3:13 - Back at Space 180 on the LAST DAY OF APATURE! w00t.
I'm here for the roundtable discussion on hip hop.
3:15 - Andrew: intros workshop. Only thought of it a couple of days ago. DJ Phatrick (Patrick Wong), Adriel Luis from Literacy.
Phatrick: DJ for 10 years. Grew up in Sugarland TX, upper middle class. Got involved in DJ community in college. Worked with Native Guns.
Adriel Luis: grew up in Union City. ILLiteracy. Orgy of fun? At APAture. Hosts radio show on KPFA first Thursday of every month. (He has a big ol' shell necklace with hella metal coil beads. I can't read it.
Asks audience for hip hop artist or song that helped you with self definition.
Phatrick: Vanilla Ice brought him to hip hop. Seriously. Wow, that takes balls. Adrien: you were saying it for shock value. Phatrick: but it's true!
Kyle: Mac Dre "Thizz Dance" his first Bay Area hip hop experience. Annie: Will Smith/Fresh Prince. Phatrick: Fresh Prince comes up a lot. Adriel: AA families it's awkward with LL, but Fresh Prince not so awkward in front of your parents. Another Annie: Korean hip hop. Big Bang. Jin. One Time, Big Bay, etc. Matt Abaya: Public Enemy "Fight the Power." Adrien: What do you think of Flav now? Matt: Sad. But Flav brought the fun. Phatrick: he created a balance. Michael Moon: "Planet Rock" Afrika Bambaataa. Andrew: Bel Biv Devoe, SWV, Wu Tang. Andrew goes on a bit. Hip hop helped him with his stutter. Phatrick: tells about an MC for whom Wu was the goth period. I talk about how old I am and not liking any rap until De La Soul, Arrested Development. Rachel: Beasties "Brass Monkey." Lauren Hill. Snoop Dogg's "What's My Name?" Ellen: hasn't changed her life. "You Be Illin'" Run DMC (changed it to "You Be Ellen.") Adriel: Outkast "Rosa Parks" harmonica breakdown. Love/hate: resistance to changing the formula but when they do, they do it like crazy.
Phatrick: generational differences. A lot of hip hop analyzed on the surface, not on a historical level. Adriel and P. workshop to modify ppl's definitions of hip hop.
Adriel: double-edged sword about hip hop and Asian Americanness: breaking out of something that has been defined for them. Perception/stereotype of what hip hop is. AAs also always defining selves negatively: "I am not ..." AAs in hip hop really corny or cliche or else it's somebody complaining in an echoey room. Hip hop isn't respected anyway.
Asian American Hip Hop: three terms "Asian" "American" "Hip Hop": all the terms here are fuzzy.
"Asian" from the continent of Asia originally. Borders drawn by Europeans. Within the borders of the Orient. Expanded to include people of Pacific Islands. Including Middle Easterners after 9/11 experience of discrimination. Not absolute. Central Asia, Russia. These definitions are based on national borders, maybe not always real.
"American" passport (as a government definition). By Andrew's definition Sarah Palin wasn't American until last year. Born in America. Also has lived here. Naturalized citizen. Here for five years. Period of time. White people. Nationality vs. Ethnicity. "Nationality" is government category. "Ethnicity" is heritage. When they came over: what era. Ownership over label. "American" as disowning ethnicity. Language.
"Hip hop" music, art, innovation, spontaneity, typically has a beat behind it. Breaks away from folk music. Hip Hop as a realm under which there's music, dancing, poetry, and visual art. Political element. Youth: lower and lower middle class youth. It's everywhere. Pop culture. Co-opted. Influential. Rapping makes hip hop unique.
3:49 - Notice differences between the types of words chosen. "Asian" is based on location. "American" based on things that are accomplished or acquired. "Hip hop" is descriptive. Come from three different realms of description.
So M.I.A. is she an Asian American hip hop artist? Plays "Paper Planes." Play a rap. Plays "Bamboo Banga." Is she hip hop? Some yes and some no. Guy says: sounds like house/club music. Sounds like she's trying to invent a new clothing line. But she is rapping. Music. Hip hop and rapping is two different things. This guy can't break down what he means. He puts hip hop against rap, Beasties against Tupac or Dre.
No one's really talking about race. You can't really say this is or it isn't. Never would have thought that M.I.A. is hip hop. She's in electronical actually, and house. She's working within the hip hop community now. Kanye is singing on his new record. A big part of it is race.
(Wow, I'm really not caring about what "real hip hop" is supposed to be.)
What would quantify "real hip hop"? What's the right race for hip hop? Black. Male, "urban" (poor, ghetto). What defines mainstream? Accessibility. Exposure. What gets most exposure?
4:00 - Basically we're in a situation where hip hop comes out of black culture. Distinction btw. hip hop and rap. "Rap" = rhyming over beats, conventional. Adriel: hip hop is valid and rap is invalid. Searching for validity.
What API hip hop do you listen to? Native Guns, Power Struggle, Jin, Blue Scholars, Deltron 3030, Lyrics Born (used to be Asia Born), Skratch Piklz, Q-bert.
How do you define these groups as Asian American? (This is such an uninteresting question.) Sir Mix-a-lot's DJ was Pinoy (Nasty-Nes). Pay more attention to MC. Blackeyed Peas.
Important to complicate these issues.
Brief talk about early years. What has changed? Less distinction between hip hop and R&B. We're in a time when definition has become theory. Very blurred because of "me" attitude. A lot of influences are coming in (not true: hip hop/rap has always been very syncretic.) Tremendous confusion over what it means to be hip hop artists or audiences.
Final Note: what can you consider a uniquely Asian American pop art form? Hip hop is a black and brown art form, but APIs use it as a tool b/c it's so accessible. In the future what do we consider a uniquely Asian American art form? Oliver Wang: import car racing. Going back to country of origin and bringing back traditional instruments or forms. It's really more about content than form.
4:17 - This really needs to end now. I'm so done with this. Okay. I'm done. Somebody's still talking but I'm putting the computer away.
4:48 - Whew. Made good my escape. I think the every-day-APAture-every-day and all the people is finally catching up to me. I was just ... done all of sudden. Not because of what anyone was saying. In fact, the "unique Asian American pop art form" question is an interesting one ... or would be on another day. Whew. Glad it's almost over.
Okay, back to duty: that was a really good workshop. Some of the questions were too general or broad, and some of them got to the bases of identity that all of APAture deals with implicitly so I'm not sure they needed to be dealt with there (although maybe they did), but overall the workshop DID "complicate" definitions--and reveal some biases people were carrying. I would have liked to have done that the first weekend of APAture. It would have been a great intro to a lot of the issues--identity, ethnicity, art forms, syncretism--that run through all of APAture.
I'd really like to see that workshop done again next year, with a LOT more advertising in a much bigger venue. There was a good turnout for this: about twenty people. Maybe the thrust of the workshop could be "is there a unique APA pop art form?"
The rest of the thing was sad. There was NO turnout for the tablers. And there were seriously only like three tablers, plus Chris Brown with the sewing table (make a bag out of old APAture t-shirts, which has been a really fun workshop in past years.) The atmosphere was depressing. I hope there's a better turnout tonight.
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