Abstract
No Chinese movie star’s name has been perpetuated for so long a time and with such great intensity as Bruce Lee. His bond with hip hop is prominent in his stardom and becomes a visible aspect in his obituary material. This chapter will explore how Lee and his hip-hop-propelled persona are recalled and represented in fan vids, an emergent user-generated cyber media, as an extension of earlier forms of fan-based memorial culture. By examining two fan vids from YouTube, Bruce Lee Tribute Video and Bruce Lee ‘Be Like Water’—A Tribute (40 Year Anniversary), the chapter will argue that fan vids work to sustain Lee’s hip hop connection, allowing him to appear in the global fan circuit as contemporary, compelling, and vibrant even though he has been dead for four decades.
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Notes
- 1.
While producing The Game of Death in 1973, Lee suddenly died from what his doctors officially announced as a ‘death by misadventure’, and autopsies showed his brain had swollen considerably due to cerebral edema.
- 2.
Accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqrivEdB8K4 [1 July 2014].
- 3.
Accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8o0Xk5LSAg [1 July 2014].
- 4.
BruceLee.Com is a website engineered by personal management of Lee since 2010. It is part of the system of production and circulation of ‘official’ star images and narratives.
- 5.
During the week of 16 May 1973, a handful of films, such as Fist of Fury (1972), Deep Thrust: The Hand of Death (1972), and Five Fingers of Death (1973) were ranked the top three on Variety’s box-office list. According to Desser (2000), this was a rare instance where a number of foreign films, starring non-white actors, were extremely well received at the US box office.
- 6.
This newspaper, the oldest African American newspaper in the United States, was founded in 1909 and continues to be published to this day, under the name, New York Amsterdam News.
- 7.
Coppa (2008) further corroborates her thesis by pointing out, journalist, Jake Coyle’s false assumption in an Associated Press article (‘The Best Fan-Made Music Videos on YouTube’, 15 January 2008) that fans who make fan music videos intend to use video to illustrate the music, rather than using the music to convey the story of the video.
- 8.
The Long Beach competition is an international karate and martial arts tournament held in Long Beach, California since August 1964.
- 9.
‘Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend’ (Longstreet, 1971).
- 10.
This point is made clear by Lee’s speech in Berton’s interview, heard in fan vid #2 after about one minute and twenty seconds. As Lee professes: ‘Styles tend to … err … separate men because they have their own doctrines, and then the doctrines became the gospel truth, you know? Then you cannot change, you know? And … but if you do not have style, we just say, here I am, you know, as … as a human being, how can I express myself, totally and completely. Now that way … you won’t create a style because style is a crystallisation, you know what I mean, that way is a process of continuing growth’ (The Pierre Berton Show, 1971).
- 11.
Mozez is a member of the successful British trip hop band called Zero7. Trip hop’s drum-based breakdown is similar to hip hop music.
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Lau, D.Ws. (2016). Rearticulating Bruce Lee and His ‘Hip Hop Fury’ in Fan-Made Videos. In: Bolton, L., Wright, J. (eds) Lasting Screen Stars. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40733-7_21
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