Shanghai Ning, crosscultural Asian/American hip-hop

BB reader Diana Huang says,

This bizarre sibling of American rap made up of English, Mandarin, and Shanghainese (Shanghai dialect of Mandarin, a.k.a. my hometown dialect) just blew me away. The sound is typically rap but the lyrics and topics have a very distinctive Chinese/Shanghainese spin. The lyrics are jammed with "trash" words in different languages. Topics are typically social commentaries such as the track named "Made in Shanghai" that takes a shot at the Chinese youth's blind infatuation with foreign pop cultures (Japanese, Korean) but also has a good amount of softer topics about unrequited or lost love. BBC has a good story about of the rapper named "Little Lion" — Link.

Link to Shanghai Ning website.
Update Boing Boing reader Tian adds news of another Shanghainese hiphop hybrid:

I posted a song by an unknown flight attendant for Eastern Air (Chinese airline) last Decemeber. She used Enimem's "Slim Shady" as the baseline.

Link

And Scott Deerwester says:

Just a quick comment on the Shanghai Ning posting – Shanghainese is no way, no how a "dialect of Mandarin". The formal name of the language is Wu, and it's spoken by about 7.5% of the people in China, according to the Ethnologue, and it's one of the thirteen or so major families of languages that people call "Chinese" (in addition to the 200 or so languages spoken in China that aren't called Chinese!). Even the term "dialect" is tricky, especially in China. There, as in many places, it's more a political term than a linguistic term.

Linguistically, the distinction between language and dialect is the degree of overlap – "mutual comprehensibility". The various Chinese languages are at least as different from each other as, say, French and Italian, or Dutch and German. But there's only one written Chinese language (which is basically Mandarin). When people who speak other Chinese languages read (or write) Chinese, many of the words that they write are completely different from the ones that they speak! Even more bizarre, this means that, while two literate speakers of different Chinese languages may not be able to understand each other at all, they can write to each other, each in his or her "own" language!