How Higher Brothers Brought Chinese Hip-Hop to the West
"We're just being ourselves, being authentic in our music, doing what we like, making the music that we want to make," said band member MaSiWei.
Chinese rap group Higher Brothers were named after an air-conditioning unit. In 2016, on a humid summer's day in Chengdu, Sichuan, the four friends—MaSiWei, 25, DZknow, 21, Psy. P, 23, and Melo, 23—were listening to beats in the studio when they looked up and saw the Haier Group logo, consisting of two ethnically diverse animated robot boys. The electrical brand's mascots, made famous through an accompanying 1995 Chinese cartoon where they travel the world exploring unknown cultures while saving humanity from natural disasters, remain one of the mainland's most iconic images today.
"We wanted to become as famous and worldwide like those Haier brothers," MaSiWei told . "We were inspired to write a song imagining that as our
