between the notes: finding asian america in popular music

Between the Notes: Finding Asian America in Popular MusicAuthor(s): Oliver WangSource: American Music, Vol. 19, No. 4, Asian American Music (Winter, 2001), pp. 439-465Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3052420Accessed: 18-09-2016 10:27 UTC

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OLIVER WANG

Between the Notes:

Finding Asian America in Popular Music

When asked to explain the premise behind the Broadway musical he helped create and direct-Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk- George C. Wolfe wrote, "I'm interested in how, if you actively unearth popular culture and look inside it, you can find all kinds of secrets and truths and rhythms of a time period, much more than you find in written history."' Wolfe's conjecture validates forms of expressive public culture2 that are repositories for narratives that can capture the meanings of an era with more accuracy than the "official" historical record. In fact, with traditional historical methodologies coming under increasing critique within the academy, cultural documents are becoming all the more important as potential sites of knowledge. It is not that they are any more objectively "true," but they can offer alternative and complementary histories or, in some cases, be the only history left to examine.

By examining examples of popular music drawn from the last for- ty years, one can peer into the history of Asian America itself-its changing social, political and cultural identities, its larger relationship to the national/ cultural symbol of "America," its remembrances of the past and its visions for the future. I don't mean to suggest that music is didactically reflective of society, as only a one-way relationship existed, only that music has always been a site for more than just entertainment or commercial enterprise within Asian America.

Oliver Wang is a doctoral candidate of the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are focused on race, ethnicity, and popular music. He is also a frequent contributor on music and culture for the LA Weekly, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and other publications.

American Music Winter 2001

@ 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois


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Ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin argues, "Music is at once an every- day activity, an industrial commodity, a flag of resistance, a personal world, and a deeply symbolic, emotional grounding for people in every class and cranny the superstructure offers."3 To this, I would include that music has been a meaningful and important form of expressive culture that has helped negotiate the meanings of ethnic and personal identity for multiple generations of people. This notion is made all the more important because in the "official record" Asian American history has been made marginal, even invisible. While knowledge about Asian Americans has crept into the popular media, it has long been in limited sound bites and stereotypical images-such as model-minority success stories, Asian youth gangs, and tattered boat refugees. Despite a history in the United States spanning over 150 years, they remain "strangers from a different shore" in the words of historian Ronald Takaki, an analogy to how-unlike European immigrants-Asians have worn their difference twice, first as foreign immigrants, second as racialized objects.4 The result has been a long history of disenfranchisement and disavowal of Asian Americans from the American imagination, except in the paranoia around the "yellow peril" and Asian horde. The works of historians such as Takaki and Sucheng Chan have tried to "re-vision" this history, to discover buried and forgotten pasts. They seek to show how Asian Americans have been actors on history, not just passive objects. However, what these and other historians largely exclude from their historical survey and reenvisionment is an attention to popular culture. Takaki goes far enough to use literary texts as forms of historical documentation, but neither he nor any other community historian considers other kinds of popular media, such as music, film, or fashion.5 They look for examples of documentation-inherited oral histories, resurrected newspaper fragments-rather than imagination for their historical evidence. Asian American popular music developed during three distinct eras in history. The first is roughly from 1950 to the late 1960s, what I term the "pre-panethnic" era-a time before Americans of Asian descent mobilized under the umbrella political identity of "Asian American." The second era focuses on the 1970s, in particular, the impact of the Asian American movement on musical production and its continued legacy into the 1980s. Finally, I offer some thoughts and problems in studying Asian American music in the 1990s and beyond, a contemporary era marked by dramatic changes and cleavages within the community.

My purpose is not to create an ontology of musical production within the community. Like the history of Asian America itself, its popular music has followed a path marked by disjunction, not linearity.


Between the Notes 441

Because musical practices are diverse and disparate, it is very difficult to draw any overarching conclusions or make tidy presumptions- in any given era, the exceptions usually prove the rule. The musical examples I draw from are not necessarily representative for the whole of Asian American music-making. Rather, each is a starting point into a larger discussion, opening dialogue rather than attempting to conclude it.

