If you want to find a few representatives of the mesozoic rapper in today's Chinese rap circle, the names of the three "Douman T" will definitely be among them. Their Weibo followers total more than 14 million, each of whom is brought out individually, and they are also heavyweights who can serve as the finale guests of large music festivals.
However, there was once a person in the Chinese rap circle who was equally high in popularity. In the era when he still used Douban to hear and sing, his number of fans was the first in the whole network. Although the era of Douban Small Station has long gone, the skinny camel is bigger than the horse after all.
But when I clicked on his Weibo, I saw that the fans were only in their early 50,000s. Any rapper who has shown his face on the show, or a rapper who has a small hit single, can easily surpass the former popular king in terms of Weibo fans.
If you've heard rap on Douban, you probably remember his name — sexy slippers. At the Douban station, the sexy slippers received 47,000 followers.
In contrast, the number of fans is two to four yin san'er, manshuk and kindergarten killer, their attention is about 30,000, and everyone has at least 10,000 or more gaps with slippers. The number of followers of Egg Castle and Light is about 20,000 or so, while Jony J's attention number does not even exceed 10,000.
The more eye-catching data comes from the playback data displayed in the Douban small station playlist of slippers, and the tracks in the "Keep Up" list correspond to the "J-Sleeper Sexy Slippers Portfolio" in NetEase Cloud Music.
Released in 2013, Mixtape has played more than 100,000 plays almost every song on the Douban station of slippers, and "Can't Catch" has reached 450,000. When rap music is still absolutely niche music, slippers' achievements in popularity far exceed the "highest level" in the general sense of this circle.
And the slippers that are so popular are actually not from the class at all, but just a newcomer who has been halfway out of the house. According to what he said in his Douban diary in 2013, he initially had the idea of playing rap just to show it in front of girls in college.
"I used to think that I had this idea very dirty, but now that I think about it, I think that I was quite simple in the first place, because this is my truest idea."
"To attract the attention of girls" sounds like a very unhipHop motivation, but slippers use this motivation to do his music to the extreme. He doesn't talk too deeply about society or politics, nor does he deliberately add dirty words or street elements to his songs, but instead unfolds his work in a light-hearted and humorous tone.
What he expressed was something that a young man of his age would have thought of. It was also for this reason that slippers were loved so much in the rap circles of Chinese, which had a weak audience base at that time.
In 2010, Slippers was invited to participate in the Shanghai World Expo Volunteer Handover Ceremony and Closing Ceremony, and in 2011, he was invited to participate in the performance of the Black Stone Stage of the Play Stone Music Festival, and won the title of "Most Popular Hip Hop Singer" of the Play Stone Music Festival.
In 2012, he was invited to the 54th Grammy Awards and performed at the warm-up party, becoming the only Chinese rapper to perform at the Grammy Awards.
In the same year, he participated in the China Rap Instant Battle Competition and won the championship. And after 2011, he once again won the title of "Musician of the Year" at the Douban Abbey Deer Music Award, and the singles "Can't Catch It" and "The Warmest Love Song in the World" won the Douban Annual Best Rap Single and Best Pop Single Awards respectively.
Slippers were so confused that they embarked on the path of musicians, and he quickly gained a lot of fans in Douban. From playing tickets to true love to becoming a signed artist, everything happens in just a year or two.
At that time, the slippers were in graduate school at Shanghai Normal University, but to make music, he needed to go to Beijing, so the rushing life did not make him tired, but made him more determined to embark on his own musical path.
Regarding the stage name of sexy slippers, the slippers said that "in fact, the source is very boring, that is, the non-mainstream screen name taken when I used QQ when I was a child, and then I used it until now."
He also used the prefix J-Sleeper for a long time, but in the beginning, Slippers wrote his own musical style directly in the stage name, and he was called "Jazzilipper" at that time.
To this day, Jazz HipHop is not the mainstream genre of rap music, but when Jazz HipHop was mentioned a decade ago, in addition to Lu1, Egg Castle, Tiger and Kafe.Hu, the name of the slippers was mentioned.
Being able to keep pace with these Jazz HipHop OGs also shows the impressive results that slippers have achieved on Jazz HipHop. And Slippers has publicly stated more than once that Lu1 is his idol on hiphop roads, and egg castle has an important influence on his creation.
