From Bad Bunny to Chinese rap, hyperlocal music is going global

Labubu dolls knocked against the Chanel purses of clubgoers at the MGM Cotai in Macau, their fiendish smiles mirroring the faces of their owners, who bounced to the beat. “Lai cai!” the rapper Skai Isyourgod yelled, thumping his chest. “Lai!” the crowd chanted back. “Lai cai!” he called again. “Lai!” the crowd roared. The hook — “Riches come!” — from Skai’s hit single Stacks from All Sides is classic hip-hop fare. Less typical is the artist delivering it. Skai, whose Chinese stage name is Lan Lao, brought his intoxicating mix of Memphis-style rap with Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka rhymes to the afterparty for American rapper Travis Scott’s Macau concert in October. With earworms like Blueprint Supreme and Karma Code, he’s become inescapable in China — sparking social media dance trends and starring in ads for Alipay. But he’s also taken off outside of the country. Since his EP release in July, Skai’s monthly Spotify streams have surpassed even Jay Chou, the long-reigning titan of Asian pop. Unlike Chou, whose popularity was built largely among Chinese-speaking audiences worldwide, Skai is a rare example of Chinese cultural crossover. He spent November and December on an 11-city North American tour, following dozens of shows in cities that included Sydney, Jakarta and London. His music has found fans with no grasp of Chinese — as one TikTok commenter put it: “Understanding 0%, Vibing 100%.” Skai’s ascent is more than a breakout success story. It represents a broader shift in the streaming era: The most locally specific music — rooted in accent, place and cultural texture — is increasingly the work that travels the farthest. The trend flips a long-held industry assumption that non-Western artists must sand down their cultural edges to achieve global reach. Cultural authenticity For years, Korean megastars like BTS and Blackpink have drawn heavily on Western pop traditions. With Hybe Co. launching the global girl group Katseye and the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack sung almost entirely in English, debate continues over what “counts” as K-pop. But now a different logic is gaining momentum: The artists breaking through globally aren’t diluting their identities — they’re doubling down on them. No one illustrates this more clearly than Bad Bunny, who with 19.8 billion plays was Spotify’s most-streamed artist in 2025 — the fourth time he’s claimed the top spot. Although he’s fluent in English, the Puerto Rican trap star performs only in Spanish and unapologetically opted to stage an extended residency in San Juan rather than tour internationally last summer. The announcement that Bad Bunny will headline the Super Bowl halftime show on February 8 sparked a wave of memes — not just about learning Spanish but also his slang-heavy Caribbean dialect, which sometimes mystifies even native Spanish speakers. The decision marked a shift in global attitudes toward accents once considered “nonprestige.” “Gen Z and younger audiences really are looking for and prioritize cultural authenticity,” says Laura Fisher, an entertainment analyst at MIDiA Research. In her June report International Success for Local Language Artists, Fisher cites the global success of Gaelic-speaking rap act Kneecap, Italian rock band Måneskin and Spanish-Moroccan drill rapper Morad as evidence that language is no longer a limiting factor. Hyperspecificity, she argues, signals freshness and helps artists stand out amid algorithmic blanding. Spanish singer Rosalia is testing this logic with her critically acclaimed album Lux, released in November, which features vocals in 13 languages. “There are visuals of Spain, visuals of what it’s like to be a Catholic,” says Fisher. “It’s opening up that culture to a different audience rather than diluting it.” There’s “a new generation of truly borderless listeners who don’t care about long-held boundaries of language or location,” says James Foley, Spotify’s global editorial strategy lead. He predicts the trend will accelerate in 2026 with “more Asian artists breaking through globally across a broader mix of styles and sounds” — including Japanese rapper Yuki Chiba and Indonesian indie soul band Thee Marloes. Philosophy, Pei Pa Kao and the power of regional dialects Skai, 26, transplants the shadowy, lo-fi rhythms of Memphis hip-hop onto the soundscape of southeastern China, weaving in Cantonese opera samples, traditional instruments and philosophical aphorisms. The video for Blueprint Supreme roams through iconic Hong Kong venues like the Happy Valley Racecourse and Lin Heung teahouse. In the hypnotic track Nin Jiom, he raps about Pei Pa Kao — a heritage Chinese cough syrup brand that’s recently gained cachet among Western celebrities. On