Theoretical Considerations

One of the first questions that this study generates is one of definition. What is Asian American music? There is no easy answer to this query for the very idea of "Asian American" has always been in a state of contention, continually challenged and reshaped depending on social context and historical factors. I don't wish to replicate an entire body of discourse within Asian American studies and cultural studies except to say that any and all uses of "Asian American" in this text are girded by an understanding of the constructedness of the term. I deploy it not because I necessarily believe in its social fact- that is, that there is a discernable, unitary Asian American community that one can reference-but because the term holds a significant level of cultural cache within the public sphere. Indeed, the tensions that surround the term itself are partially at the heart of how and why music by Asian Americans is valued to begin with. Moreover, any definition of Asian American music has to stay implicitly fluid and adaptive to the particular situations in which the term applies. To this extent, I draw on sociologist Yen Le Espiritu's work on panethnicity, in particular, her thought that "ethnicization-the process of bound- ary construction-is not only reactive, a response to pressures from the external environment, but also creative, a product of internally generated dynamics."6 I argue that music is a prime example of the creative ways in which ethnic identity is expressed and contested.

Not only is "Asian American" a difficult label to define but musi- cologist Joseph Lam points out that music's uniqueness as a medium additionally complicates matters:

[Asian American music] is not something that one can easily identify by merely listening to its sounds, or interpret with rigid notions of cultures, histories, and peoples. Its musical-ethnic at- tributes and meanings must be analyzed with a series of param- eters and discussed in musical, historical and social contexts.7

Lam argues that Asian American music is not dependent on the text (e.g., lyrics, images, even melody, timbre, rhythm) or even a tradition of musical practice. Instead, Asian American music is so designated


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based on the context of production (who makes the music and why?) as well as reception (how is the music used, how is it understood?). This kind of open-ended definition makes discussion of Asian Amer- ican music difficult but it is a necessary concession in order to avoid suffocating the music under an overly rigid set of criteria. Despite these caveats, however, Lam still champions the acceptance of "Asian American music" as a heuristic device because he feels such a move

is a necessary first step rather than a final definition. He argues,

The term Asian American music is needed to provide a theoretical and historical point of reference so that we can contrast and compare diverse musical works of Asian Americans, examine their musical creativity and artistry, and understand their expres- sions of living in America as individuals and as members of ethnic groups.8

Thus, for Lam, his attempt to define Asian American music is less a desire to provide a canonical standard than to establish a point of common reference that future discussions can work from-even if it

is to deconstruct Lam's own theories. Moreover, the very ambiguities of the musical medium also speak to why it is such a powerful cultural form through which identity can be created and negotiated. In her study of the popular music habits of Vietnamese refugees living in the United States, Adelaida Reyes notes that musical expression among South East Asian Americans is not so much a series of state- ments of stable identities but rather the uncertainty and unsettled state of being that many of these newly forming communities have to deal with. She writes, "Music, as their mirror or their embodiment, projects their image not through its capacity for exactitude of meaning but through its capacity for ambiguity, for harboring a multitude of possible meanings."9

Moreover, within the popular music are embedded key discourses around Asian American identity-what is it, what does it mean? This is not an outstanding claim; popular music scholars like Simon Frith, Ron Eyerman, and Andrew Jamison have long suggested that music's ability to fashion collective identities is one of its most powerful at- tributes.10 However, there is something unique in the Asian Ameri- can engagement with popular music, one based on the particular historical contexts of race, gender, class and immigration experiences that have shaped people's experiences.

Historically speaking, Asian Americans have long existed in a state of contradiction. Welcomed for their labor by capitalists and feared by the white working class, early waves of Asian immigrants were quickly stymied through exclusionary legislation while populations already in the United States feared race riots and discrimination. This



tension-among the needs of capital, the state, and the populous- has pushed Asian Americans into a very unstable relationship with American national culture. As a result, cultural studies theorist Lisa Lowe writes,

Rather than expressing a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this distance [between Asian Ameri- cans and the U.S. national culture] preserves Asian American culture as an alternative site where the palimpsest of lost mem- ories is reinvented, histories are fractured and retraced, and the unlike varieties of silence emerge in articulacy.11

Lowe's definition of culture is actually quite expansive, including any social practice that lies outside the narrow field of political represen- tation. While she doesn't name popular music as an example of an "alternative site," her argument resonates with the ways in which music provides a means through which history and memory can be re-visioned and articulated. British rock scholar Simon Frith describes

popular music as being able to "stand for, symbolize and offer the immediate experience of collective identity."12 Adopting this assertion and joining it with Lowe's argument about the role of Asian Ameri- can culture, I argue that music has been a site where Asian American communities could be imagined symbolically, in resistance to the de- nial of that collectivity in the American political, social, and material world.

