7 Music Stars You Should Know for Asian Pacific Heritage Month
Musings on why Asian-Americans haven’t really broken into mainstream music, the ones that should’ve, & the ones on the verge now
Like everyone else, when I first saw the #DontRushChallenge, I was blown away at the ingenuity of the creators. Here was the perfect bite-size demonstration that beauty doesn’t have to be white or willowy. After waiting a tiny while to let the black women who started the movement enjoy their moment in the limelight, my Asian diaspora burlesque sisters and I excitedly began our own #Slaysian #DontRushChallenge. With all the racism that we’re encountering due to coronavirus panic, it felt like an important message. We are not your China dolls or manicurists or Ivy League students or nameless Yellow Peril threat. No, we don’t look alike. We are every shade from fair to mocha. And surprise surprise, some of us even have eyelids.
But while I was editing the video for the Asian diaspora burlesque multiverse, I encountered an unexpected hiccup. It was obvious that the music should reflect the purpose of the video. But where were the Asian-American music stars?
I’m not talking about Asian superstars like Kyu Sakamoto whose Sukiyaki was #1 on Billboard charts back in 1963 or K-pop phenomenon Blackpink. They’re from Asia, so obviously they didn’t grow up with the stereotypes, racism, and “othering” that Asian-Americans struggle with. I do have Asian-American musician friends and I knew we could use their music, but I was surprised that I couldn’t think of any well-known musicians from the Asian diaspora besides Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
This led me down a rabbit hole of discovery. Of course there have been amazing Asian-American musicians and bands since the 1970s, when the Asian-American movement rose in tandem with Native American, black, and Latino rights. Diving into the history made me think about all the reasons why none of these musicians managed to make it past the gate-keepers and into the mainstream.
There’s discrimination, of course; the way that we are always “othered” even if our family has been in America since the 1800s. Maybe we’re not considered American enough to be a rock ‘n roll star. Or maybe we don’t have a musical genre where we can be “othered” while becoming stars, like Latinos had Afro-Cuban jazz, mambo, and salsa before Carlos Santana or Christina Aguilera could be accepted into the mainstream. Andy Goldmark, the manager of Asian-American singer Natalise and former vice president for talent at Jive Records, stated in a NY Times article, “Asian-Americans have tended to follow what’s going in the pop world rather than use the Asian-American path to invent new things.”
The problem to this is that there isn’t really any such thing as an “Asian-American path.” Asian-American is a total construct. Our families come from a vast continent stretching from India all the way to Japan. There is no language that we share. There is no melody, timbre, or rhythm shared by all these vastly different Asian cultures. “Asian-American” is a pan-ethnic rubric created to strengthen the disparate Asian minorities who were fighting for civil rights in 1960s America. Asian-American is a political term, not a cultural springboard. What we share is a history of immigration, discrimination, and resistance. We actually have about as much in common with each other as we do with every other immigrant group and every other marginalized community. Most of us identify more with black Americans and Latino-Americans than we do with Asians from Asia.
So it isn’t really possible for there to be one sound that defines Asian-American music. Instead, Asian-American music is defined by who is making it and by the consciousness in the music. Perhaps this liminal definition is partly why so few of us that have managed to break into the mainstream. We can’t be defined, so we don’t exist.
Except that we do.
While doing this deep dive into the history of Asian-American music, I discovered some incredible musicians who should be better known. They range through the entire spectrum of contemporary music from folk to all kinds of rock to hip hop. Here’s my highly curated list of musicians that I was particularly excited to learn about from the 1970s to now.
A Grain of Sand (Acoustic Folk) — 1970 to 1975
Legal scholar Chris Ijima, Broadway triple-threat Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, and activist Charlie Chin started to make music together in the wake of the murder of a Japanese-American teenager at the JACL convention in 1970. Their band, A Grain of Sand, helped define the nascent pan-ethnic Asian-American movement. AsianWeek columnist Phil Tajitsu Nash said that when hearing the music of A Grain of Sand, “From Boston to Chicago to San Francisco to Honolulu, Asian-derived people who had been classified in the Census as “Other” suddenly realized that they had an identity, a history, and a place at the table.” Their music is heartfelt and honest acoustic protest music in the vein of Joan Baez or Phil Ochs.
