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Jutoupi, Funny Rap 1, 1994

Jutoupi, Funny Rap I: You Sick Suck Nutz Psycho Mania Crazy Taipei City, 1994

ranking: #27 on 1993-2005 list

Before rap in Taiwan was sexy, before it was thug, and before it sold cans of Pepsi at 7-11, rap was funny. We got a hint of rap’s capacity for irony on Blacklist Studio’s seminal Songs of Madness.  That was 1989, just after the lifting of martial law.  Then, in the early 1990s, rap turned hip-hop and went in two possible directions.  The L.A. Boyz and to some extent The Party (樂派體) explored the physicality of hip-hop, namely through dance, fashion, and sexuality. And then there was Jutoupi (豬頭皮) aka Ju Ywe-hsin (朱約信), who continued Blacklist Studio’s ironic take on rap — its aggressive hyperness, its ear to the odd cadences of the streets.  In short, the funniness of the sound and the funniness of society.  Not Weird Al funny, but sick, psycho, manic, crazy funny.

On his debut album, Jutoupi called it “Funny Rap.”  He also called it “You Sick Suck Nutz Psycho Mania Crazy Taipei City,” an English title that today seems too good to be true.  The Chinese title was “I Am Insane” (我是神經病), probably a nod to the 1993 hit “Insane in the Brain.”  The Cypress Hill comparison is a good one, though Jutoupi is less druggy and more intellectual.  Like that L.A. collective, Jutoupi heard in rap an inner explosiveness that immediately reflected our fractured, bombarded psyches.  The album cover of Funny Rap 1 is a Sgt. Pepper-type collage of Taiwan cultural politics circa-1994.  The music is a mix of genres, dialects, and international references.

But beyond just mixing and juxtaposing, Jutoupi shows the hilarity that reveals itself when the collision of cultural touchstones is placed under his (somewhat distorted) rap microscope.  “The Way of Making People” (做人的道理) brings Serge Gainsbourg’s very sexy “Je t’aime …moi non plus” into self-help-y, globalizing Taiwan, where the rise of a sex culture (namely from abroad, as seen in the song’s many references to Euro-American music) and the residues of Confucian principles make for interesting bedfellows.  (Incidentally, Funny Rap 1 came out the same year as Edward Yang’s similar sex comedy A Confucian Confusion.)

Likewise, “Long Live Punk ‘N’ Funk” (中華民國萬萬歲) perverts a KMT catchphrase (“Love Live the Republic of China!”) via Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way” and rhyming the catchphrase (“wan wan sui”) with homonyms like sleep (“shui”), water (“shui”), tax (“shui”), and most awesomely the Run DMC chant “walk this way” — all until the familiar patriotic slogan becomes a defamiliarized slog of syllables.  Wordplay galore continues on “Taiwan Language Battle” (If U 惦惦 No Body Say U 矮狗), which beatboxes its way through the disillusionment of all the English and Japanese infiltrating Taiwan, as well as the difficulty (and hilarity) of understanding the Mandarin and English of people from Taiwan.  (“How old are you? / I’m dirty”)  Once again, globalization seems if anything a subtractive as opposed to additive process: the more hybridized Taiwan gets, the less anybody seems to make sense anymore.

That feeling that more is less figures most manically on the album’s title track, a mix of Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, and Japanese, with references to everything from New Balance to Megadeth, ensuring that with more thrown into the concoction, the less chance there’s anybody who can understand it all.  The song is also perhaps Jutoupi’s most impressive rap performance.  We’re a far way from the calculated, syllabically-simple constructions of Blacklist Studio.  Jutoupi’s flow is deranged, more like Fu-Schnickens, minus the velocity.  Jutoupi struts from verse to verse with unpredictable flows, shifting from slow to quick, low to high tones, often mid-line.  The diversity of flows lends itself to Jutoupi’s dialogues, in which he plays multiple characters cackling at each other.  And while those moments break up the flow, as well as Jutoupi’s verbal attack, he makes up for it in his rare extended spits, as when he raps about renting an apartment.  21-year-old wunderkind producer Jerry Lo (羅百吉) layers a jazzy strut below the vocals, smoothing-out the rapper’s drunken staccato with old-school flair.

In fact, Lo (also an L.A. Boyz producer), and the rest of the production team, is as much the star here as Jutoupi is.  The Zapp and Roger “Doo Wa Ditty”-esque “Lady Skindeep” (皮小姐野史) lends the album some genuine street-corner cred.  The children’s ditty “Don’t Be Cool” (來放尿) transcends  its schoolyard roots due to the professionalism of its juvenility.  The cautionary condom announcement “Franchcap Called Englishcap in France” (給我抱抱) is lovable (and huggable?) due mostly to Jutoupi’s PSA-type delivery and hilarious lyrics, but it’s underscored by an equally ludicrous collage of sound effects and instruments, and a most-strange interpolation of “Do That to Me One More Time.”

Even more masterful, and weirdly moving, is “No Hometown” (我的(故鄉)), which incredibly samples Angelo Badalamenti’s title theme from Twin Peaks.  Here, David Lynch’s creepy reconsideration of small-town living becomes a haunting lament for a society bent on money and property.  Jerry Lo and Jutoupi don’t sample one of the weirdest moments of early-90s pop culture just to prove they can; they borrow what they need and they reinvent the rest.  They know how to slow things down, boil things down to a soft murmur, or drag things out to a haunting choral.  The result is sick.  Nutz.  Psycho.  Crazy.

[Note: I used the English song titles from the album's iTunes store listing instead of directly translating them from the Chinese titles.]

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