The Pre-Panethnic Era (1950-1970)

Setting 1950 as the "beginning" of the pre-panethnic era is mislead- ing.13 In truth, that date should be around whenever Asians first came to the United States, beginning with Filipino sailors who jumped ship from Spanish galleons into New Orleans in the eighteenth century. The history of Asian music-making in America extends back well over 150 years, including the tradition of mok-yu (literally "fish song"), folksongs composed by early Chinese settlers up and down the Pacific coast. Based on traditional Chinese folksongs, the mok-yu songs detailed their struggles and sorrows as sojourners to America and, thus, were among the first forms of cultural production that specified a uniquely American experience.14

Likewise, by starting at 1950, I also exclude the long tradition of jazz bands within Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino American communities, especially in California and Washington. Jazz pianist George Yoshida's Reminiscing in Swingtime is an excellent history of Japanese American jazz bands from 1925 to 1960, while Arthur Dong's documentary, Forbidden City U.S.A., looks at the prevalence of Chinatown


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jazz clubs in the World War II era.1s These are all histories that de- serve greater exploration and analysis. However, my use of 1950 is not arbitrary either, especially in understanding a set of dramatic changes that happened within the Asian American community during and following World War II. The war itself was a seminal historical event, a time of dramatic and tragic contradictions. On one hand, the U.S. military summarily rounded up Japanese American citizens and interned them in concentration camps from 1942 until the end of the war, dislocating and fracturing their once-strong communities from across the West Coast.16 At the same time, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino Americans benefited considerably, both from the removal of Japanese Americans from key niches in the economy, which they then filled, as well as from citizenship rights granted to them as a show of diplomatic goodwill toward wartime allies such as China and the Philippines.17 This represented a funda- mental shift in domestic policy, which had mostly tried to exclude and suppress Asian American groups residing in the United States. Despite some of these changes, restrictive immigration laws such

as the 1952 McCarran-Walters Act and various Asian exclusion laws

from the turn of the century prevented new immigration from coming to the United States. At the same time, those Asian Americans already in the United States experienced a set of new opportunities, largely stemming from the space race and economic boom of the 1950s. Expanding employment opportunities in manufacturing, construction, transportation, and service industries created new jobs while the onset of the cold war gave educated Asian Americans the chance to enter professional positions as engineers and scientists.

As a result, many Asian Americans were becoming more socially mobile, moving up the class ladder, out of ethnic enclaves like Chi- natowns, and becoming more spatially and culturally integrated into the American mainstream. They were still in a state of pre-panethnic consciousness; World War II in particularly was viciously divisive in playing Japanese Americans against other Asian ethnic groups. How- ever, the seeds of panethnicity were being planted as second and third generations of Asian Americans were being born and raised in the United States.

Both Takaki and Chan talk about the "second-generation dilemma" of Asian Americans in the pre-World War II era, and it is plausible to extrapolate these ideas to the postwar period as well.1" Takaki and Chan document how second- and third-generation Asian Americans were trying to enter into the mainstream of American society by adopting "American" cultural values, gaining greater education and, in general, trying to shed overt signs of "foreigness"-be it linguistic accents, traditional dress, or cultural activities. In other words, they



were pursuing what Chan has called the "200% American" strategy to assimilation and integration, the idea that Asian Americans had to try to become twice as American as their white neighbors in order to gain acceptance.19 Unfortunately, a severe paucity of work exists within Asian Amer-