More about A Grain of Sand in the Smithsonian Magazine.
Fanny (Rock’n Roll) — 1969 to 1975
Fun fact: one of the first all-women rock bands signed by a major label was Fanny, formed in 1969 by teenage Filipino-American sisters June Millington and Jean Millington. They opened for major bands like Jethro Tull and Slade, appeared on BBC and the Sonny & Cher Show, and generally blew people’s minds. David Bowie told Rolling Stone in 1999, “They were one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time… They were extraordinary: they wrote everything, they played like motherfuckers, they were just colossal and wonderful, and nobody’s ever mentioned them. They’re as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever; it just wasn’t their time. Revivify Fanny. And I will feel that my work is done.” There are several YouTube videos of the band playing live, but my favorite track is Play Like a Girl, a catchy, witty, and hard-hitting feminist anthem that is also the title of a documentary about them.
More about Fanny in Dangerous Minds.
Seam (Shoegaze / Slo-Core) — 1991 to 2000
Fronted by Korean-American singer-bassist Sooyoung Park, Seam helped define post-punk shoegaze and slo-core in the early 1990s. The music is emotional, moody, and introspective with Park pouring out his heart over a complex carpet of sound that CMJ New Music Monthly called “rich and artful.” I don’t know why I never heard of this band until now. And Park’s bespectacled boy-next-door charms in this video is like the antidote I never knew I needed to centuries of posturing white male supremacy.
King Khan & the Shrines (Garage / Psychedelic Soul)
Okay, so King Khan isn’t American. Originally from Montreal, he’s now based in Berlin. But he’s distributed by American indie garage labels and regularly plays stages all over the U.S. as well as at festivals like Coachella and Pitchfork Music Festival. And man, can this Indo-Canadian guy rock. He fronted the notorious Canadian band Spaceshits from 1995 to 1999 and is now the shirtless caped guru of the nine-member psychedelic soul band King Khan & the Shrines. Channelling Little Richard and Wilson Pickett with manic stage antics and raucous waka waka music, this band can even make it rain as seen in the video below.
Thao & the Get Down Stay Down (Alternative Rock)
I am in love with this genre-defying band led by Vietnamese-American powerhouse Thao Nguyen. The songs are a grab-bag of punchy beats, dissonant psychedelic riffs, and catchy licks, with Nguyen channeling a demonic force that builds in blistering ferocity. Her scathing song Meticulous Bird about abuses of power comes with a subversively surreal video set in a supermarket that speaks volumes about the often invisible underbelly of Asian immigrant life. In an NPR article, Nguyen said of the song, “I wanted whoever to be able to scream ‘I take my body back.’”
Mitski (Indie Rock)
Mitski is perhaps the Asian-American who is closest to breaking into the mainstream. She played at Coachella in 2018 and her album Be the Cowboy peaked at #7 on the Billboard charts. The New Yorker compared her to Fiona Apple and Adele, “artists who produce songs that cut to the heart of shared emotional experience, and who write a good hook, too.” I am allergic to anything sentimental, but her music manages to be sweet and smart at the same time. And her track Nobody, which was popularized on Tiktok and in this amazing interview on Genius really is the song we need for the Quarantine Blues, “My God, I’m so lonely, I open the window to hear sounds of people.”
Dumbfoundead (Hip Hop / Rap)
The Korean-American rapper known as Dumbfoundead was born in Argentina and migrated to Los Angeles with his mother and sister at the age of three. A master freestyler, he became as known as one of the best battle-rappers of the U.S. In 2016, he scored a hit with his song Safe about #OscarsSoWhite, which was accompanied by a hilarious video where he superimposes himself over the white male leads in iconic Hollywood films. But I love Are We There Yet, an earlier ode to the Asian-American experience with its nod to the powerful women who shaped his life.
More about Dumbfoundead in Vice Magazine.
