It was 1996 when the young poet Tugsjargal Munkherdene heard American hip-hop for the first time.

Four years earlier, Mongolia’s Soviet-aligned government had fallen, opening the country to a fresh wave of cultural imports. The easing of state censorship heralded a new era of free expression. It also meant that G-funk, boom bap and gangster rap soon arrived on the airwaves — including the track that made a lasting impression on the then-teenage Munkherdene: Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s “187 On an Undercover Cop.”

“I realized I could put my poems on a beat like them, and I started writing rap music,” he recalled in a video interview from his studio in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital.

Growing up in one of Ulaanbaatar’s impoverished ger districts, Munkherdene could empathize with the kind of urban hardship chronicled in the music he idolized. Comprised largely of semi-permanent tents (or gers, the Mongolian word for yurts), these sprawling outer-city…

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