Hip hop is one of the most popular cultures and music genres in the world. But unlike in the United States and the UK, where music awards have celebrated the genre for years, Hong Kong has been slow to embrace it.
Despite local rappers having shows in recent years, hip hop has a comparatively small following compared to pop music.
But all that will change next month, when What's Good Music Awards 2022, Hong Kong's first hip hop music awards, will be held.
There will be 36 awards up for grabs in recognition of talent in hip hop music and its production from 2019 to 2021.
This has been a dream 10 years in the making for one of the event's cofounders Phat Chan, aka Phat, a member of local hip hop group 24 Herbs.
It is one shared by his band-mate, Julius Brian Siswojo, aka JBS. "We have been talking about this for a long time. We thought: 'If the mainstream platforms do not offer this opportunity, why don't we establish one ourselves?' "
The event was originally planned for this February but had to be postponed because of the pandemic. So when the lights finally come on, it will mark a culmination of a long wait.
As the slogan of WGMA goes: "The music scene is not only about them, there's also us."
One of its aims to provide a stage for hip hop talent to come to the surface and earning the recognition and respect they deserve while formalizing the atmosphere to cultivate talent for the music genre's development.
The organizers believe that hip hop has huge potential. Wong Chi-chung, a member of the judging panel, pointed to the popularity of local hip hop movies The Way We Dance (2013) and The Way We Keep Dancing (2020) to suggest the culture has much to offer.
Wong has witnessed the development of Hong Kong music in the past 30 years as a veteran radio DJ in local and international indie music and a university general education assistant director.
"Rap in Hong Kong was taboo because of its explicit use of language but it has now become a popular genre," he said, adding that WGMA is a bottom-up act and one of the statements to further diversify the cultural development of Hong Kong.
So it makes sense to hold a huge hip hop "party," given that the scene is not new.
In the 1990s, there were pioneering groups like Softhard and LMF, which started "rapping it the Hong Kong way" as an example of how playfully down-to-earth music can be.
The 2000s saw different sub-genres in rap in other established names like FAMA, Mastamic, MC Jin and 24 Herbs.
And since the 2010s, with the rise of social media being one of the contributors, more and more amateur and independent rappers have started releasing their music online while more independent record labels were founded. This is how the underground hip hop scene is expanding in multiple directions.
Obviously, you can't have a music award without live performances. Besides 24 Herbs and LMF, two of the "OG" groups, are rappers who have made their names in the past decade or so - KZ, JB, Novel Fergus, Novel Flash and Luna is a Bep, to name a few.
And there are local social media pages dedicated to promoting this music genre and culture as a whole, such as Spacbar, Rapaholic, 9Rap and Vee HK. The last one organized a hip hop competition series this year, Born on Fire 2.0, and gathered more than 100 amateur and independent rappers to submit their verses on the same beat to compete.
Not only were the verses of 10 rappers made into a music video, but the six finalists also came up with a new cypher and music video and performed in a live show.
This is one example of what hip hop culture in Hong Kong is like.
To understand more about the rappers in Hong Kong, search "Hong Kong Cypher" on YouTube and there will be more local rappers from different cultural backgrounds and languages waiting to be discovered.
This cultural diversity will also be seen in WGMA. Said Siswojo: "We're inclusive to everyone that fits into the genre regardless of ethnicity or language. It's going to be an eye-opener for the public to see the talent we have."
WGMA will be held at hall 5BC of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on August 6. For details, go to whatsgood.hk.