the night of the Travis Scott concert, Guangzhou resident Mona, who only provided her first name, had missed most of the main show due to traffic, but her VIP ticket got her into the afterparty. “The beats, it’s the same,” she said, sporting waist-length hair and a bodycon outfit as she vibed to Skai’s flow. “I’m from Tanzania, but we can get into it.” Hong Kong cultural entrepreneur Kevin Poon, who was in the DJ booth that night, said the rise of mumble rap over the past decade — through artists such as Future, Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage — has already trained audiences to pay less attention to lyrics. “You can’t hear what they’re saying anyway,” Poon said. “It doesn’t really matter what language it is so long as it has a good beat and good rhythm to it.” A new generation rediscovers dialect pride and cultural memory Skai, whose real name is Chen Xukai, is from Huizhou, a city of 6 million people in Guangdong province. Now a lithium-ion battery hub, it’s also home to Mount Luofu, a sacred site in Taoism and Buddhism — influences that run strongly through his music. He studied music performance at a university in Sichuan, then worked briefly at an electricity company and even sold Laoganma chili sauce via livestream before committing fully to his rap career. After experiments with emo rap and other styles, he eventually found his sound. “I was nonstop copying Europe and America,” Skai said in an interview with Chinese media. “No matter how I copied, it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t me.” He ultimately broke through with what Wai Mun Leung, a linguist and associate professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, describes as a “unique southern accent collage,” drawing on pronunciations from Guangxi, Fujian, Hainan and even Southeast Asian Chinese communities. The embrace of linguistic diversity marks a reversal from the early years of communist rule, Leung says, when regional dialects were discouraged to unify the nation and boost literacy. Today, dialects are being rediscovered as important markers of identity, she says. They’re “now seen as cultural assets rather than backward.” Yan Jiayun, the social media director for Radii, an online platform that tracks Asian youth culture, says Skai offers something fresh even to Chinese listeners. His flattened, Hakka-inflected Cantonese — a rural cousin to the variety spoken in Hong Kong — inspired Yan to learn more about the Hakka, a Han Chinese subgroup with a distinctive identity, language and culture. “I felt like I’m not just watching people rapping,” Yan says. “I’m also watching a whole kind of fragment of culture that’s unfolded for me.” For the overseas Chinese diaspora, meanwhile, Skai’s music plays into a powerful nostalgia factor. Many families left the country before the Chinese Communist Party came to power and before Mandarin was adopted as the lingua franca, meaning they never learned it. Hearing an artist perform in something other than Mandarin can feel like a homecoming. Andrew Chau, a Chinese-American entrepreneur and founder of the tea shop Boba Guys, saw Skai perform in San Francisco in November. The hybrid accent reminded him of the slightly off-kilter intonation of his father, who is from Guangzhou. Chau was also struck by Skai’s philosophical lyrics, which he says give “words of wisdom toward a life of peace and prosperity.” Drawing on Taoist and Buddhist thought as well as Confucian ideas of filial piety, the music felt, above all, culturally authentic. Cultural specificity is the new universal language A longstanding critique of Chinese hip-hop, particularly in its early days, is that it could feel imitative — borrowing the sound of American rap without the lived experiences that shaped it, such as racial injustice, police brutality or inner-city life. Skai, by contrast, fuses literary idioms with coarse street talk, addressing themes ranging from post-pandemic economic anxiety among Chinese youth to religious rituals, Leung says. Across global music scenes, artists are increasingly finding power in becoming more — not less — specific about where they come from. Chinese artists, Poon notes, are uniquely positioned to benefit given the size of the domestic market and so don’t need to worry about taking off globally. Ironically, that lack of crossover ambition may be precisely what helps the music resonate abroad —irrespective of the fame of the artist. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like that,” Chau says, recalling the San Francisco show. “The walls were literally going to shake because it was packed. But it’s just a random Chinese rapper that came to America.” By Tiffany Ap

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From Bad Bunny to Chinese rap, hyperlocal music is going global