In the summer of 2019, in the last performance of "China New Rap 2019", in the moment before they were about to be crowned king, Yang and Su sang the lyrics: "A child who has never been favored, put on a duck tongue hat and goes on stage."
If you know Yang and Su from the 2019 show, you may not understand the meaning of this lyric. If you know Yang and Su from 2018's "China New Rap", you may think that "not optimistic" is about the fact that he stopped in the top 15 of the country that year and was eliminated by Pan Weibai and Deng Ziqi early.
If you met Yang and Su from 2017's "China Has Hip Hop", you will know that this is the theme song "R! CH" in a lyric. That year, Yang and Su were not yet KeyNG, his English name was still Jason, and there was a prefix in front of the name, called low-key combination. You will feel that Yang and Su in 2019 are paying tribute to themselves in 2017.
However, in fact, the child who was not optimistic put on the duck tongue hat and came to power "a long time ago".
Yang and Su's later teammates, and the most important guide in his rap career, Pharaoh, exposed the fact that he once stuttered in his work "Truant Veyron". It is hard to imagine that the pharaoh, who is now famous for his fast mouth, actually stuttered.
Yang and Su, who are also known for their fast mouths, also have the same experience as Pharaoh. Before the age of 3, he was a child who could not even speak and was considered "late" by his parents, but 10 years later, he was able to stand in front of all the teachers and students of the school and win the honor of "the best debater in the school".
Of course, what makes Yang and Su more powerful than Pharaoh is that Yang and Su learned English well, and Pharaoh is still scratching his head at the three English learning software in his mobile phone. When Yang and Su were 13 years old, he was still a "stupid kid" who didn't know anything about English. But by high school, his English scores rose to the top of his class, and he also won the second place in the English Speech Contest.
Could it be that Yang and Su are even more gifted in learning English? This is not entirely the case. In junior high school, Yang and Su's grades have been quite flat, but he has a niche hobby: rapping.
In the summer after the middle school entrance examination, Yang and Su went to the United States to participate in a summer camp. In front of his foreign friends, he sang a rap he liked, and to his surprise, the song was warmly welcomed by his American classmates. Since then, Yang and Su have found self-confidence and found the path they will take.
At first, Yang and Su's love for rap only stayed in the imitation stage, but after the summer camp's small test knife, he bought a variety of books and CDs about rap, from the bite, rhyme, rhythm and other aspects to feel the singing skills of foreign rappers. On the other hand, learning to practice English rap songs requires a lot of word accumulation, so Yang and Su have been expanding their word volume since the beginning of high school.
Compared with many grassroots rappers, Yang and Su are called prominent families. His father, Yang Shichun, was a composer who served as an arranger and recording producer for Cui Jian, Cheng Fangyuan, Tian Zhen and others.
However, Yang Shichun's most notable achievement is undoubtedly that he founded the Chuanyin Pop Music Academy in 2001. During his tenure as dean, he cultivated household names such as Li Yuchun, He Jie, Wei Chen, and Wang Zhengliang. In 2012, Yang Shichun was jointly invited by the China Music Association, Shenzhen University and Shenzhen Radio and Television Group to go south to serve as the executive vice president of the Admiralty Conservatory of Music of Shenzhen University.
Yang and Su's mother, Su Xuemei, is also not to be underestimated, she is one of the representatives of the contemporary song scene cover Teresa Teng lijun songs. At the age of 17, Su Xuemei, who loved to sing, was discovered by the Chinese record company and collaborated with Tu Honggang to launch the first album "A Thousand Words" named after a cover of Teresa Teng's songs.
Since 1986, Su Xuemei has successively released 7 cover albums such as "Sweet Honey", "You are in My Heart", "On the Side of Water", and "Teresa Teng Commemorative Golden Song".
However, Yang and Su, who came from a musical family, did not really learn music since childhood. After high school, he ignited a love of music. After less than a year of piano study and HipHop self-study, he has been able to appear on the Chengdu DreamWorks Student Music Festival, Chengdu Heat Wave Music Festival, and Japan's NHK TV programs, which are unimaginable for high school students.
At the 2012 Chengdu DreamWorks Student Music Festival, bands and singers from Chengdu Shude Middle School, Chengdu No. 3 Middle School, Southwest Petroleum University, Shishi Middle School, and Yandao Street Middle School exploded in different ways such as pop, rock, B-BOX, hipHop, etc.
Yang and Su were from the Stone Chamber Middle School, and what he did not expect at the time was that he would become a teammate of JarStick from Yandao Street Middle School, who performed together 7 years later, and that day.
At the Chengdu Heat Wave Music Festival held in the same year, we can also glimpse the style of high school students Yang and Su through a video. Interestingly, as early as ten years ago, the young Yang and Su were already "macho men" who dared to show their figures on the stage. At that time, Yang and Su's singing skills also carried the deep imprint of Eminem.
Frequent appearances at music festivals in Chengdu did not affect Yang and Su's studies. In 2013, Yang and Su took the U.S. college entrance exam, and he eventually received a notice from 5 universities, including UCLA. It is worth mentioning that these 5 universities are ranked in the top 50 in the United States. In the end, Yang and Su chose to go to UCLA to pursue a double degree in economics and philosophy.
