Coachella’s ‘WAP’ Performance By Megan Thee Stallion Causes Headaches For Chinese Censors

A live stream of the rapper’s performance was illegally broadcast on the WeChat app.

Meghan Thee Stallion’s risqué Coachella 2022 performance wowed festival fans on Saturday (April 16), but was also a headache for censors in China.

The monitoring site What’s On Weibo noticed that Chinese social media and messaging app WeChat users have been live-streaming Coachella illegally, with Chinese censors trying to catch moments or performances that transgress China’s increasingly moralistic censorship rules. Unfortunately, Megan Thee Stallion’s performance of her hit song “WAP” proved the undoing of one poor WeChat censor who applied the black bar to videos.

The censor struggled to keep up with the dancers and failed to censor anything, thus the black bar whizzing left and right, all over the video. Adding to the censor’s nightmare were the lyrics to “WAP,” which WeChat users translated in the comments. In the comments, users also pushed back against the censors, claiming they should not treat them like children.

The lyrics to “Wet Ass Puxi” were also adapted by some wags, which refer to the district of Shanghai currently under a draconian lockdown because of an Omicron surge.

Coachella is also being livestreamed via WeChat. Apparently, this performance not only made censors sweat, everyone was also joking that they're singing a song about Shanghai Puxi District. #MeganTheeStallion #Shanghailockdown pic.twitter.com/2ltSqzFC9c
— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) April 17, 2022

Despite the fact that Coachella is not broadcast in China legally, resourceful social media users circumvent the countrywide firewall by using VPNs to stream big events illegally.