ican studies-or any other academic discipline for that matter-on how Asians culturally factored into American society in the era between World War II and the 1965 Immigration Act.20 Most historical texts discuss some of the demographic changes in the era, particularly around geographic dispersal and economic mobility, but practically nothing is said about how Asian Americans of the time fit into the concept of America that existed. What we do know, based on historical artifacts of the era, such as films, albums, and books, is that many second- and third-generation Asian Americans, particularly Chinese and Japanese Americans, were working their way into the American popular culture industry. Actors like Nancy Kwan (The World of Suzie Wong, 1960), Nobu McCarthy (Walk Like a Dragon, 1959) and James Shigeta (The Crimson Kimono, 1959) were landing lead roles-albeit often stereotyped-in Hollywood movies. Authors like C. Y. Lee (Flower Drum Song, 1957) and Louis Chu (Eat a Bowl of Tea, 1961) experienced moderate success. And there were a handful of musicians signing to major record labels, such as Pat Suzuki (for RCA/Victor), Elsie Itashiki (stage name Teal Joy; for AAMCO) and Ethel Azama (on Liberty). These handful of record albums create an intriguing though incom-

plete and ambiguous statement on how Asian Americans negotiated both the culture industry and American society as a whole. Given the lack of oral histories and other documentation of where they fit into the social landscape, it is difficult to fit the context of these albums. Were they signs of how Asian Americans were assimilating? Or examples of how pioneering Asian Americans were making inroads on their own terms?

For example, James Shigeta had a successful career, appearing as a leading actor in over half a dozen films between 1959 and 1969. He also briefly tried his hand at a singing career, signing with Silver Slip- per Records in the late 1950s to release Scene One under the name Jim- my Shigeta.21 What's interesting about the album are the different, sometimes contradictory, ways in which Shigeta is positioned as an artist in reference to nationality and ethnicity. The music on the album is almost all completely Tin Pan Alley standards like "They Can't Take That Away from Me" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To." Only the Hawaiian pop song, "Chi-Sai-Hana (My Little Flower)" be- trays any kind of ethnic or racial tint and, given that Shigeta was Hawaiian born and raised, the song loses some of its exoticness. The


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music by Axel Strodahl is similarly unremarkable as Shigeta is backed by ballad-oriented big band and orchestral arrangements. Unlike other music of the era, for example, some of the compositions in Rodg- ers and Hammerstein's Chinese American musical Flower Drum Song (1958), there is no use of pentatonic scales that typically signify "Ori- entalism" or the ubiquitous gong that starts other songs marked "Ori- ental." From an auditory perspective, there is nothing different about Shigeta from any other pop singer of the era, certainly not on a racial / ethnic level.

However, reading through both the liner notes as well as critics' commentary, it is clear that Shigeta needed to be handled carefully as an artist, especially since his racial difference as a nonwhite was ob- vious to anyone looking at the album cover or his surname. In the liner notes, an uncredited author makes a point to note that Shigeta is "Ho- nolulu-born, college educated," served two years in the U.S. Marine Corps in Korea, and starred in films with Glenn Ford and Donald O'Connor. He also appeared on the Dinah Shore Show with Shirley MacLaine and Louis Jordan. The mention of Shigeta's college education and service tour seems especially important for positioning Shige- ta as an American rather than a foreigner, as do the various photos of Shigeta taken from his movie, stage, and television appearances. The critics' praise included on the back cover, however, tells a slightly different story, one where Shigeta's ethnic difference has to be both acknowledged and reconciled. Most telling is that three of the six comments describe Shigeta as a Japanese artist when, in fact, he is a second-generation Japanese American actor/ singer. For example, Louella Parsons writes, "Not since the days when the young Ses- sue Hayakawa completely charmed American movie fans has a Jap- anese actor registered as compellingly as tall, dark and handsome James Shigeta." The Associated Press's Jim Bacon calls Shigeta "the Frank Sinatra of Japan," while Army Archerd of Variety calls him "a triple threat, two-continent star." The fact that Shigeta is positioned as being from Japan potentially speaks to how difficult it is for some of these critics to talk about Shigeta in race-neutral language. His racial difference is unavoidable and, therefore, needs to be contained and explained within the marketing of the album.22 It is tempting to read Shigeta's album-as well as those of Pat Su-

zuki who recorded at least four albums for RCA Victor in the late

1950s and early 1960s-as being part of the "200% American" strategy to social integration / assimilation. After all, these singers were positioned through their marketing as all-American. However, this has to be balanced by the reality that there was little to be gained in trying to emphasize ethnicity. Asian Americans constituted far too small of a demographic buying audience for record companies to try



