Myanmar’s Rappers Don’t Care Much About Politics

In contrast to their predecessors, Myanmar’s second generation of rappers keep away from politics. “I’m a rapper,” says J-Me. “Politics don’t matter to me.” Even after the democratic reforms of 2011 that supposedly gave the country a new, more democratic direction, the government is still pretty much controlled by the military – it’s just that this time control might be less visible than in 1962, when the Myanmar army staged a coup d’etat. So just to be on the safe side, everyone’s learned to watch their words.

Zayar Thaw is the frontman of the insanely popular hip hop crew Acid. In 2008, Thaw was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison because it was said that he was involved with the pro-democracy movement Generation Wave. Indeed, his songs featured a fair bunch of coded criticism of the regime. In 2011, as part of the government’s effort to show the outside world they were cool, Thaw and hundreds of other dissidents were released early.

Despite this alleged political transformation, nobody in Myanmar seems to know what they can or cannot say, think or do. For 28-year-old Ye’ Yint, member of the band One Way crew and founding member of hip-hop crew G-Family, the priority is to create a unique Myanmar sound, a task that requires “a lot of work.”

He hopes that his music will contribute to the development of Myanmar’s music scene, and believes that smoking weed can help with that. His band One Way wrote a song about marijuana, which they titled ‘Marie-Ana’ – “otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to pass it through the censorship commission and it would have never been played on the radio.”

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