Fusing Western hip hop with Taiwanese traditional music, Kou Chou Ching are vocalists Fan Chiang (back left), fishLIN (back, second from left), instrumentalists Achino (squatting), and Yobo (third from left), and turntablist DJ j.little (fourth from left). (courtesy of Kou Chou Ching)

A group of young men clad in baseball caps and oversized T-shirts bob around excit-edly on stage, rapping in a mix of Taiwanese and Hakka, denouncing shoddy workmanship that threatens everyday people; mixed with their Western hip-hop rhythms lie elements of traditional songs, with occasional mournful strains of suona--Chinese oboe--music drifting out across the audience. The band's music is a unique mixture of traditional, modern, local, and foreign.

This is Kou Chou Ching, and it is one of those rare animals in the Taiwanese popular music scene--a hip hop group. Most of their tracks incorporate elements of traditional music, and their lyrics skewer current events to a rapturous response. They are icons for Taiwan's local brand of hip hop.

Formed in 2003, Kou Chou Ching is led by fishLIN and Fan Chiang; offstage the two are as quick of mind and word as their beats onstage, and while they may dress in a very Western fashion, they're still traditionalists at heart.

The two, who share writing and lyrical duties, first met during a freestyle rap battle on a basketball court on Taipei's Civic Boulevard. Freestyle battles are exercises in unrestrained improvisational creativity, like the scenes in Eminem's semi-autobiographical film 8 Mile. Generally a DJ first lays down a beat, and then the two competitors clash lyrical swords, occasionally engaging in themed "battles" to sharpen their rapping skills.

These two strangers soon realized they shared similar attitudes to music and decided to form a band, calling it Kou Chou Ching. The name is a pun: on the face of it, it is a reference to the agricultural proverb "plough in spring, weed in summer, harvest in autumn, store in winter," where the "harvest in autumn" in Mandarin is qiuqin. The boys chose to romanize this as "chou ching," adding the word "kou" (kao) in reference to the hacking action involved in harvesting rice, making their band name a paean to the hard work of farmers.

But when pronounced in Taiwanese, the name quickly drops its cultured pretensions, sounding like a particularly vulgar slang term for masturbation. In this name Fan Chiang and fishLIN found a perfect representation of their music's combination of seriousness and irreverence.

When the band first formed, Fan Chiang and fishLIN were the only two members. Last year they added three new members--DJ j.little, who handles the computers and is the band's turntablist, and Achino and Yobo, who play traditional Chinese instruments--but they only perform as a five-man band for bigger, more formal gigs.