What Is Asian American Music, Really?
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.
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.”
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.”
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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May 31, 2021 at 11:00PM
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