to appeal to, and while the 1950s also saw the rise of Orientalist-tinged exotica albums from composers like Les Baxter and Martin Denny, the few Asian Americans who held recording contracts were not part of that genre's development. It seems safest to suggest that while these albums by Shigeta, Suzuki, and others might have been one indica- tor of the degree to which Asian Americans and, more accurately, Jap- anese Americans were being accepted into the American cultural scene, they didn't reflect any newfound welcome given to them. For example, in analyzing the Rodgers and Hammerstein 1958

musical and 1961 film Flower Drum Song (one of the only, if not the only major Hollywood film to star an all-Asian American cast), while the musical and movie both seem to celebrate ethnic difference and

diversity, the narrative-and songs-are really a treatise on the joys of American assimilation. To quickly summarize, the musical/ movie was originally adapted from Chinese American author C. Y. Lee's book of the same name, about a family in San Francisco's Chinatown trying to find a wife for the eldest son, Wang Ta (played on Broad- way and in the 1961 movie by James Shigeta). The songs, written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, focus on themes such as the generation gap between parents and children ("The Other Generation"), cultural tradition ("A Hundred Million Miracles"), and ethnic mixture ("Chop Suey"). While the musical and movie are striking for their all- Asian casting, Lee counters that the thrust of the narrative is about erasing ethnicity rather than celebrating it. In talking about Flower Drum Song as well as the 1956 Sayonora, historian Robert Lee writes,

Sayonora and Flower Drum Song both celebrate American liberal- ism. In these films, ethnic assimilation is the vehicle through which the social identities of race, class, sex, and nationality can be displaced by the individual embrace of the modern.... The nuclear family, the end result of both these films, is expected to produce a new American: a liberal individualist who transcends social origin.23

In other words, like Shigeta's solo album, Flower Drum Song must rec- oncile the exotic origin of characters and assimilate them into a recognizable and nonthreatening American mainstream. For example, in the song, "Chop Suey," a metaphor for ethnic pluralism in America, the tune begins using a cliched "Oriental" pentatonic scale to play the first few notes but then slides into conventional Broadway big band. The lyrics are telling: "Chop suey, chop suey / living here is very much like chop suey / hula hoops and nuclear war / Dr. Salk and Zsa Zsa Gabor / Harry Truman, Truman Capote and Dewey / Chop suey."24 What is strange is that while chop suey is ostensibly understood as a unique Chinese American food dish, all of the songs


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references are to Americana-Zsa Gabor, Truman Capote, and hula hoops.25 Moreover, in the movie the song is accompanied by an elab- orated musical sequence where the song shifts from big band to square-dance country to cool jazz, all accompanied by complementary dance moves to fit the music. Indeed, "Chop Suey" ends up being a song that celebrates American culture as defined by a white popular culture, not the ethnic pluralism that the title suggests. These examples suggest that while Asian Americans were gaining visibility within the American public sphere, their entries were con- trolled and careful. Their success was not so much an indication of

how far they had come but how far they could go in "becoming" American. Their presence wasn't so much to be celebrated but reconciled and folded back into the American mainstream. For them to gain a more independent foothold in the musical world, on their own terms, would take an upheaval that extended well beyond the music industry and one that confronted American society itself.

Legacies of the Asian American Movement (1970-1990)

The post-World War II complacency shared by white Americans re- vealed its vulnerability with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, but came crashing down all about with the social movements of the 1960s. The rise of the Black Power Movement, anti-Vietnam War ag- itation, and a host of other social movements came to the forefront, including, at the latter end of the 1960s, the Asian American Move- ment. Like its contemporaries, the Asian American Movement pushed for an agenda that included social, political, and cultural empower- ment, creating organizations, initiating protests, and, in general, shap- ing a new consciousness. To say that the movement was a watershed event for Asian Americans is gross understatement-indeed, the very term Asian American was born of the movement. Prior to it, different Asian ethnic groups were still largely insular, split by cultural and linguistic differences into national subgroups, such as Chinese Amer- ican, Japanese American, and Filipino American. However, a series of different events in the late 1960s-the Third World strikes at San

