White Sox strike for three extra-inning runs, hand Cleveland Indians 8-6 loss in doubleheader Game 1 - cleveland.com

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CLEVELAND, Ohio — Adam Eaton delivered the knockout blow with a two-run home run off James Karinchak in the eighth inning as the White Sox handed Cleveland a 8-6 loss in the first game of a doubleheader Monday at Progressive Field.

Jose Abreu’s RBI sacrifice fly in the eighth scored automatic runner Billy Hamilton with the go-ahead run for Chicago. The Indians scored their automatic runner, Harold Ramirez on a double-play grounder by Josh Naylor in the bottom of the eighth.

The loss spoiled a record-setting start by Indians righty Triston McKenzie, and a two-homer game by Cesar Hernandez. McKenzie locked in after a rough second inning and found his command to the tune of 10 strikeouts and just four hits allowed in his longest outing of the year.

Indians manager Terry Francona said McKenzie was undaunted when he issued a walk or gave up a hit, coming back with some of his best stuff after a misstep.

“He missed some bats, he threw a good curveball, he attacked with a fastball and got it by their barrel for the most part,” Francona said. “What we’re seeing is when he does have a walk, he doesn’t turn it into two or three. He’s gathering himself and he’s coming back and using his best stuff. That’s a big step for him.”

McKenzie struck out Jake Lamb looking in the third and ended the inning by whiffing Abreu. That began a stretch of eight straight punchouts by the right-hander that set a club record and was one short of the American League mark (9) held by Detroit’s Doug Fister.

McKenzie broke Cleveland’s seven-year-old record set by Corey Kluber against the White Sox on May 4, 2014 when he fanned Lamb again leading off the sixth. Yoan Moncada followed with a single to right that ended McKenzie’s day after a season-high 5 1/3 innings.

McKenzie said he found success because he worked ahead of hitters in the count.

“My fastball was working up in the zone, curveball down, my slider worked, too,” McKenzie said. “It was just kind of keeping them guessing and I credit a lot of that to René (Rivera).”

Bryan Shaw relieved McKenzie and walked a pair as Moncada scored on an RBI fielder’s choice by Yermin Mercedes that put Chicago in front, 5-4. But the Indians answered in the bottom of the sixth, when Josh Naylor singled and moved to third on a base hit by Rivera. Bradley Zimmer legged out an infield hit with two out as Naylor scored the tying run.

Francona said Naylor stayed on the ball and went the other way against White Sox starter Carlos Rodon. Both of his singles were over shortstop Anderson’s head. But with two runners on base in the eighth against Chicago lefty Aaron Bummer, Naylor pulled the ball on the ground and into a double play.

“That’s how you face a lefty,” Francona said. “In his last at-bat off Bummer, he lined the ball down the line, which was great. Then he got a little jumpy and pulled the slider.”

The Indians wasted little time jumping all over Rodon in the first. Back-to-back home runs by Cesar Hernandez and Amed Rosario staked McKenzie to a 2-0 lead and marked the first time Indians hitters went deep to start a game since Francisco Lindor and Michael Brantley did so in September of 2018. Hernandez’s leadoff home run was his third of the season and 16th of his career. He blasted his second homer of the game off Rodon on the first pitch he saw in the third, marking his first career multi-home run game.

But McKenzie gave the early lead right back in a four-run Chicago second. The White Sox got a one-out walk by Mercedes and three straight hits, including a bases-loaded double by Zack Collins.

Chicago added a fourth run when Anderson, who had walked, got caught in a rundown between first and second that allowed Collins to score from third.

Cleveland cut the White Sox lead to a run in the fourth when Naylor singled with two out and scored on Yu Chang’s RBI double to right center.

Next: Game 2 of today’s doubleheader is set to begin at 6:35 p.m. with Indians righty Cal Quantrill (0-1, 2.03) on the mound. The White Sox will stat right-hander Jimmy Lambert (0-0, 0.00). The game will air on WTAM 1100 AM, WMMS 100.7 FM, Bally Sports Great Lakes and the Indians Radio Network.

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The video game industry spoke up against anti-Asian violence. Some went further. - The Washington Post

In March, after a man in Georgia killed eight people at three spas, six of them Asian women, dozens of gaming companies responded with statements of solidarity with the Asian community. Some went further and made donations to charities and hosted internal employee support events.

The recent responses by companies in the video game industry mirror moves made in other industries, which have begun to address politics and social justice in their public relations and marketing. Some anonymous employees at video game companies who spoke with The Washington Post said they saw reflections of how companies had reacted to the murder of George Floyd last year. Public support for the Black Lives Matter movement helped companies respond faster to anti-Asian violence.

After recent waves of anti-Asian violence and racism, many gaming companies spoke out, and some planned events around May, which is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month.

Bandai Namco, a Japanese company with branches in the U.S. and Europe, was one of the first companies to respond with a statement. Denny Chiu, Bandai’s director of communications, said that the company is diverse and the recent news “left us all shocked, dismayed, and saddened.”

“The statement we shared on our social media channels was intended to offer support to the AAPI community, our players, and our employees,” Chiu said. “We hope our statement inspires other game publishers and individuals alike to be aware of the plight being experienced by the AAPI community. Only by uniting and working together to fight racism and hate, can we stand a chance at building a better and brighter future for everyone.”

Bandai declined to say if it had donated to charity, thrown any events or changed any company or game policies beyond its initial statement.

