{"id":478,"date":"2005-08-20T20:27:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-21T00:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tradermike.net\/movethecrowd\/2005\/08\/move_to_china_become_a_rapper_make_millions\/"},"modified":"2005-08-20T20:27:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-21T00:27:00","slug":"move_to_china_become_a_rapper_make_millions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/20\/move_to_china_become_a_rapper_make_millions\/","title":{"rendered":"Move to China, Become a Rapper & Make Millions!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was reading an article in Business 2.0 about Americans who are making it big in China<\/a> when I noticed a picture of a brotha with two Chinese girls next to him. (reminds me of that line from Digital Undergrounds ‘Sex Packets’, but I digress…) So of course I skipped right to that part of the story and what I read blew me away. This cat moved to China on a whim, had never done any ‘serious’ performing before and is now a huge star over there and making millions! See for yourself…<\/p>\n

\nFOCUS NOT ON AMERICA’S CULTURAL VALUES, BUT ON THE VALUE OF ITS CULTURE<\/p>\n

As in much of the world, Americans and American culture are often viewed in China with a mixture of repulsion and fascination. Andrew Ballen has ridden the second part of that equation to improbable heights.<\/p>\n

Ballen arrived in China four years ago “on a whim,” he says. A native of New York, Ballen, now 32, had dropped out of Duke University’s law school, angering his father, a high-achieving Jamaican immigrant who is a physician in North Carolina. Ballen wanted to get far away from the scene of his failure, and China seemed about as far away as he could go. He didn’t know a soul in China. He didn’t speak a word of Chinese.<\/p>\n

To cushion his landing, he took a job at one of China’s leading for-profit language schools. After a month, he realized two things. First, he’d never earn enough money as an English teacher to live well in China. Second, Chinese youth were mesmerized by hip-hop. “As an American black kid, I knew something about hip-hop,” Ballen says.<\/p>\n

He’d never done serious performing in America, but Ballen quickly started his own weekly Thursday night hip-hop show in Shanghai, renting out a club, paying a flat fee to the Chinese owner, and keeping the $4 entrance fee and a slice of the bar take. He canvassed top universities, distributing fliers to students to announce his opening night. He did the same in expat neighborhoods, concentrating on women. “Get the hot women, and the hot men follow,” Ballen says, summarizing his marketing strategy.<\/p>\n

Three hundred people turned out to hear Ballen rap and DJ on opening night, and kids keep coming back, in increasingly large numbers. On a recent Thursday night, Ballen takes in $3,200 from the gate, and the bar soaks up more than $10,000. In the four-year history of the show, Ballen has grossed nearly $2 million.<\/p>\n

The rap gig launched a burgeoning multimedia empire. A few months after his debut in the club, Ballen started an English-language radio talk show where he spoke frankly about romance and the anxieties of youth. The talk show led to a deal with Motorola; Ballen became “the voice” for some cell-phone services. Next he started a popular TV travel program, striking an innovative deal with one of Shanghai’s leading stations that allowed him to sell advertising and keep the lion’s share of the take.<\/p>\n

Andrew Ballen is now a star in China. He moves around the country with two Chinese assistants, one of them on hand simply to answer his mobile phone. The endorsement deals keep coming; even his old employer, the language school, pays him more than $1,000 a month to be a pitchman. He is frequently stopped on the street by Chinese who want to shake his hand or buy him a beer.<\/p>\n

On a recent Friday, after staying up all night at the hip-hop club, Ballen snatches a few hours of sleep, then goes into a studio to do a radio commercial. Next he grabs a late breakfast and gulps down two cups of coffee before locking himself away to write a script for his next TV episode. Between paragraphs, he ponders how someone who never ran a business in the United States could launch so many, so quickly, in a country he still barely comprehends. “I have nothing,” he says, “but my imagination.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was reading an article in Business 2.0 about Americans who are making it big in China when I noticed a picture of a brotha with two Chinese girls next to him. (reminds me of that line from Digital Undergrounds ‘Sex Packets’, but I digress…) So of course I skipped right to that part of… Continue reading Move to China, Become a Rapper & Make Millions!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,6,11],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":22,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/06\/25\/rise_of_international_basketball_talent\/","url_meta":{"origin":478,"position":0},"title":"Rise of International Basketball Talent","date":"June 25, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"This is sort of a follow-up to my earlier basketball post about the foreign invasion of basketball players. REAL Sports With Bryant Gumbel had an excellent report on international basketball this week. (The show will be rebroadcast a few more times if you missed it.) Here's a synopsis of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Race"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":154,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/08\/14\/plastic_surgery_boom_in_asia\/","url_meta":{"origin":478,"position":1},"title":"Plastic Surgery Boom in Asia","date":"August 14, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Time Asia has a very interesting article about the surge in plastic surgery in Asia. One of the more interesting aspects of all this surgery is that people are trying to look more Caucasian: The culturally loaded issue today is the number of Asians looking to remake themselves to look\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Current Events"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":283,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/02\/28\/countries_ive_visited\/","url_meta":{"origin":478,"position":2},"title":"Countries I’ve Visited","date":"February 28, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"create your own visited country map or write about it on the open travel guide This one is really sad. I've only visited 5 countries: USA, Canada, Mexico, Bahamas and Brasil. Some other places I'd like to visit: Ghana, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Spain, Portugal, Cuba once it's legal of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Just for Fun"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tradermike.net\/movethecrowd\/images\/worldmap.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":357,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/14\/ladies_dont_let_this_happen_to_you\/","url_meta":{"origin":478,"position":3},"title":"Ladies, Don’t Let This Happen to You","date":"July 14, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"An all too common wardrobe malfunction","rel":"","context":"In "Just for Fun"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":410,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/06\/americans_flock_to_canadas_immigration_web_site\/","url_meta":{"origin":478,"position":4},"title":"Americans Flock to Canada’s Immigration Web Site","date":"November 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Looks like I'm not the only one who's been thinking about breaking the hell out. But Canada is the wrong drection -- fools need to head towards (around) the equator. OTTAWA (Reuters) - The number of U.S. citizens visiting Canada's main immigration Web site has shot up six-fold as Americans\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Current Events"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":23,"url":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/2003\/06\/25\/affirmative_action_response\/","url_meta":{"origin":478,"position":5},"title":"Affirmative Action Response","date":"June 25, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Rob, the BusinessPundit, correctly states that the government should neither restrain nor aid the American people in their pursuits. (By the way, he used a quote from Thomas Jefferson, of all people, to make that point.) But he fails to even mention the centuries of free labor through slavery that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Current Events"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelseneadza.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}