Exclusive Claymation Rap Video

Yours truly had been teaching at a university in central China for over a year. Up to that point in the city of 6 million I hadn’t found anyone musically creative, much less a hip-hop artist. In one of my classes I had given an assignment for the students to prepare a talk on their favorite films in English and this shy kid I’d had for a year now reported on ‘8 Mile.’ At the end of his presentation I asked if he could rap, he nodded and proceeded to spit Eminem’s quintessential ‘Lose Yourself.’ The whole class was blown away… as was I.

Afterwards I asked the student if he wrote his own lyrics. He said yes, but only in Mandarin. We began making tracks that very weekend. By the time I had to come back to America a few years later, we had an entire album’s worth.

So since I’ve been back, Rui MC (as he is now known) has graduated and in his last letter to me said he was working at a dead end job. The thought of him being stuck in obscure misery ate at me and even though we really only made those songs together for our own creative joy, I started thinking about how to get Rui’s name out there. Videos seem to get folks’ attention better than anything but as that we were separated by the Pacific I couldn’t see how we could pull that off. Then I just asked Rui, “Hey would you mind if we made you a clay person?”

And thus “Just sayin.'” It’s fitting because it was the first song we made together and even features a Sanxian—more-or-less a Chinese banjo I acquired to throw in the mix.