For the month of May, Twitch said it placed Asian and Pacific Islander creators on its front page, on Times Square billboard ads and on social media. It also partnered with Lions Share, a community and weekly podcast featuring artists from Asia and the Asian diaspora, for the three-day Lion Awards held in late May. The Lion Awards drew in 477,000 to 829,000 views a day, featuring Twitch streamers and various Asian celebrities.

The Lion Awards set an ambitious goal of raising $50,000 for the Hate is a Virus nonprofit, and so far has raised about $2,000. Cathleen Cher, co-founder of the Lion Awards, said they still have a few days left to the end of the month, and have asked a few companies to contribute as well.

With the Lion Awards, Cher said her organization was trying to strike more of a positive note after several months of holding tough conversations about race and violence.

“[I was] asked to do quite a lot this month in terms of diversity and inclusion initiatives within my company and I was on a podcast speaking about violence against Asian women, and things like that,” Cher said. “We can talk all day about all of these issues and how we can improve, but it is quite emotionally exhausting for everyone at a certain point. Being able to celebrate how far we’ve come and how much talent exists in our community is also really important to do in times like these, when there is a lot of pain and suffering.”

In The Post, Hanke said Niantic is donating $1 million in total to organizations including Stop AAPI Hate, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, internal and external educational programs to “help people learn the history of communities of color in the U.S.” and more. Part of the funds will also go toward matching employee donations that go toward AAPI support organizations.

Some companies have pledged to donate as well, but had fewer details to share.

The Pokémon Company, a Japanese company which has branches in the U.K. and the U.S., said on March 26 that it was donating $200,000 in total to “organizations working to bring awareness to this issue.” The money went to Stop AAPI Hate, the nonprofit legal aid group Asian American Advancing Justice and the U.K.-based community interest company Southeast and East Asian Centre.

Sony, Bungie and Devolver Digital all publicly announced they would make donations, but Sony and Bungie did not respond to questions about the timing and amount of their donations. Devolver declined to comment on how much it donated to Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta and Red Canary Song. WarnerMedia, which owns Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, donated a total of $329,500 to organizations including the Asian American Chamber of Commerce and Asians Americans Advancing Justice, but did not share a breakdown of how individual game studios contributed.

An Electronic Arts employee, who is Asian American, said that when they saw anti-Asian racist attacks in the news, they “went through the range of emotions” before deciding they needed to take some action. An Asian-American employee at Twitch expressed similar sentiments.

“When the Atlanta shooting happened, that really affected me in a way that I hadn’t anticipated,” they said, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media. “I tend to be a pretty tough person. It’s hard to make me cry. But I felt so paralyzed after that happened … my grandmother lives in Chinatown. It was a great concern to me.”

Both employees chose to get more involved in company initiatives.

“We’ve done quite a few internal events for employees, we’ve hosted numerous healing circles, created various safe spaces for our communities to speak up and share the lived experiences,” said the EA employee, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media. “We even created a virtual vigil, which was to honor the victims and recent deaths within the Asian communities, and that was led by our executive team.”

Electronic Arts donated $400,000 to organizations committed to stopping hate, including the nonprofit Ascend Impact Fund, dedicated to raising awareness of “the history and prevalence of anti-Asian racism,” Chief People Officer Mala Singh said to The Post in a statement. EA joined Ascend as a repeat donor.

Singh said that EA is also offering to match employees’ donations to charitable organizations supporting India’s covid-19 health crisis.

“It isn’t just simply donating capital and dollars but also donating time, skills within our workforce and resources,” the anonymous EA employee added. “EA absolutely isn’t perfect, but EA has taken a real ‘learn as we go’ mind-set. From the C suite to the senior leaders to the individual contributors, we’ve all taken an approach where we’re all learning, staying open, and we’re doing everything we can to educate each other.”

“There’s still a long road ahead, but we understand the responsibility that we have,” they said.

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NFCA and USA Softball virtual awards presentation moved to 8 pm ET - NFCA Home Plate

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LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The NFCA and USA Softball virtual awards ceremony has been moved to 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT on Tuesday, June 1. Co-hosted by the two partners, the NFCA/Schutt Sports DI Freshman of the Year and the USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year will be announced live on NFCA.org.

The top three finalists for the NFCA – Clemson’s Valerie Cagle and the Oklahoma duo of Jayda Coleman and Tiare Jennings - and USA Softball – Oklahoma’s Jocelyn Alo, UCLA’s Rachel Garcia and Washington’s Gabbie Plain - will also be recognized. Guest speakers will include 2016 NFCA/Schutt Sports DI Freshman of the Year, Amanda Lorenz and two-time (2012, 2013) USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year, Keilani Ricketts.

Click HERE for Virtual Presentation.

The original start time for the ceremony was 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT.

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White Sox 8, Cleveland 6 (8 Innings): Offense finally supports Carlos Rodón - Sox Machine

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In his last two starts, Carlos Rodon was masterful, only allowing one run on three hits with 23 strikeouts to zero walks. Yet, the White Sox lost both games because the offense failed to generate a single run of support. 

On a day that Rodon didn’t have his best stuff is when the offense backed him up. Zack Collins and Adam Eaton had clutch hits as the White Sox won Game 1 of the doubleheader in extras, 8-6. 

Cesar Hernandez gave Rodon a tough time early. On the very first pitch, Hernandez took Rodon deep for his seventh home run of 2021. Then Amed Rosario, on a 1-1 pitch, hit his third homer of the season, and quickly the White sox were down 2-0. 

