Asian Americans and hip-hop

BY OLIVER WANG

Asian American performers began emerging in the early 1990s, especially at college and community events. Politically-charged Asian American rap groups like the Asiatic Apostles (Davis, Calif.), Yellow Peril (New Jersey), and the Seoul Brothers (Seattle) started making small waves; while in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, squads of mostly Filipino American DJs and dancers were gaining notoriety.

In more recent years, more groups have started to come out on the popular front, including L.A.'s Key Kool and DJ Rhettmatic, a Japanese American/Filipino American duo who released an independent album in 1995, Kosmonautz. But until the past month, there had been little else heard from Asian American groups.

Yet, in what seems serendipity, the latter part of 1998 has seen the release of hip-hop-influenced albums by three Asian American artists, each representing a very different set of aesthetic and geographical perspectives. While it may be an overstatement to call it a renaissance, the sudden appearance of albums from Philadelphia's Mountain Brothers, New York's Jamez and San Francisco's DJ Q-Bert marks an extraordinary step in Asian American hip-hop's coming of age.

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Of the three, the Chinese American trio of Chops, Peril and Styles, better known as the Mountain Brothers, are the most likely to break through into the mainstream rap world. Combining fluid and intelligent rhymes with jazz-influenced beats, the Mountain Brothers have suffered through the difficult trials of the rap industry and have survived to tell about it.

Steve Wei (Styles), Scott Jung (Chops) and Christopher Wong (Peril) formed the Mountain Brothers in 1991, while Styles and Chops were both students at Penn State University. The three had a watershed year in 1996 with the release of an independent EP single, winning a national rapping contest for Sprite and being signed to the Ruffhouse label, home to the Fugees and Cypress Hill. They were the first Chinese American rap group ever signed to a major industry contract, but after a protracted process with Ruffhouse, the label released the group early this year with only a promotional single to show for its trouble. Undaunted, the Mountain Brothers decided to independently produce their new record.

To be released this month, Self, Vol. 1 is an impressive album that showcases the collective strengths of the group. Chops provides the music, working hard to produce original beats without sampling. He creates an "organic" sound for the album, mixing warm keyboard chords and basslines with crisp drum work. Lyrically, each of the three MCs, or rappers, has their own personality, but each excels at rapid rhyme flows and clever metaphors-qualities that have already garnered the group respect in the underground, especially in songs like "Paperchase" and "Days of Being Dumb."

As children of a hip-hop generation, the group shows a keen awareness of rap's strengths and weaknesses, and on the wonderfully tongue-in-cheek "Brand Names," they attack rap's materialist obsession with wit and charm. Spreading word of their music across the Internet and through independent distribution channels, the Mountain Brothers are only now starting to tap their own potential.

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An L.A.-transplant who now calls home the heavily Asian American neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, Jamez (James Chang) reflects the growing international identity of hip-hop evident in his recently-released full-length album Z-Bonics, which showcases his unique fusion of Korean music with hip-hop aesthetics.

Dubbing his efforts as part of an "Azian/Pacific Renaissance," Jamez rhymes from a conscious perspective, seeing hip-hop as a fundamental means of communicating across generations and cultures. Not unlike the nascent Asian American rappers of the early '90s, Jamez wields hip-hop as a tool for social and political empowerment, embedding his songs with social commentary rarely found into today's parties-and-pistols monotony. Songs like "Day in the Life" and "7-Train" root themselves in the realities of class and race that arise in daily urban life.

Jamez's most unique contribution is his fusion of traditional Korean musical practices, like Poongmul drumming, with beats to create a style of hip-hop that he hopes will educate Korean American youths about their heritage. "So many of us are influenced by Western standards of beauty, speech and music. I want to expose Asian Americans to their rich legacy of music. Our beat of life," Jamez says.

In recognizing hip-hop as a growing universal language among American youths of all cultures, Jamez uses his music as a way of creating new identities for young Asian Americans.

Q-Bert (Robert Quitevis) is perhaps the most recognized and respected Asian American rap artist to date. But he's not a rapper-the only speaking he does is with his hands as a pioneer in the DJ-derived art form known as turntablism, a method of scratching vinyl that produces a completely new sound. Taking "skratching" to a new artistic level, DJ Q-Bert, and scores of other Filipino American DJs up and down the West Coast have revolutionized turntablism and are among the newly emerging aesthetic's main shapers.

Turntablism involves a range of practices-from unbelievable sound manipulation through hand-play alone, to extensive hunting for quirky samples to scratch and cut up, to amazing feats of team performance that reaches orchestral magnitude.

After a long wait, DJ Q-Bert has finally released his solo debut CD, Wave Twisters-the title is a play on how DJs twist soundwaves with precision wrist-action. Despite the relatively primitive equipment-turntables and mixers that haven't changed basic technological principles in more than 20 years-DJs like Q-Bert one are on the cutting edge of future music.

Wave Twisters might sound chaotic at the first listen, especially for untrained ears, but as each layer of sonic fabric is gradually peeled away, musical compositions of intricate complexity and inspired creativity emerge. The album is a manifestation of Q-Bert's own designs on the future of music. "Instead of just playing guitars and horns, there's more into it, because there's more sounds you can use with turntables. There's a whole universe that's yet to be discovered with turntables."

An often unspoken question centers on race and ethnicity. Traditionally, hip-hop culture has seen strictly through the black-white lens of American race relations-the presumption being that blacks innovate and whites imitate. The inclusion of Latino performer, and now Asian American artists in that community serves to complicate matters.

Yet it also points to the amazing multicultural and international appeal of hip-hop to youths of various ethnic groups. Most Asian American artists are quick to acknowledge that hip-hop stems from an African American tradition. At the same time, they also believe that they are contributing to hip-hop's expansion and evolution in ways that don't exploit or betray the heritage or spirit of the movement.

The relation these artists have to the larger Asian American community is also complicated. Q-Bert, for example, headlined at the 1997 San Francisco Asian American Jazz Festival, but he rarely talks about his ethnicity -or its relation to his artistry-in interviews. In some ways, calling his crew the Invisibl Skratch Piklz has some unintended irony since the fact that most of the Piklzes are Filipino American is rarely mentioned at all-either by themselves or press coverage.

Especially as so-called "electronica" expands into the mainstream pop world, turntablists are ensuring that their contributions remain heard. While Asian American rappers still face an uphill battle among skeptical label execs and audiences, Asian American DJs have made their mark and are now accepted as unquestioned pioneers who are sure to be a continuing force as turntablism evolves.

On the other side of the spectrum, Jamez's work comes out of a desire to incorporate a Korean American identity into hip-hop aesthetics. While he doesn't want to limit his audience to just Korean American youths, his concepts of an Azian/Pacific Renaissance and "Azian" hip-hop are explicit reflections of his artistic and political perspectives. Perhaps unintentionally, Jamez continues a tradition of music "made for, by and about" Asian Americans that pioneering folk-jazz groups like A Grain of Sand and Hiroshima began more than 20 years ago.

The Mountain Brothers, while not explicit with their identity politics, acknowledge its importance in shaping the group's perspectives. Here's how Styles puts it: "If people dig our music first and then find out that we're Asian, it's like they get blown away by that because it's so unexpected and end up digging us even more. That's some of the kind of phenomenon that we want to create."

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