Ten years later, today's questioning and accusations of "rap music popularity and commercialization" have been experienced by slippers ten years ago. In Slippers' own concept, he did do a lot of pop music, because rap music itself is a kind of pop music, and it is difficult to have a specific division between pop music and pop rap.
Rap that discusses spirit and consciousness and rap for the masses and popularity is feasible in slippers' view, and he admires the former, in his own words, "I often listen to their songs and learn to learn, because that's what I lack."
Show respect for different styles of HipHop musicians and gain each other's respect, and slippers don't just stop at verbal talk.
In 2015, he forwarded a sharp "consciousness rap" by Naggy, who is also a Shanghai rapper, "Crappy", and gave it a high evaluation, and Naggy also modestly said that "it has passed the award".
We've tweeted about Naggy before, and he's arguably a rapper who lives in two worlds with Slippers, but they still have respect for each other.
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that the slippers, which look soft and weak, were actually good friends with Pharaoh, the king of hardcore. According to Pharaoh, the idea of starting a label of their own was proposed by Sexy Slippers and another of his friends, Young Gee, who initially considered using "sexy board shoes" as the label name. Of course, we all know that the name of the last label is called "The Living Dead".
Because of the high popularity in the early years, slippers can even directly experience the life trajectory of many players after "China Has Hip Hop" in 2017. In an interview before the start of the show in 2017, Slippers said that "I feel that I still have to have a life to make music, I have been performing and participating in the show for a while, and then I can't write a song, even if I write it, I feel insincere." This kind of experience of his can be said to be rare among rappers before the appearance of "China Has Hip Hop".
And what makes slippers start this busy life is the T-CRASH group. Speaking of T-CRASH as a group, it may be a little strange to the audience now, but seven or eight years ago, T-CRASH was definitely the number one commercial label in the Chinese rap circle.
And at the beginning of its establishment, T-CRASH is still a very unique "producer label", the main manager is a senior producer Big Eye Cannon, team members include GoldChild, Cass, L-Brody, Ender and others, are the industry's top producers.
At the beginning of 2013, T-CRASH officially signed slippers and Dewen, and formed a "Dewen and slippers" combination, With Dewen in charge of Vocal and Slippers in charge of Rap.
In 2013, they won the national top five of Hubei Satellite TV's large-scale reality show "My Chinese Star", and in 2014, they were selected for the "China Good Songs" audition and successfully shortlisted for the Zhou Huajian group.
For comparison, Xie Di's "Don't Go to Work Tomorrow" only got the turn of two mentors, while Dewen and Slippers' "Open hanging man" got the turn of all four mentors.
Unfortunately, Zhou Huajian eliminated Dewen and slippers during the screening of the group, resulting in their excellent results not appearing in the subsequent programs and getting more exposure.
After the show, the two released the album "Super Power Open Hanging Man", which still maintained a good popularity in the Douban station of slippers.
However, at this point when the popularity was about to reach a new high, the "Dewen and Slippers" group suddenly terminated the activity, and the slippers did not release their personal works for a long time.
Judging from the content of his Weibo at that time, slippers should be the producer behind the transformation, or it may have entered the time when graduate students are about to graduate.
Slippers that have retreated behind the scenes have written songs for many mainstream music circles, including Brilliance Chenyu, Li Sidani, Supreme Lihe and others. However, this experience of envying others has brought trouble to the creation of slippers themselves.
"Writing too many songs is easy to numb, will forget the essence, forget what is the reason for making music in the first place, I write songs for many artists, but also have to write their own songs, sometimes it is really confused, to play a lot of roles, how to maintain a pure heart, I think it is my biggest obstacle at present." 」
Slipper described his difficulties in the interview, but he maintained his optimist attributes, adding: "But it's also fun, fight yourself." ”
In the period from 2014 to 2015, Slippers played a considerable influence in the Chinese rap circle, and his gentle personality helped him make many friends. In addition to the aforementioned Naggy and Pharaoh, Slippers also intersects with Manshuk, TT, Babe, Hikari and others.
However, slippers are not the kind of character that is gentle to weak. For Iron Mic, a very influential rap competition that year, he once publicly expressed his displeasure. He also once ridiculed his fans for buying them, but the truth is that he once again achieved hegemony in the main position Douban.