If Yang and Su's original life plan is followed, he may enter the Federal Reserve and work in poverty alleviation. But at UCLA, an alumnus from China has invisibly changed the fate of Yang and Su, and this alumnus is producer Wang Xiaofu.
One day, he invited Yang and Su to his studio to record, and it happened that one of his friends was doing the audition for the North American division of "China New Song", and Yang and Su were very interested in this and expressed their intention to participate, and then Yang and Su successfully passed the selection directly in Wang Xiaofu's studio. Since then, the two sides have maintained cooperation, including the "Coronation" that crowned Yang and Su, and Wang Xiaofu also came up with many ideas to help the chief producer Chen Lingtao.
After officially becoming students of "China's New Song", Yang and Su immediately applied for a one-year suspension, and then calmly called their parents and said that they were going to return to China to compete. The son, who should have been moving towards a great future, suddenly decided to devote himself to the extremely unstable acting career of eating "youth rice", and Yang and Su's parents were not happy in their hearts.
However, when Yang and Su promised to return to school a year later to get their diplomas, their parents finally agreed to his decision. In the Skit "Old Yang" of the album "Coronation", we can still hear Yang and Sue's father say: "I still hope that after you finish the album, you will hurry back to the United States and get your graduation certificate back."
On the stage of "China's New Song", Yang and Su are not alone. Through the Internet, he met Zhang Xinyue, who studied at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music. Zhang Xinyue is two years older than Yang and Su, and she loves HipHop culture as much as Yang and Su, and the two began to cooperate musically.
Zhang Xinyue, who is from a science class, has more experience in stage performance than Yang and Su, she has participated in the guizhou satellite TV "Sing The Spark of Love" competition in 2014 and successfully advanced to the national top 14; in the same year, she also participated in the competition of Beijing Satellite TV's "The Most Beautiful Harmony Season 2", singing Wang Lihong's "Things You Don't Know" and joining the Xiao Jingteng group.
Although I have previously performed at a music festival in Chengdu, "China's New Song" has received attention that even the few shows that Zhang Xinyue participated in are difficult to catch up with, not to mention the music festivals that Yang and Su participated in as early as high school. What kind of performance will Yang and Su, who are on the national stage for the first time, hand over? A song called "My Sky + Rap God" was his answer.
It turned out that the combination of Yang and Su and Zhang Xinyue worked quite well. The form of boys in charge of Rap and girls in charge of Vocal has long proven to be effective, and in China, there are household phoenix legends; as far away as the United States, there are the first heirlooms left by Yang and Su's idols Eminem with Rihanna or Skylar Grey.
"My Sky" is very explosive in the chorus, and "Rap God" is a song for showmanship. Zhang Xinyue let the audience feel the "power" brought by the pitch at hook, and Yang and Su made the audience feel the "speed" brought by the fast mouth in Versae. A song with both strength and speed, the most intuitive feeling to ordinary listeners is "cool", and it is not surprising that low-key combinations can become popular.
However, Yang and Su are still fledgling newcomers after all, and the phenomenon of swallowing words in his Versace is serious, and there are also cases of random shooting. Therefore, Yu Chengqing will say a sentence "Just by this girl, you can actually rush down." But in fact, among the rappers who were able to ascend to the elegant hall in those years, Yang and Su's technical level was still remarkable - after all, even when Liu Fuyang, a recognized technical stream in the underground circle, was on CCTV, there was still a situation of swallowing words and shooting randomly.
Before choosing a mentor, because of Jay Chou's questions, Zhang Xinyue introduced the origin of the name of the low-key combination. Because one surname is Zhang and the other is Yang, the two people once thought that it would be called "Zhang Yang Combination". But considering that HipHop itself is already publicity enough, it is the opposite, called "low-key combination".
On the stage, Zhang Xinyue stressed that the name was temporary, and hoped that the mentor would help them change their name, but in the end, the name "low-key combination" was used in this way.
The post-90s boys who grew up in Chinese mainland have almost all heard of Jay Chou; and those children who take rap as a hobby are almost all influenced by Jay Chou. Although Yu Chengqing on the mentor seat wrote the first Chinese HipHop single "Report Class Leader", Yang and Su and Zhang Xinyue still firmly chose Jay Chou.
Since then, the low-key group has worked hard to survive in several rounds of fighting by Jay Chou's team, singing songs such as "Bad", "Ordinary Road", "The Brightest Star in the Night Sky" and so on. Among them, the song "Bad" is a small breakthrough, both of them are involved in Rap's attempt, but the actual performance effect is not good, so the later "Ordinary Road" and "The Brightest Star in the Night Sky" still follow the classic mode of male Rap female Vocal.
It is worth mentioning that when the low-key group sang the episode of "Bad", when one of the lyrics was broadcast, the subtitle labeling occurred with an obvious error, and HipHop was written as "HitPop". Obviously, this is not likely to be the deliberate writing of the wrong lyrics by Yang and Su and Zhang Xinyue, who have known hip-hop culture for many years, but the mistake of the staff responsible for subtitle labeling in the program group.