That Cleveland lead didn’t last long. In the top half of the second inning, the White Sox put up four runs thanks to Zack Collins. Yermin Mercedes walked and advanced to third base off of Adam Eaton’s double to right field. Garcia loaded the bases with an infield single. Ahead 2-0 in the count, Collins pulled a fastball down the right-field line just inside first base. Mercedes and Eaton easily scored, and then Hernandez fumbled the relay throw allowing Garcia to cross home plate. 

Up 3-2, Collins advanced to third base on Nick Madrigal’s ground out and would score thanks to Tim Anderson. After walking against Triston McKenzie, Anderson got caught off guard on a pick-off attempt. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, Anderson generated enough attention from Cleveland’s infielders, getting himself in a rundown. Collins dashed home plate, and Anderson bought just enough time for his teammate to score before tagging out. 

Despite having a 4-2 lead, Rodon couldn’t hold it. Hernandez hit his second home run in the third inning, his first career multi-home run game. In the fourth inning, Yu Chang hit a two-out double to plate Josh Naylor tying the game at 4-4. During this stretch, the White Sox hitters went into strikeout mode as McKenzie, at one point, punched out eight straight batters. That strikeout streak sets a new franchise record for Cleveland, once held by Corey Kluber, who had seven consecutive strikeouts in a game. 

Yoan Moncada had other ideas leading off the sixth inning by snapping the strikeout streak with a single to right field. Manager Terry Francona pulled McKenzie, who recovered nicely after allowing the crooked number in the second inning. Bryan Shaw came in relief and threw a wild pitch which Moncada made a good jump on to reach second base. After another wild pitch and walking Jose Abreu, Shaw was in a jam with runners on the corners. 

Next was Yermin Mercedes. After fouling off very hittable cutters in the strike zone, Mercedes was in his defensive mode on a full count. Manager Tony La Russa elected to have Abreu run on the pitch. Mercedes got jammed on an inside corner and only mustered a slow grounder to Hernandez at second base. A scoop and toss in attempting a double play, the lob from Hernandez hit Abreu in the back as he slid into second base. Without putting the runner in motion, Mercedes would probably have hit into an inning-ending double play. Instead, Moncada scored the go-ahead run, and the White Sox were still in business with runners on first and second. 

Leury Garcia walked to load the bases setting the stage once again for Collins. Instead of another extra-base hit to add more cushion for Rodon, Collins struck out on a foul tip ending the threat. 

Even though McKenzie left the game in line for the loss, it ended up being a no-decision, thanks to Bradley Zimmer. With a low pitch count, La Russa opted to have Rodon continue through the sixth inning. Naylor once again singled off Rodon, but Cleveland looked at two outs thanks to strikeouts against Chang and Owen Miller. 

Francona put Naylor into motion on a 1-1 pitch to Rene Rivera, who pulled a single to left field. Naylor reached third base, and it was runners on the corners for Cleveland. Next was Zimmer, who hit a soft grounder to Anderson at short. Charging in on the grounder, Anderson didn’t get a good grip on the ball in time to throw out the speedy Zimmer. Naylor scored from third base, and once again, the White Sox lead was erased. 

Facing Hernandez for the fourth time, Rodon didn’t pull any punches throwing a 99-mph fastball by for the inning-ending strikeout. The final line for Rodon was 6 IP 9 H 5 ER 1 BB 8 K, which for his 2021 standards was not great. 

Neither team scored in the seventh inning as Codi Heuer had Abreu pull off a nifty double play. Rosario started the inning with a single, and next was Jose Ramirez. Well-known for his dramatic hits against the White Sox in high leverage situations, all Ramirez could muster was a grounder hit towards Abreu. The White Sox first baseman touched first base and made a solid throw to Anderson, who tagged out Rosario. Heuer struck Harold Ramirez out, sending the game into extras. 

Billy Hamilton punched out to end the seventh for the White Sox and was the runner on second base to start extras. After Moncada struck out against Karinchak, Hamilton proceeded to take very aggressive leads off second base. Despite numerous looks back to the bag, Karinchak never came off the mound or made a pick-off attempt. Hamilton eventually figured out Karinchak’s timing and swiped third base. 

Stealing third base ended up being a smart play. Leading the league in RBIs, Abreu once again found a way to put the ball in play, hitting a sacrifice fly. Now the Sox were ahead 6-5, and Karinchak’s command slipped. After walking Mercedes on five pitches, Karinchak attempted to get a 95-mph heater by Eaton. Instead, Eaton hit a laser of a line drive that carried out for a two-run homer. 

Ahead 8-5, La Russa picked Aaron Bummer for the save attempt and once again had trouble with his command. Instead of a complete meltdown, Bummer was able to recover. Naylor grounded into a 5-4-3 double play that Cleveland scored a run to make it 8-6, but it also cleared the bases. Bummer picked up his first save of the season by throwing three straight sliders to Chang, who struck out swinging.

Game Notes: 

• Adam Eaton went 2-for-4 with a double and home run. 
• Jose Abreu was 0-for-2 with a sac fly and walk. 
• Leury Garcia had a multi-hit day going 2-for-3. 
• It’s the White Sox first extra-innings win of 2021. 

Record: 33-20 | Box Score | StatCast

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Texas Tech Named No. 8 National Seed, Opens with Army - Texas Tech Red Raiders - TexasTech.com

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LUBBOCK, Texas – For the fourth time in five years, the Texas Tech baseball team has been named a top-8 national seed with a No. 8 selection and a matchup with Army on Friday at 11 a.m. at Dan Law Field at Rip Griffin Park, the NCAA Selection Committee announced today.
 
