A close look at how Taiwanese musicians are using rap music as a creative way to explore and reconcile Taiwanese identity and history.

Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes, ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan.
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Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present.

"Renegade Rhymes is a great book that fills in a knowledge gap for a lot of readers in the U.S. and beyond who are unaware of the hip hop scene in Taiwan. It covers the music and culture in great depth, but Schweig also manages to make the book pretty accessible to those who wish to learn this unique part of hip hop culture." - Scratched Vinyl

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"Meredith Schweig’s monograph, Renegade Rhymes, is the first detailed English-language account of rap music in Taiwan. Using interviews with Taiwan hip-hop key actors, observations, song lyrics and a plurality of archival materials, Schweig brilliantly fills a gap in the literature about popular music in Taiwan and in the Sinophone world in general."

"Deconstructing verses from some of Taiwan’s foremost wordsmiths, [Schweig] demonstrates how the properties of Mandarin and Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) are used to accentuate what the late, trailblazing scholar of hip-hop Adam Krims calls a 'percussion-effusive flow.' . . . What follows is a fascinating exposition of how this achieved." - Taipei Times

"In Taiwanese hip-hop culture, as Meredith Schweig reveals in this captivating and original work, socio-political considerations continue to play a key role." - Global Asia

"Through Renegade Rhymes, Meredith Schweig
offers a vivid and lucid ethnographic and historical
account of coalescing hip-hop communities
in Taiwan, which she bolsters with
a detailed, relevant exploration of the island’s
social, political, and military histories." - Fontes Artis Musicae

"As an indispensable contribution to the field, Renegade Rhymes provides a concise yet foundational text, valuable for a broad spectrum of academic disciplines such as sociology, history, performance studies, and cultural studies. This book is equally useful for scholars engaged in historical and ethnographic examinations of Taiwanese music, illuminating unique facets of its development and cultural significance." - Asian Music