Ka Lee Wong (University of Southern California)
In 2007, Namewee, a Malaysia-born singer and filmmaker mostly based in Taiwan, rose to popularity after publishing on YouTube a parody of the Malaysian national anthem, which led to the Malaysian government to prosecute him for his criticism of corruption in the country. Since then, despite more arrest warrants from the government and even death threats from religious groups in Malaysia, Namewee still uses YouTube to showcase his music videos, which are mostly satirical of political, cultural and religious issues in Malaysia and beyond. In July 2017, he released another controversial song called Geebai People – superficially it is an ordinary Mandopop love song depicting melancholic unrequited love; yet it is also a song filled with latent vulgarity, which is rare in Mandopop. In the music video, in every line of the lyrics (which are subtitled in Chinese characters), certain words are highlighted in bold red. Literally, these highlighted words are gibberish, like “chao (noisy), hai (also)” (吵/還) which are actually drawn from back-to-back sentences; yet, Hokkien and Cantonese speakers will intuit subliminal meaning from these phrases: when sung in the tone of the song, these are swear words in Cantonese or Hokkien, like the aforementioned “chao hai,” when understood as Cantonese rather than Mandarin, becomes a Cantonese profanity, “cau hai (stinky cunt)” (臭屄). The vulgarity in the song is, interestingly, ambivalent in a sense that it is embedded with covert multilingualism – it is vulgar but not quite, since the words only sound similar to but are not literally vulgar expressions. This suggests that criticism against its vulgarity could just be blamed on the paranoia of the listener, since it relies on his or her interpretive gesture. In this study, I’ll explore the significance of Namewee’s expression of latent vulgarity through a few questions: Is there a critical significance to these gestures in Namewee’s songs and music videos beyond mere vulgarity itself? What is vulgarity after all? How does it relate to issues like conflicts in multilingualism and freedom of aesthetic and creative expression in Malaysia and the transnational Sinophone space? To address these questions, I first illustrate the trajectory of Namewee’s rise to fame in relation his non-conformist works; then I turn to discuss his use of vulgarity and explore what actually makes his works vulgar. By doing so, I contend that Geebai People demonstrates Namewee’s strategy to find alternative outlets for the censored voice – not only do the platform of YouTube and the transnational site of Taiwan represent his spaces of cultural exits to circulate his contentious works as a Malaysian Chinese artist, his latent insertion of vulgarity in Geebai People represents an alternative mode for challenging different forms of cultural dominance, like Malay-centrism and Mandarin-centrism in Malaysia as well as in the transnational Sinophone space.
Ka Lee Wong is a third year PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in University of Southern California. Her research focus is transnational Chinese languages and cultures, especially issues concerning cultural productions in Chinese dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien.