jay Chou (b. 1979), responding to the common criticism of his slurred pronunciation, explained that he deliberately "takes off the four tones" in rapping.  "We can't take into consideration the tonal shapes (pingze) in rapping," he declared, "or else it would sound like shulaibao".  Now that's a mouthful, since Jay Chou here is essentially saying that, if the artist / singer sticks to the tonal categories, his / her rap would sound like a traditional Chinese folk art that is analogous in function to battle rap, but lacking its musicality because it would be constrained by the tonal patterns of traditional Chinese poetry.  That would make it akin to xiàngsheng 相声 ("crosstalk; comic dialog" [double act / comedy duo like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, etc.]).  Shǔláibǎo is sometimes rendered as "doggerel", so you can see how inappropriate that would be for serious rapping, and why Jay Chou would not want to be a part of it.  I had to laugh out loud when I heard Julesy say it sounds like something "whack".  She does a good job of tracing the history of shulaibao from the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD) up through kuàibǎn 快板 ("clapper tales") in recent times (here's a performance by Jan Walls in 2016).  Julesy offers several cool clips of kuàibǎn and related genres, so you can get a good idea of how different they are from rap in execution, though somehow still folksily kindred.  As a bonus, while she is tracking the history of shulaibao, she also delves into the development of West African griots (historians, storytellers, praise singers, poets, and musicians) and how they evolved into the various genres of modern Black American musical performance.

3. Julesy quotes Mitchell Ohriner, a professor of music theory at the University of Denver, to the effect that, as a contemporary musical form, rap occupies "a liminal space between speaking and singing".  She follows that up by telling us that maybe, or maybe not, coincidentally the Chinese translation for "rap" has most commonly been translated as shuōchàng 說唱 (lit., "speak-sing").  Now, this is new to me, a veritable revelation, since I have been researching and writing about Chinese shuōchàng wénxué 說唱文學 ("speak-sing literature") for more than half a century.  To hear shuōchàng used as a translation for "rap" boggles my mind.  When I began my studies of Chinese shuōchàng wénxué, we referred to it as chantefable, which connected it to the European tradition of romance and troubadours:  "A form of Medieval French literature with alternative spoken and sung passages." (Wiktionary; Wikipédia).  Later, I began to refer to shuōchàng wénxué as "prosimetric literature" or "prosimetrum".  See Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl, eds., Prosimetrum:  Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (Martlesham, Suffolk, England:  Boydell & Brewer, 1997). Now I have to make room in my mental lexicon for "rap" under shuōchàng wénxué.  C'est la vie.  Ohriner found that, compared to speech, emceeing had a smaller or reduced pitch range within intonational phrases.  Julesy visually presents that finding in the form of two contrasting sound spectrographs (5:48-6:06).

4. Some of the most interesting data presented by Julesy is that of speech rate vs. rap rate.  English speech rate overall is 6.19 syllables/sec (Pelligrino et al. 2011), whereas English rap rate across all subgenres is 5 syllables/sec, whereas trap rap rate is 6-7.5 syllables/sec (Ohriner 2019).  Contrastingly, Mandarin speech rate is 5.18 syllables/sec (Pelligrino et al. 2011), making Mandarin one of the slowest languages in the world (visual and oral emphasis added by Julesy).  This phenomenon, she says, can be explained by "syllable density", whereby languages with "Information Dense" syllables don't need as many syllables to convey the same information, and hence tend to be slower.  In all varieties of Chinese, each syllable is a meaningful morpheme and has tone, an additional layer of meaning.  Julesy says that this is a big division that makes Chinese a difficult language to rap with.  Cui Jian, the "grandfather of Chinese rock", once said, "I have tested the limit of rapping in Putonghua.  It doesn't have a strong capacity to integrate rhythm, and it's not fast enough, not to mention that we need to consider musicality as well."  Julesy then demonstrates that in the 2016 "Gāi āi 该挨" ("Deserves a beating") by the hip-hop group Higher Brothers, one of them "spits out" 8-10 syllables per second.  So Chinese rap can be fast and it can be rhythmic.  BUT, can it be understandable?  THAT, she says, is a completely different story.  Research has shown that the falling contour is a key element of English rap phrases and the closing syllable usually ends on a rhyme.  That's fine for English, but not fine for Chinese, because there are three other contours.  If you're a Chinese rapper, "Zěnme bàn 怎麼辦?" ("What to do?").

