Proceedings of The 5th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Vietnamese Les Rap as Art to Promote Rights and Gender
Ly Quyet Tien
ABSTRACT:
In recent years, Vietnam has witnessed the striking appearance of Les music into the local entertainment activities. A series of well-known artists such as M.E.O, Diby, Ken By, Trang only, Lil’s, etc., have written and sung rap songs which express their fight for visibility, identity and sensibility.
Their lyrics are largely about girls’ love: intimate feeling, a sense of lesbian destiny, unashamed sexuality, utmost indignance, and power of love. These songs encompass all human feelings such as passion, hate, sorrow, anger, frustration and happiness. Composed for the lesbian community, this music is typically Vietnamese in the way the music flows and styles thereby paving the way to the ‘coming out’ of an unnoticed and forgetting gender in society.
Starting in the 2010s and growing in tandem with Vietnam’s LGBT movement, this music has not only touched the heart and won the sympathy of the LGBT community but also the larger public, marking the rising queer voice, contributing to a flourishing of LGBT culture, diversifying Vietnam’s extraordinary musical treasure and revolutionizing the colors of Asian hip hop music in times of gender liberation.
The paper examines the background into which Vietnamese Lesbian rapping was born and develops: its styles, themes as well as its own particular and similar features with world LGBT hip hop music. The paper also studies its identity, diversity in the local culture and its revolutionary role in the promotion of the welfare of the native queer citizens by furthering the LGBT rights movement.
Keywords: art, culture, lesbian, music, rap .