MC Jin, re-branded
MC Jin is back on track with his music - and with a strong devotion to God, he tells Lee Wing-sze
"I'm brand new, I'm brand new," Jin Au-yeung, better known by his stage name MC Jin, proclaims repeatedly on the track featured on his latest English EP of the same name. "Guess what? Even if you don't know me, all you need to know is that I ain't the old me and tomorrow is a brand new day. As long as I got God, everything's OK."
The rapper, born in Miami to parents from Hong Kong, is famed for winning seven consecutive freestyle battles on the American TV network BET's programme. But the previously rough-edged rapper responsible for tracks such as has turned over a new leaf since he became a born-again Christian.
"The type of change and transformation that takes place in a person when God's love and grace is involved can be hard to explain verbally in a sentence or even in a paragraph," he says during filming for a new project in San Jose, California. "2 Corinthians 5:17 in the Bible illustrates this transformation: 'If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come'."
The EP, which topped the local iTunes hip hop chart on its release a couple of months ago, is the rapper's first English-language release in six years. Jin wrote on his blog that the EP, recorded in New York in early 2011, contained six songs not just about the changes he went through in the past few years, but also his devotion to God. And there is a track dedicated to his wife, who gave birth to their first child, a boy, last June.
The EP from the 30-year-old comes after several free downloads such as and , which also contain Christian messages. But Jin's change from gangsta rap to what many hip hop fans consider "Christian rap" has confused many followers who had enjoyed watching him spit out strong language while fighting his opponents in freestyle rap battles back in his early days.
"It's understandable that people want to put things in a genre," Jin says of how his work is now labelled Christian rap. "But as long as the music is being heard by whoever God wants and that he is receiving the glory, nothing else matters."
Jin dreamed of becoming a rapper as a teenager and he shot to fame with those phenomenal performances on , which also landed him a deal with hip hop label Ruff Ryders in 2002. He played a mechanic in street racing film in 2003, before putting out his debut English album, in 2004. Expectations for the album were high, but its singles and did not receive much airplay and record sales were disappointing, with only about 19,000 copies sold in the first week.
