The Tibetan rap song that took over the Chinese internet
Fresh off my first-ever trip to Tibet last year, I became captivated by a bouncy Tibetan hip-hop track I heard on the social media platform WeChat. I tried to search for it online in Mandarin, English, and even Tibetan – my ancestral language – but failed to find it. After returning home to the United States, I bookmarked the song and soon forgot about it.
Months later, I clicked on a clip from the popular Chinese talent show Rap of China that was going viral on my social feeds. To my surprise, it showed a performance of that very song, which I learned was titled ‘Drokpa Drokpa’ (the Tibetan word for nomad) and written by a Tibetan rapper group called Wings (ཤོག་པ་ངོན་པོ།).