The Red Raiders will also host UCLA and North Carolina, who will face off at 6 p.m. (CT) in the first day of NCAA Regional action. Tech's opener against Army will air on ESNPU, and the full Lubbock Regional will be streamed on ESPN3 and the ESPN app. Each Tech game can also be heard on the Texas Tech Sports Network on 97.3 FM, the Double T 97.3 app, the TuneIn app and at TexasTech.com.
 
A top-10 team for the majority of the season, the Red Raiders (36-15) were one of 16 regional hosts selected on Sunday night by the by the NCAA baseball selection committee. Texas Tech is the only team in the country hosting an NCAA Regional for the fifth straight tournament. It marks the first time in school history Tech has hosted five-consecutive years, and the eighth overall. The Red Raiders have played regional action in Lubbock in 1996, 1997, 1999, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021.
 
This year marks the 15th overall berth in an NCAA Regional for Texas Tech. It is the fifth straight postseason Tech has been named a national seed, and the fourth time to earn a top-8 position. The Red Raiders were the No. 5 national seed in 2016 and 2017, and the No. 8 national seed in 2019 and 2021. Tech was also slotted as the No. 9 seed in 2018.
 
For the second straight regional, the Red Raiders will open up against the Black Knights of Army West Point. Friday will mark the 3^rd overall meeting between the two teams. Tech defeated Army, 11-2, in the 2019 Lubbock Regional to begin its run to the College World Series.  Army (28-23) has won three Patriot League titles in the last four seasons.  
 
Both coasts are represented with the No. 2 and No. 3 seeds in the Lubbock Regional. UCLA (35-18) heads to Lubbock as the No. 2 seed following a fourth-place finish in the PAC-12 after they were slotted as the preseason No. 3 club in the nation to start the year. Tech is 1-0 all-time against the Bruins with the only other meeting coming in 1999. Meanwhile, the Red Raiders have faced North Carolina (27-25) twice in its history, most recently in the 1998 Coral Gables Regional, taking a 6-2 win in the first round.
 
Season Ticket holders and Red Raider club members may request tickets online at TexasTech.com and have until Tuesday, June 1, at 5 p.m., to request all-session tickets to the regional. The Texas Tech Athletics Ticket Office will be open on Monday, May 31, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. to assist fans.
 
Tech is offering only all-session passes at this time. If seats remain following the season ticket holder/Red Raider Club priority request period, all remaining all-session tickets will go on sale to the general public on Wednesday, June 2, at 8:30 a.m.
 
Season ticket holders/Red Raider Club members who held reserved parking for the 2021 season are encouraged to hold on to those passes as they will be valid throughout the postseason. Tech will also offer complimentary parking in the commuter lots located near Dan Law Field at Rip Griffin Park similar to the regular season.
 
In addition, Tech has held 300 complimentary seats for students. Ticket information will be emailed to students on Tuesday. Only students who paid the athletic fee in the spring semester are eligible for the student tickets.
 
For the latest on Texas Tech Baseball follow @TTU_Baseball on Twitter.

The road begins right here in Lubbock.

??#WreckEm?? pic.twitter.com/3omlmICDkF

— Texas Tech Baseball (@TTU_Baseball) May 31, 2021

 

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3 Big 12 Teams Among Top 8 Seeds in NCAA Baseball Tournament - NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

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3 Big 12 Teams Among Top 8 Seeds in NCAA Baseball Tournament

The Regional round begins Friday

Published 2 hours ago • Updated 2 hours ago

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Three Big 12 schools are among the top eight national seeds in the NCAA Baseball Tournament. The 64-team field was announced Monday.

No. 2 Texas, No. 6 TCU and No. 8 Texas Tech will all host regionals starting Friday and host again in the super regionals if they advance.

Download our NBC DFW mobile app for Apple or Android to get alerts for local breaking news and weather.

Texas (42-15, 17-7) reached the NCAA Baseball Tournament for a record 60th time. Arizona State, Fairfield and Southern will play in the Austin regional.

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TCU (40-17, 17-7) won the Big 12 Conference tournament Sunday night, defeating Oklahoma State 10-7. The Fort Worth regional will include Oregon State, Dallas Baptist and McNeese State.

Texas Tech (36-15, 14-10) will host UCLA, North Carolina and Army in Lubbock. The Red Raiders feature Big 12 Player of the Year Jace Jung, the younger brother of Texas Rangers prospect Josh Jung.

Oklahoma State was the Big 12's only other team to earn a tournament berth. The Cowboys will play in the Tucson Regional, hosted by Arizona.

Baylor would be the first team to be a replacement if a team cannot play due to COVID-19 health and safety protocols.

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Invitation to Ferratum Oyj's Capital Markets Day on 8 June 2021 - GlobeNewswire

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Invitation to Ferratum Oyj’s Capital Markets Day on 8 June 2021

Helsinki, 31 May 2021 – Ferratum Oyj (ISIN: FI4000106299, WKN: A1W9NS) ("Ferratum" or the "Group") invites financial analysts, institutional and retail investors to a Capital Markets Day, to be held virtually, on Tuesday, 8 June 2021 at 14:00 CET.

During the event, top management will provide an update on the Group’s strategic ambitions, including the new brand and tribes, and on the Group’s financial targets.

The program and link to the webcast of the event is available on the Group’s website https://ift.tt/3wQ4XPV.

