Darkhan | Mongolia’s Release Valve

For Mongolia’s marginalised youth, hip-hop music provides an outlet to discuss unemployment, anger and disillusionment

01 September 2010
Nyamka and Dalai, two members of Sea-Star, are part of a burgeoning hip-hop scene in Mongolia.
JEFFREY LAU FOR THE CARAVAN
Nyamka and Dalai, two members of Sea-Star, are part of a burgeoning hip-hop scene in Mongolia.
JEFFREY LAU FOR THE CARAVAN

I HAD BEEN IN THE MONGOLIAN CAPITAL of Ulan Bator less than 24 hours before I saw my first racially motivated fight. You could scarcely call it a fight: three Chinese men knocked to the floor by a drunken Mongolian. He’d been angered by them talking to Mongolian women in a bar, and followed the trio outside to teach them the error of their ways.

Standing beside me as it happened, a young hip-hop singer in a green wife-beater undershirt and Yankees baseball cap looked on and shrugged his shoulders as if to say it happens every night and said, “It is stupid”—a sentiment he spoilt by laughing afterwards.

I had met Nele, who like many Mongolians has just one name, the night before on the train to the capital. During the long journey, he told my photographer and I about the explosion of hip-hop among the youth of Mongolia, let us listen to a handful of his band SS’s songs, and explained some of the problems in the country, of which there are many (alcoholism and a hatred of their southern neighbours being major ones). This was made all the more impressive by the fact that he spoke perhaps 200 words of English, many of which were curse words he’d learnt listening to foreign hip-hop records.

Kit Gillet is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Beijing. His work appears regularly in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Forbes, Foreign Policy and CNN.

Keywords: Kit Gillet Mongolia Darkhan nomadic Ulan Bator hip hop alcoholism unemployment social unrest Sea Star ransformation former Soviet
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