In contrast to their predecessors whose lyrics were often rather anti-authoritarian, Myanmar's second generation of rappers keep away from politics. “I’m a rapper,” says rapper 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.
Annons
Zayar Thaw is the frontman of the insanely popular hip hop crew Acid, who basically introduced hip hop to Myanmar in the late 1990s. In 2008, Thaw was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison because of his alledged involvement with the pro-democracy movement Generation Wave. Indeed his songs featured a fair amount of coded criticism of the regime. In 2011, in an attempt to show the Western world that the Myanmar government was 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 and founding member of hip-hop crew G-Family, the priority is to create a unique Myanmar sound – "but 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. One Way recently wrote a song about marijuana, which they titled 'Marie-Ana' because as he explains "otherwise we wouldn't have been able to pass it through the censorship commission and it would have never been played on the radio."Dutch documentary photographer Jeroen de Bakker is looking at what sixty years of dictatorship have done to Myanmar and its citizens. More about the project can be found on The Myanmar Project website.