Participants will have an opportunity to ask questions after the presentations. The company will publish a recording of the presentations after the event.

About Ferratum Group:
Ferratum Group is an international provider of mobile banking and digital consumer and small business loans, distributed and managed by mobile devices. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Ferratum has expanded to operate in 19 countries across Europe, Africa, South and North America, Australia and Asia.

As a pioneer in digital and mobile financial services technology, Ferratum is at the forefront of the digital banking revolution. Ferratum has approximately 480,000 active customers that have an open Mobile Bank or Wallet account or an active loan balance in the last 12 months (as at 31 March 2021).

Ferratum Group is listed on the Prime Standard of Frankfurt Stock Exchange under symbol 'FRU.' For more information, visit www.ferratumgroup.com.

Contacts:

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What Is Asian American Music, Really? - Pitchfork

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What Is Asian American Music, Really?

Seeking more than representation, a critic tries to make sense of a fragmented, disparate musical tradition

By Cat Zhang

May 31, 2021

Graphic by Drew Litowitz. From left: Karen O (photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images), No-No Boy’s Julian Saporiti (provided), Vijay Iyer (Ebru Yildiz), Chris Iijima and Nobuko Miyamoto (Bob Hsiang), Yaeji (James Emmerman), Arooj Aftab (Soichiro Suizu), United Front (courtesy of Anthony Brown), and Mitski (Scott Dudelson/WireImage/Getty Images)

The weekend that six Asian women were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, I gathered with hundreds of strangers at a rally in Chinatown, weeping silently as two dogs with “Stop Hating” signs around their necks cluelessly wagged their tails next to me. I’d been to plenty of similar events, but none that felt this viscerally personal, and I was embarrassed to be standing there, glasses blurring, in such open need of solace. I wondered what it would have been like, over 50 years ago, to see the concept of “Asian America” as the flutter of something exciting and new. Roused by the rebellions of the sixties—the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, anti-Vietnam protests—some people of Asian descent made the conscious decision to free themselves of the marker “Oriental” and embrace a prouder, more unified political identity. “Asian American” broadcast not just what they were, but what they stood for. Following the lead of the Black Arts Movement, Asian American activists expanded their energy into artistic avenues, establishing their own cultural institutions and aesthetic priorities. They wrote poems, staged plays, choreographed dances—and, of course, they made music.

At the rally, I couldn’t imagine what songs we’d use to voice our protest in the future—and whether there was a corpus of music somewhere out there that could adequately reveal the complexity of our own experiences and identities. It is evident, from the news and lived experience, that many people cannot see Asian Americans as fully-realized human beings—deserving of care, capable of passion and complexity. Instead, we are characterized as foreign threats, soulless nerds, mute seductresses, vectors of disease. This extends to the music industry, which has a history of assuming that Asian Americans don’t have the interiority to generate interesting art, or the sexiness to sell it. For decades, the number of visible Asian American musicians were so few and far between that you clung onto the rare few who broke through: Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Tony Kanal of No Doubt, the part-Indonesian Van Halen brothers. It didn’t matter how prominent the artists were, whether you really understood their relationship to identity, or even liked their music. Far East Movement topping the Billboard charts felt like a personal victory, even though my friends and I had no clue what it meant to be “getting slizzard.”

In recent years, Asian and Asian American musicians have moved to prominence in certain scenes, from Mitski’s cathartic indie rock to Yaeji’s rewiring of house music to 88rising’s attempts to market global Asian hip-hop. This year Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast released Crying in H Mart, a memoir about rediscovering her Korean heritage through food, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. Still, I can feel an absence of language with which to think about Asianness in the music industry beyond the dry terms of representation politics. In 2018, NBC Asian America ran a year-end essay proclaiming that “Asian-American music shined”; tellingly, in this case “Asian American music” simply meant “music by artists who have Asian heritage”—anything from MILCK’s empowerment anthems to songs off Drake’s Scorpion, produced by Filipino-American Illmind.

The strategy of aggregating and promoting music based on artists’ common racial identity has been adopted widely by publications; streaming platforms have done the same while attempting to show solidarity to the Stop Asian Hate campaign and during AAPI Heritage Month. It is an efficient, even understandable tactic, one that often yields laughably unimaginative results: Some of the first selections on Apple Music’s “Celebrating Asian American Voices” playlist include “Leave the Door Open” by Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, “Deja vu” by Olivia Rodrigo, and “Taste” by Tyga feat. Offset—a selection that illuminates more about the current Billboard charts than the “different traditions, histories, and points of view” within a “vast AAPI family,” as Apple suggests. (And what about the songs that are not by Asian artists, but have become anthems for Asian American communities nonetheless?)

Again and again, I see coverage that touts how rich and varied the Asian diaspora is, while falling short of reflecting any real eclecticism or intentionality—overlooking artists who may be revamping cultural traditions and, while doing so, underscoring a deep-seated musical history, or ones cultivating anti-racist ideals in their musical practice. I’ve been irked to see the same obvious pop, R&B, and hip-hop acts featured in lieu of someone like Arooj Aftab, the Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer whose winding, melancholic music reinterprets old Urdu ghazals. I’d rather listen to a heritage month playlist curated by ska-punk trailblazer Mike Park—founder of Asian Man Records and frontman of bands like the Chinkees—instead of Hollywood actresses. Over the years, I’ve come to wonder how Asian American perspectives might be better articulated holistically—especially considering that Asian instruments and musical styles have long been absorbed into Western music—and whether it’s possible to excavate a meaningful Asian American musical history at all.

