Participants of the Grant Road Follies, a senior cabaret dance troupe founded in San Francisco’s Chinatown, collaborated with rapper Jason Chu at the Lunar New Yr track “That Lunar Cheer.”

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Participants of the Grant Road Follies, a senior cabaret dance troupe founded in San Francisco’s Chinatown, collaborated with rapper Jason Chu at the Lunar New Yr track “That Lunar Cheer.”

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A cabaret dance troupe of elders from San Francisco’s Chinatown has launched a rap monitor and video celebrating ​the Lunar New Yr.

That Lunar Cheer, a collaboration between the Grant Avenue Follies and Los Angeles-based rapper Jason Chu, hippety-hops into the Yr of the Rabbit with requires meals, circle of relatives and amusing.

“We have now been via a pair difficult years and we need to want everyone a cheerful new yr in addition to ensuring that it’ll be a calm and wholesome new yr. That is essential to us,” Follies co-founder Cynthia Yee advised NPR. “We’ve customs that should be adopted, similar to cleansing the home earlier than New Yr’s Day to comb away all of the dangerous success and welcome the brand new.”

The video was once was once funded via the AARP, a nonprofit passion team specializing in problems affecting the ones over the age of fifty.

No strangers to hip-hop

The 12 individuals of the Follies, elderly between 61 and 87, may well be steeped in faucet dance and the songs of the Fifties and ’60s. However they’re no strangers to hip-hop.

That Lunar Cheer is the gang’s 3rd rap monitor so far. The Follies’ track protesting violence towards other people of Asian descent, Gai Mou Sou Rap (named after the rooster characteristic dusters that Chinese language folks historically use round the house, and likewise use to spank naughty kids), has garnered just about 90,000 perspectives on YouTube since debuting in Would possibly 2021.

Follies founder Yee mentioned she feels a connection to the hip-hop style.

“What higher technique to specific ourselves is thru poetry, which is a track with rap,” she mentioned.

Their willpower to the artwork shape inspired rapper Chu, who wrote That Lunar Cheer, and has a robust background in neighborhood activism in addition to tune.

“Those girls are robust and feisty and artistic,” Chu advised NPR. “Attending to collaborate with them is precisely the type of artwork I like making — one thing that highlights tradition and neighborhood in some way that is amusing and empowering.”

Yee added she hopes the track exemplifies the values of the Yr of the Rabbit: “Most commonly very quiet, very lovely, very fuzzy-wuzzy, and naturally all about having plenty of circle of relatives,” she mentioned. “The Yr of the Rabbit is ready multiplying the entirety, whether or not that is kids, grandchildren or cash.”