It wasn't until early 2016 that Slippers finally returned to the spotlight again, when he and his friend Young Gee participated in the recording of "I Am a Singer, Who's Kicking the Pavilion" with his friend Young Gee.
This show belongs to the derivative program of "I Am a Singer Season 4", and there is no splash, but the performance video of the slippers has been turned over in recent years, if nothing else, just because he and the judges came to a wave of positive hardness at that time, and even soared, and the name of the judge was called Ding Taisheng.
It can be seen that Ding Taisheng and another music critic, Deng Ke, put forward quite strict requirements for the "poetry" of rapper lyrics as early as five years ago, and it is interesting that Deng Ke criticized the slippers at the same time, taking the Nawukere Yusu Pujiang who participated in "Good Songs of China" as a model of "clear rhythm"; he even once moved out of the little tiger to suppress the lyrics ability of the slippers. For the harsh evaluation of music critics, slippers directly chose to return the favor. After the recording, the slippers continued to line up with Deng Ke on Weibo.
Slippers, whose popularity has declined and is not popular with the mainstream, naturally did not get the opportunity to go to the "I Am a Singer" main competition to kick the pavilion, so he turned to the special competition in the vertical field of rap - the "Lisen Up" rap contest that began in 2016.
Relying on a rich reserve of works and good popularity, Slippers achieved an unprecedented and probably unprecedented achievement - reaching the national finals of "Lisen Up" for three consecutive years.
Regrettably, though, his best result was only in the top five in the country, and the "most popular award" won in 2017 seems to illustrate some problems: the more popular genre is always easy to be at a disadvantage when facing technical players in competitive competitions. After the 2018 competition, the slippers were difficult to find, and there was no news.
As we said earlier, sexy slippers may be one of the most popular rappers before the emergence of "China Has Hip Hop", so does he have any stories with "China Has Hip Hop"? The answer is yes.
The slippers of that year also went to the competition, and it was personally assessed by Wu Yifan. However, the most dramatic scene appeared, when Wu Yifan asked "Is there a Freestyle?" And the slippers are good everywhere, there is no Freestyle.
He couldn't do even one sentence of improvisational rap: there was a brief Freestyle Cypher session at the beginning of the 2017 Listen Up Finals, and when it was his turn to flip flops, he simply said he didn't have Freestyle and handed the microphone to the next contestant. Even "where is the next microphone" can not be said, and it is expected to be eliminated by Wu Yifan.
After the audition was eliminated, Slippers released a ticket-playing song "Is There a Freestyle?" Slightly helplessly self-deprecating. The elimination of slippers has once again set off a long-standing discussion: whether Freestyle is a necessary skill for rappers, and should it be used as a criterion for promotion?
In the middle of the show, Slippers also cooperated with "Hyaluronic Acid" with VaVa, the national top four of "China Has Hip Hop" and VaVa, an old comrade-in-arms of "Listen Up".
For the hit "China Has Hip Hop", the slippers that were eliminated by the audition gave a relatively high evaluation. He believes that the show's influence and production are well-produced, which is of great help to the development of rappers. And some shady and other remarks, he feels that it is not very valid.
However, as one of the most popular rappers ever, we have never seen Slippers on rap variety shows in the past three years, and even in the auditioned venues, we can't find him.
Maybe "China Has Hip Hop" has let him down, maybe he's used to the feeling of being behind the scenes, like Wang Tianfang, the national champion of 2017's Listen Up.
The slippers after 2018 are more like a cat slave and a full fan on Weibo, and perhaps he really no longer intends to stick to the rap career after the age.
By the end of 2019, after two years and two months, Slippers finally released his new song. However, at this time, he changed his name to OneFly Yiteng, and only a few old fans knew that he was using his real name Zhao Yiteng as a new stage name.
We don't know whether we changed AKA, which has gained countless popularity and honors in the past decade, in order to "be a new person and pay off debts" as he said, and to prove yourself with musical works in the new identity, or whether it has another intention. But in 2020, OneFly added "sexy slippers" to its stage name.
It's now the second half of 2021, but Slippers only released one song in January. It is difficult to predict what the future of the slippers will be, but for him who is no longer Buddhist, maybe he has had glory, and it is enough...