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The history of Asian immigrants and their offspring in American music is long— though, as I’ve noticed, it often survives in fragments, uncovered sporadically in news articles or academic texts. During World War II, the only swing band in Wyoming was the George Igawa Orchestra, formed by Japanese-Americans detained behind barbed wire at the Heart Mountain internment camp. In the ’60s, Indian sitar virtuosos like Ravi Shankar and his disciples not only introduced ragas to the Beatles, but also helped bring Hindustani rhythms and temporalities to jazz. A decade later, Chinese restaurant owners ushered in California’s punk scene, and Filipino DJ crews like Invisibl Skratch Piklz helped pioneer turntablism in the ’90s. “The idea of a Asian American musical tradition is interesting, because all it can ever be is a collection of scraps,” says the musician and historian Julian Saporiti, aka No-No Boy. His heartfelt indie folk album, 1975—the latest release on Smithsonian Folkways Asian Pacific America series—narrates little vignettes of personal history: the George Igawa Band, a Khmer painter, his own Vietnamese heritage.

Saporiti is often compared to Yellow Pearl, a trio of New York-based activist-musicians who recorded what is considered to be the first “Asian American” album in 1973. A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America is a collection of folk songs that consist mostly of a few voices harmonizing over guitars, with occasional conga, bass, and a Chinese flute (di-zi) folded into the music. Its style is loping and conversational, but many of its ringing declarations—“We are the yellow pearl/And we are half the world”—could be cried out at a march. Shaped by years of activism and community-building, the members strive for a purposefully pan-Asian consciousness on A Grain of Sand; their most famous anthem, “We Are the Children,” proudly proclaims Asian Americans as the offspring of Filipino migrant workers, Japanese camp survivors, and Chinese railroad laborers. When two of them played the song on national television in 1972, at the invitation of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the director of The Mike Douglas Show worried that Midwestern housewives would be scandalized by their confession of “watching war movies and rooting for the other side.”

Yellow Pearl got its start in 1969, as part of the nascent Asian American movement. Chris Iijima and JoAnne Miyamoto (now known as Nobuko) met at a drab office space in the Garment District, where the civil rights group Asian Americans for Action (or Triple A) was planning a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Activism was Iijima’s inheritance—his mother had founded Triple A, one of the first pan-Asian organizations on the East Coast—but he’d also embraced music outside of rallies, studying french horn and guitar, emulating blues singers like Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Terry. Miyamoto, a relative novice to politics, had performed as a Broadway dancer, Hollywood actress, and lounge singer, eventually becoming disillusioned by commercial entertainment. One day, while helping shoot a documentary of the Black Panthers, she felt a tap on her shoulder. It was none other than the legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama in her classic horn-rimmed glasses, inviting Miyamoto to the meeting that begat Yellow Pearl.

Iijima and Miyamoto wrote and performed their first song in the summer of 1970, while trying to push the Japanese American Citizens League to take a stance against the Vietnam War; they’d also paid respects to the local Black Panther Party and befriended Native American protesters squatting for better housing. “Being in those spaces together stimulated emotions about who we were, what we related to, and what was important to us,” says Miyamoto, who is now in her 80s. When they returned home, they started drafting more music in her basement apartment. They traveled through churches, rallies, and prisons with their songs—sleeping on friends’ floors on the West Coast, becoming like “Asian American griots.” By late 1970, the duo had met their third member, William “Charlie” Chin—of Chinese, Caribbean, and Venezuelan descent—at a conference advocating for Asian American Studies. They kept their music simple, gravitating toward folk not only because of its protest history, but also because its set-up was portable, just a couple of guitars and their voices.

“When we saw Chris and Nobuko for the first time, it was like wow, people are writing songs about us,” says Peter Horikoshi of Yokohama, California, a ’70s folk and pop quintet from San Jose that branded itself as “the second Asian American movement band.” Horikoshi—who attended UC Berkeley during the Third World Liberation strikes and saw Yellow Pearl at least twice in the early days—was struck not only by their racial pride but also their solidarity with other minority communities. Their Spanish-language song “Somos Asiaticos” (“We Are Asians”), came out of their camaraderie with Latino activists involved in the squatters rights movement Operation Move-In; “Free the Land” is a tribute to the Republic of New Afrika, featuring backing vocals from RNA members including Mutulu Shakur, the stepfather of rapper Tupac.

Yellow Pearl initially had very little interest in a record deal, believing it would compromise their people-oriented ethos. But after three years of touring, they were already on the brink of parting ways. So as final hurrah, over two and a half days in 1973, they recorded A Grain of Sand in a modest, 16-track studio for Paredon Records, a scrappy activist label that documented protest music from liberation struggles around the world.

Around the same time, more Asian and Asian American artists were carving out their presence in the music world. There was the Latin jazz-rock band Dakila, a group of Filipino-Americans in San Francisco’s Mission District that assembled from the remains of a Santana cover band; their only release, featuring songs in Tagalog, was put out via Epic/Columbia Records in 1972 but developed a cult following decades later. There was also the fusion band Shakti, a collaboration between an English guitarist and Indian musicians playing violin, tabla, and ghatam, which resulted in a striking blend of jazz and both Hindustani and Carnatic music. One of the most commercially successful Asian American groups of all time was Hiroshima, a Grammy-nominated fusion band that incorporated Japanese instrumentation, like koto playing and taiko drumming, into their blend of jazz, R&B, pop, and Latin music. Named after the first Japanese city bombed during World War II, their goal was to show that Asian Americans were “real people with really real lives.”