However, this screenshot of the wrong subtitle began to circulate among rap circles. At that time, Andy, who had not yet become teammates with Yang and Su, directly opened "You know your mother", and the producer Mai said that "my mother does not understand him". If you look closely, you can also see that there is jony J's name among the likes. These unfriendly remarks are obviously not aimed at the program team staff, but have some implications against Yang and Su.
The reason why Yang and Su are "unpopular" is actually not complicated. First of all, he was not a rapper in the traditional sense at all, he didn't have any underground experience, and although he had performed at music festivals, there were no influential original works.
Secondly, the image he showed on the show was too positive, and he did not have the domineering spirit of Xie Di on CCTV in 2014, which was obviously difficult to convince the rappers in underground. Finally, from a technical point of view, at least The little Andy of Kaimai is qualified to criticize Yang and Su's level. Objectively speaking, the lyrics of this "Bad" do have a lot of water.
The low-key group stopped at the bird's nest sprint night in the show, they did not enter the final competition, and the fame radiation of "Jay Chou Team Cadets" did not last long. However, as one of the few groups in the mainstream vision who actively claimed to be HipHop, they still attracted some fans, and some of them even established the "Low-key Group National Support Association".
After the show, they formed the "Shenzhen Low-key Culture" studio; Vipshop's advertising song "Dating King Tuai" became the first single of the low-key group. It doesn't seem to be a good sign that the group's first single, the commercial song, but at the end of the year, the low-key group released its first original single" "Finish Point", which established a good reputation for them.
2017 was the most active year for low-key groups, the year they released "Amazon", "EPM", "Half Centimeter", "Two-Seater", "I Have A Dream", "Climb", "FAST", "Der er Drift" and other works, but this is all the works they released in the name of the group.
Commercialization is an unavoidable problem for low-key combinations, and almost half of the works in this year are promotional tracks, and there are very few truly original tracks. Obviously, commercial success is not the kind of success that Yang and Su want most, and he composed and sang the theme song "R! CH reflects his aggressiveness on HipHop to some extent.
The low-key duo's last public event stopped on January 13, 2018, when they went to the 10th anniversary of QQ Speeding. After that, Yang and Su and Zhang Xinyue began to divide the army into two roads. In 2018, Zhang Xinyue participated in Jiangsu Satellite TV's "Hey! Sing It Up", she sang with Fei Yuqing on the show, but did not attract more attention. In the same year, Yang and Su chose to participate in "China's New Rap".
In 2018, the rap circle of Chinese, which has just undergone strict rectification, is in a state of trembling, and the most watched variety show "China New Rap" is no exception. Compared with the fleshy GAI and Bridge in "China Has Hip Hop", "China New Rap" obviously hopes that players with more mainstream images will receive huge attention. Therefore, at the beginning of the first episode of the program, the program team showed Duo Lei from Tsinghua University and Yang and Su, who studied at UCLA.
Yes, although Yang and Su at this time have become famous throughout the country through low-key combinations, and even been "targeted" by some people in the rap circle, the program group still values his "school bully" identity. Yang and Su, who have been tempered on the big stage, are no longer pure "academics", he is prepared. Although a song "Bugs Bunny" is only a short 60 seconds, it concentrates and comprehensively shows the depth of his technical skills, and the degree of showmanship is similar to that of PG One in 2017.
After surviving 60 seconds, Yang and Su successfully passed the Freestyle session, and in the 1v1 Battle stage, he inexplicably faced Chen Zexi, who had the lowest vote inside the rapper. In the collaborative track "Dark Horse", Yang and Su used the fastest fast mouth in "Sleep, Read, Love", successfully advanced to the selection gate stage, and were selected by Pan Weibai's Deng Ziqi team.
After entering the team, Yang and Su were quite confident in themselves. In the sub-Beat Challenge stage, in the face of Beat who sampled "Ghost of a Woman", he took the initiative to propose the idea of "Quiet Scarecrow" to Ai Ge, and really put it into practice, saying that Yang and Su dominated the song.
Although the greater the risk, the greater the reward, but this time, the risk is already large enough for Yang and Su to overturn. As it turned out, not only was this Beat impossible for their teammates, neither of them was it. Even if this theme of "outsiders seeing the world" has been affirmed by Deng Ziqi, in terms of specific interpretation, Yang and Su and Ai Re have not been able to do a good job.
Deng Ziqi has a sharp evaluation, saying that neither of them has played the advantage of sound. In this regard, Yang and Sue are even more disadvantaged than AiGe, because Ai Ge has a strong Vocal ability, otherwise there would be no "Planet Fall" out of the circle.
However, at that time, Yang and Su's timbre advantage was in the angry tone, which was completely inferior in vocal, and it just so happened that this was another Beat who would be very embarrassed to sing angry tones, so the defeat of Yang and Su was also reasonable.
I thought that I could show my fists when I entered the team, but what I encountered was a cruel elimination, which made Yang and Su quite devastated. And how did Yang and Su bounce back from their defeat and thus return a year later in blood to win the championship? Stay tuned for The Next Chapter of Yang and Su's Characters!