Sinopop

In 2007, Sinophone Malaysian artist Namewee (Wee Meng Chee) gained notoriety after publishing a rap rendition of the Malaysian national anthem, Negaraku (“My Country”), on YouTube. The song, Negarakuku (“My Negaraku”), rapped mainly in localized Mandarin (with a mixture of languages and dialects such as Malay, English, Hokkien, and Cantonese), pokes fun at Muslims and Islam while raising issues relating to racial inequalities in Malaysia. The playful nature of the song as a reflection on Malaysian society was perceived by the Malaysian government as an insult to the nation as a whole. This chapter examines Namewee’s music as conjunctures in which concepts such as “Asianness,” “Chineseness,” and “Malaysianness” are challenged and destabilized by a multilingual and multicultural genre I call Sinopop. I propose Sinopop as a strategic critical category to distinguish it from Mandopop and Cantopop, which are genres mainly defined by exclusive linguistic features of Mandarin or Cantonese, respectively. Arguably, Sinopop could include Mandopop and Cantopop; however, I choose to limit the term to describe and represent localized expressions such as the popular music from marginal Sinophone communities. Sinopop, in this usage, also engages with anti-hegemonic ideologies that speak to power centers in order to deconstruct uniform representations and to celebrate marginal voices. I see Namewee’s music as an example of such expression, articulating the cultural diversity and interethnic relations of communities such as that of Malaysia.