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What distinguished the members of Yellow Pearl as musicians was their explicit dedication to Asian American self-determination and liberation. While their folk and blues songs were not all that sonically adventurous, later musicians would toy with structure and instrumentation to create a “new Asian American music.” Still rooted in Third World activism, the loosely Bay Area-based scene drew from Asian folk musics and also free jazz—music that, to quote saxophonist Archie Shepp, strove to free America “aesthetically and socially from its inhumanity.”

In 1981, the Kearny Street Workshop, the longest-running Asian American arts organization in the country, staged the first annual Asian American Jazz Festival in San Francisco. As the story goes, the producers were tired of hearing their friends grumble about a lack of performance opportunities. The festival sold out during its first run, helping to coalesce an Asian American “creative music” movement that bloomed in the ’80s. By and large, the main musicians associated—Mark Izu, Anthony Brown, Glenn Horiuchi, Fred Ho, Francis Wong, and Jon Jang, among others—were activists. Several were involved early on in the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a Marxist-Leninist movement formed out of the merger between Black, Asian, and Latino communist groups, although they reject the militancy and didacticism often demanded by “political art.” The pianist Jon Jang, now in his late 60s, describes it simply: “We were playing music that sought to liberate us, and liberate our communities.”

These Asian American improvisers found a breakthrough in Black radical politics and music—the poems and essays of Amiri Baraka, the speeches of Malcolm X, and the avant-garde jazz of artists like John Coltrane and Max Roach. Jang and Francis Wong, a saxophonist, met at an Asian American Music Workshop at Stanford in the early ’80s, where Jang would talk endlessly about Coltrane and Baraka. Jang was a mail worker and labor organizer; Wong kept flunking out of school because he was too devoted to community activism. After an hour of patiently listening to Jang, Wong pulled out a copy of Unity newspaper with an article written by Baraka in it. “I had a feeling that Francis was in the know,” Jang reflected.

For Wong, the concept of an “Asian American jazz” had crystalized several years earlier. At Stanford, he and a friend would discuss McCoy Tyner’s Sahara, DownBeat’s 1973 album of the year; its cover features Tyner holding a Japanese koto. “We’d talk about what an Asian American jazz would be like,” he remembers. “Not just Asian Americans playing jazz standards—but what would we actually contribute?”

The Bay Area was especially ripe for cross-cultural exchange. The saxophonist John Handy, who rose to fame as a member of Charles Mingus’ band, was playing gigs with the sitar player Ali Akbar Khan. The famous jazz district the Fillmore, known as the “Harlem of the West,” bordered Japantown. Headlining the first Asian American Jazz Festival was the Afro-Asian quartet United Front—which, according to member Anthony Brown, was one of the first ensembles to incorporate traditional Asian instrumentation and sensibilities in a progressive jazz format, while also foregrounding lyrics that spoke directly to racial injustice. They integrated concepts of breathing and space that bassist Mark Izu had learned from studying gagaku, or ancient Japanese court music. “In gagaku, everyone takes a group pause called the ma,” Izu says. “You can’t monitor, like in Western music, whether you’ve added a sixteenth note.”

The mid ‘80s were also a high-water mark for the Asian American consciousness movement, which provided momentum for new musical works. Activists rallied around the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American who beaten to death by two white auto workers; the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign; Redress and Reparations for Japanese-Americans; and more. In 1987 and 1988, Jang and Wong co-founded Asian Improv Records and Asian Improv aRts, an independent label and a performance arts organization advancing “new directions in music by Asian Americans.” Asian Improv quickly became a primary organizing body for the Asian American creative music scene, embracing a new, more wide-ranging cohort of artists in later years, including the Indian-American pianist Vijay Iyer, the Iranian-American saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, and the Japanese-American experimental composer Miya Masaoka.

Iyer first encountered Wong and Jang in his early 20s, when he was starting a graduate program in physics at UC Berkeley and hadn’t yet decided to be a lifelong artist; one of his first major gigs was at the Asian American Jazz Festival, and Asian Improv released his first album, 1995’s Memorophilia. “They welcomed me into their community, when it wasn’t clear South Asian Americans would be counted as Asian American,” he said. “And their public way of making music, and locating it as political discourse, was really foundational for me.”

Iyer was moved by how deeply other artists engaged with Black creative music while offering critical perspectives from their own heritage. He admired how Miya Masaoka “kind of fucked shit up” with her mutant kotos; she create a hulking 6-foot-long, 21-string version of the traditional Japanese instrument outfitted with motion sensors and effects pedals, and later a laser version played by passing her hands over light beams. For over 30 years, Modirzadeh studied dastgah, a Persian musical system, under the instruction of the Iranian violinist Mahmoud Zoufonoun, eventually developing his own chromatic language. And Iyer himself was seeking out rhythmic ideas from Carnatic music, but integrating them in more subtle ways, like playing a rhythm on piano recognizable to tabla players. He admits, though, that he still felt like an outlier among the Asian Improv artists. “It’s nice that my album might be sold in a bookstore in Chinatown, but how do we get it to South Asian communities in the South Bay?,” he reflects. “I felt like it’d be my work to figure it out.”

