"It was hip-hop." Burton began to moonlight as a rapper and developed a following. "I thought about what I could offer China," he says. So, Burton embarked on a mission to bring the real thing to the Middle Kingdom. But the closest thing to hip-hop was a Michael Jackson impersonator. During his first week in town, he went to a nightclub that advertised hip-hop music. The Detroit native arrived in China in 1999 to take a job teaching English.
This annual rap battle, called the Iron Mic, isn’t taking place in New York or Los Angeles, but in Shanghai, where its founder, 32-year-old Dana Burton, has unexpectedly found fame and fortune. The crowd goes wild, raucously voicing delight and dismay. His opponent from Hong Kong snaps back to the beat in a trilingual torrent of Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, dissing the Beijing rapper for not representing the people. One rapper spits out words in a distinctive Beijing accent, scolding the other for not speaking proper Mandarin. But listen closely and you notice something unusual: They’re performing in Chinese. They look like typical hip-hop artists, dressed in baggy pants and baseball caps. On stage, a pair of rappers face off, microphones in hand, trading verses of improvised rhyme. Hundreds of people gyrate rhythmically as a DJ spins hot beats. Inside the steaming walls of a nightclub in the heart of one of the world’s most dynamic cities, you can hear the sounds of the future.
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