5. With mathematical proofs, giving data taken from Liu et al. (2023), who carried out a comprehensive study of Chinese rap to date, they analyzed 140 songs, Julesy shows that the earlier rappers tried harder to follow the original contours of syllables in their songs, and seemed to be apologetic and docile about it, whereas more recent rappers threw caution to the wind and were more willing to mask contours.  In other words, they ran roughshod over the original syllabic tones and were more concerned with phrasal contours.  Liu et al. also measured rap register / height (high, mid, or low) in comparison with that of the original morphosyllable.  Combining the rap adherence to phrasal contour and register, they came up with a Computed Tonal Congruence Index that showed the more recent rappers disregarded tonal congruence in favor of musical and intonational qualities.

6. Next comes another revelatory, and I think very significant, discovery of what's happening linguistically with rap.  Namely, as Julesy puts it, from the early 2000s up until now, Chinese rap artists tend to have a preference for including their local topolects into their music as often as they can.  Although this is happening with many topolects across the country, it is particularly prevalent in Sichuan, and Julesy focuses on the Chengdu artists Higher Brothers, who were mentioned above.  Their leader, Masiwei, says, "We realized that [using Sichuanese] is an advantage.  It's actually really cool to do it."  There are a lot of words in Sichuanese that have a sound and flavor that just don't exist in Mandarin.  The tones and the cadence are specific to the area, and they have a certain amount of hometown pride in being able to share that with the world.  "Local language is the biggest influence [of Chinese culture on our music]," Melo, another member of the group says.  A group from Shanghai, Hi-Bomb, declares that their native tongue is more musical and can better help them achieve flow than Standard Mandarin.  Also, since it's their mother tongue, it's easier for them to express their thoughts and feelings in it than in Mandarin.

7. The use of English words in Chinese rap songs has increased steadily over time (she shows a nice graph indicating that).  Reasons? — to help with rhyming, to achieve better flow, to reach international audiences? — probably all three.

8. Across 12 genres in English, rap has shown less intelligibility, 68%, compared to all musical genres (Avante-garde, Blues, Classical, Country, Folk, Jazz, Musical Theater, Pop/Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Rap, Reggae, and Religious), 72% (Condig-Schultz, N., & Huron, D. [2015]).  Jay Chou is famous for his incomprehensibility, even while singing, let alone rapping.  Many people believe that he purposely makes his words hard to understand so that listeners will reach for the lyrics.  That's such a key statement that I'm going to repeat it:  he purposely makes his words hard to understand so that people will reach for the lyrics.  Whoa!  What?  She suggests that maybe it's so that people will spend more time with his music.  Then she says something quite profound:  "Language is just a small barrier when it comes to musical expression".

Julesy's linkage of lyrics and intelligibility reveals to me something else.  For this video, she's wearing her "music" cap, so I'm not sure that she herself comprehends the full implications of what it means for her to emphasize lyrics to such a degree.  Still, Julesy is very sharp, so perhaps she is only zhuāng yīdiǎner shǎ 裝一點兒傻 ("playing a little bit dumb") for tactical purposes so as not to give away the whole game!  Bill Hannas, author of Asia's Orthographic Dilemma (Hawaii 1997) and The Writing on the Wall (Penn 2003) would understand.

 

Selected readings

• "Chinese-English rap" (2/3/16) — with reference to Uyghur hip hop in the addendum
• "Suzhou rap sounds like it has a French accent" (2/22/25)
• "Yibin, Sichuanese, Cantonese, Mandarin…; topolect, dialect, language" (4/15/18)
• "'Rondle it!'" (2/25/19)
• "The conundrum of singing with tones" (5/30/25)
• "The verbal and visual in traditional prosimetric literature" (4/19/23)
• Victor H. Mair and Tsu-lin Mei. “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Chinese Prosody.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 51.2 (1991): 375-470 — on the historical development of tonal patterns in traditional Chinese poetry

August 13, 2025 @ 11:02 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Intelligibility, Intonation, Language and music, Tones, Topolects, Writing systems

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