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Iyer’s artistic project, as he’s described it, is “considering, enacting, testing, and perhaps critiquing notions of community.” This particular phrasing comes from a keynote speech he gave in 2014, in which he asks that we interrogate our own notions of belonging, and stay alert to how ethnic and racial pride, even among minorities, can harden into another form of oppression. I’ve returned to this speech over and over, as it became clear to me that the “Stop Asian Hate” campaign—and mainstream Asian American politics more broadly—primarily focuses on a certain kind of person, and a certain type of violence. The regard for Asian lives has not fully extended to Filipino nurses at the frontline of the pandemic, or the Sikh victims of the Indianapolis shooting, or the families suffering from COVID in India and Malaysia. It has not really extended to East and Southeast Asians elders who, rather than being openly assaulted, have been subjected to a slower death incurred by gentrification and inhumane working conditions.

In the decades since its establishment, the term “Asian American” has become depoliticized; once a coalition that sought to collectively mobilize against injustice, it has calcified into a demographic category—and one marked by cavernous contrasts. After the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, an infusion of Asian immigrants came to the United States—both high-skilled laborers like my parents, whose entry in the ’90s was contingent on graduate school admission, and less privileged refugees fleeing war and repression. “To me, it’s interesting how early Asian American activists, mostly college-educated Chinese, Japanese, and sometimes Filipino Americans, created this identity around protesting against the Vietnam War, and decades later, Southeast Asians still don’t really have a seat at the table,” says Saporiti. I wonder sometimes whether it’s even worth holding onto the ideal of pan-Asian unity, pining for another “We are the Children”-type anthem. Contemporary appeals to a shared Asian American identity often invoke shallow signifiers—bubble tea, for example—to foster an artificial sense of belonging. Meanwhile, many of the artists I spoke to dislike the phrase “Asian American music” out of concern that it could be essentializing, or imply a unified aesthetic. There will never be a singular notion of who or what “Asian America” is, and that makes theorizing the music so endlessly challenging.

For one, it’s worth remembering that “Asian America” is a construction forged, to a substantial degree, by war and colonization. Because of the U.S. military’s omnipresence in Asia, so much contemporary music, from the pioneering electronica of Yellow Magic Orchestra to psychedelia-driven Thai molam, could be said to possess “Asian” and “American” elements. The “original K-Pop stars,” a winsome South Korean trio known as the Kim Sisters, started their career singing American folk, jazz, and country standards to soldiers during the Korean War. Years later, the Vietnam War would not only lead to the creation of Vietnamese rock’n’roll, but also Cambodian rock, as U.S. military radio floated across borders. “Asian American jazz is cool, but honestly, the best ‘Asian American music’ is on the other side of the Pacific,” Saporiti says, citing favorites like the legendary Indonesian singer-songwriter Iwan Fals and Cambodian singer Ros Sereysothea.

It’s even more common now for music to swerve through national borders, to sample from a hodgepodge of cultures and languages. Consider M.I.A., the brazen Sri Lankan-British rapper who made “world music” in the greatest sense—recording in India, Trinidad, and Australia, plucking from UK grime, Bollywood, punk, soca, Missy Elliott, and more. Or think about Yaeji, who oscillates seamlessly between English and Korean in her laid-back club tracks; instead of feeling like a barrier, the Korean adds an inviting textural element. On the company level, one of the more significant transnational forces is 88Rising, which, for better or worse, has attempted to rebrand Asianness into a glossy commercial product, like an Adidas campaign for the East. Despite the company’s many oversights and gaffes, it has opened up unforeseen avenues for global artists, via flashy music videos and PR rollouts, a global radio station, and now a sister label focused on Filipino music.

There are also contemporary musicians who, like the aforementioned Asian American creative musicians, have embraced and reworked long-standing folk traditions, absorbing them into their own distinct perspectives. Pantayo, a quintet of queer, diasporic Filipinas based in Toronto, combines kulintang music—featuring eight, horizontally-laid gongs, amid a larger ensemble—from the Southern Philippines with pop, R&B, and punk. (As one critic cheekily described it, it sounds like “Carly Rae Jepsen if CRJ had generational trauma from centuries of colonialism.”) On Lucy Liyou’s recent album Practice, the experimental musician utilizes text-to-speech technology to clumsily recreate the vocal patterns in Korean pansori, a type of operatic folk storytelling. The awkward rhythms of the speech attest to a fraught relationship with one’s family, a common theme in immigrant households. It reminds me of my childhood: the tedious hours of piano practice, the sense that my elders will always be somewhat unknowable to me.

When I was younger, I felt like “Asian American” was an itchy and cumbersome inheritance. I didn’t know about the decades of activism and history; all I knew is that I didn’t like having strict parents or being subjected to casual racism. I wanted to be spontaneous and brash, go to parties, express my political convictions, indulge in the fantasy of making serious art—and I didn’t see that freedom as available to me. I was hungry for role models, any who could rattle the rigid, tyrannical ideas I’d absorbed about what Asian Americans were allowed to be. Over time, I’ve become wary of rhetoric that assigns too much radicalism to an artist’s existence—they’re visible; we are the same race; thereby I am empowered. There is plenty of music by Asian American artists that I find uninspired and even embarrassing.

If we say a piece of music makes us “feel seen,” then we also owe it to ourselves to parse what about it is so invigorating, what it reveals to us about our own subjectivities. We should ask what new language it offers us, in the subtler details of rhythm, tone, metaphor, phrasing. I want more art, and our processing of it, to help assemble our personal experiences into something more than just isolated narratives. A persistent form of dehumanization against Asian Americans is the erasure of our longstanding involvement in this country, including its music. By looking to the past, and to each other, we might be able to strengthen our collective sense of belonging. We might recognize ourselves anew.

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