Chengdu Cool: The Rise of Sichuan’s Homegrown Hip Hop
The moment the elevator doors opened, Pema Tenzin found the party that he’d been looking for. He just hadn’t expected to find it here.
From the outside, Poly Center appears to be one of many dull, nondescript office buildings lining the streets of the Chinese city of Chengdu. But inside, on the twenty-first floor that autumn night in 2016, the air was thick with laughter, strobing multicolored light, and the muscular thud thud thud of the bass was booming from the speakers. Young people leaned against the walls of the cramped corridors, taking hits of laughing gas from candy-colored balloons before diving back into one of three clubs in the vicinity. At the end of the hall was his destination, the experience he’d been anticipating since he left Gansu: NASA, Chengdu’s hottest hip-hop club, where an MC that Pema had long admired from afar freestyled for the sweaty crowd.
Then a lanky 18-year-old, Pema had arrived in Chengdu a few months ago from Gannan, a small Tibetan prefecture up north in Gansu Province. He had no friends, no mentors, and no idea how to proceed with the dream he’d been nursing since he was a boy: to become a rap star.
Like many aspiring Chinese rappers, Pema got his first taste of hip-hop from the internet. Sitting in front of his computer listening to his idol, Lil Wayne, he was hooked. Unlike the squeaky-clean, rosy-cheeked male pop stars (referred to in China as “little fresh meats”) whose music his peers played on repeat, the swaggering, foul-mouthed American rapper who strutted around in snapbacks was bold, subversive, and cool. More than anything, Pema wanted to be cool. At 13, as a tribute to Lil Wayne—who also goes by the name Young Mula Baby—he adopted the name Young13DBaby. (The romanization of Pema’s name is Baima Denzing, and 13 resembles his initials “BD.”)
A true rap star must tell his own story and rep his own hometown. Imitation can be sniffed out instantly; coolness requires authenticity. So Pema, who had no thug life to rap about—who hadn’t gotten rich, let alone died trying—spent his teenage years writing lyrics that reflected his own reality. He wrote about life as a high-schooler at a rigid, military-run boarding academy in the smoggy city of Lanzhou, the capital city of Gansu