Francisco State and University of California-Berkeley, the racially informed criticism of the Vietnam War, coalition-building brought on by civil rights activism, as well as a raised level of ethnic consciousness on college campuses-became the genesis for the Asian Ameri- can Movement.26

By the time it quietly faded out in the 1980s, the movement had created ethnic press, established community-based organizations, and helped institute Asian American Studies classes. According to Yen Le Espiritu, "Although broader social struggles and internal demograph-



ic changes provided the impetus for the Asian American Movement, it was the group's politics-confrontational and explicitly pan- Asian-that shaped the movement's content."27 However, the movement's legacy was more than just political. His- torian William Van Deburg observes that the Black Power Movement

was not exclusively cultural, but it was essentially cultural. It was a revolt in and of culture that was manifested in a variety of forms and intensities.... It was this long-standing, determined- ly independent black cultural base that provided whatever co- hesion the movement eventually managed to develop.28

Much the same can be said of the Asian American Movement, for its greatest legacy was the unitary-however tenuous-identity that per- meated not only the Asian American community, but American society at large. The impact of the Asian American Movement, like the Black Power Movement, was not just whatever political changes they wrought, but the cultural impact they had as well. Van Deburg argues that, in fact, the Black Power Movement was primarily a cultural movement that transformed the political community created under the Civil Rights Movement into a cultural nation. Likewise, Asian Americans were attempting to use expressive pop-

ular culture as one way to shape their nascent political nation. Prior to the 1960s, Asian America didn't exist as either a political or cultural entity, thus the task for cultural producers was doubly difficult. Not only were they attempting to create political alliances between historically separate-if not antagonistic-ethnic groups, but they were also trying to provide a cultural vision that would unite them.29 Thus, like the Black Power Movement the Asian American Movement wasn't just political-it was fundamentally a cultural movement as well, with expressive culture serving as a prime force in construct- ing the new Asian American nation. Social movements-because of their impact on social norms and values-often create windows of opportunity for cultural change and, in turn, cultural change embod- ies the ideals of the movement and sustain it long after the movement's politics themselves have drifted into the dustbin of history. Music scholars Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison note that the con- nection between cultural forces and social movements is not spuri- ous, writing,

In the creative turmoil that is unleashed within social movements, modes of cultural action are redefined and give new meaning as sources of collective identity. For brief, intensive moments, the habitual behavior and underlying values of society are thrown open for debate and reflection, and, as the movements fade from


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the political center stage, their cultural effects seep into the social lifeblood in often unintended and circuitous ways.30

This open window of social opportunity is what the Asian American Movement was able to create by using cultural identity as one of its underlying motives. Historian William Wei reports,

Whereas Asian American activists have had little difficulty in accepting the need to refute stereotypes and reclaim history [in order to develop] an authentic Asian American identity... they also realized the need to create an Asian American culture to give form and substance to that identity.31

Wei notes that one of the major questions lying behind movement politics was the question of "who are we?" and that it was the work of cultural producers who helped provide answers to that question. Mu- sic played a key role as Wei cites artists like New York jazz composer Fred Ho and the folk trio A Grain of Sand as being key proponents of expressive public culture that merged politics and aesthetics. Accord- ing to Wei, these artists took it upon themselves to serve as "'cultural ambassadors' and bear the burden of speaking for their people."32 While Wei makes passing mention to the use of folk singing as one form of tangent from this cultural movement, the only group he names is A Grain of Sand, an interesting case study for numerous reasons.33 For one thing, they didn't simply make music for the movement-they came out of the movement. The group got its start when Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima met at the 1970 JACL convention in 1970. The murder of a young Japanese American woman at that convention galvanized Miyamoto and Chris to form a duo in order to help raise money for a memorial fund. Dubbing themselves "Chris and Joanne," the two toured the West Coast doing fundraisers up and down the Pacific Coast. Upon their return to New York in 1971, where both had worked in community issues, they added William "Char- lie" Chin and renamed themselves A Grain of Sand after one of Chris

and Joanne's first songs. Together they performed at rallies, college meetings, and social gatherings, acting as participants within the movement rather than outside performers.

In doing so, A Grain of Sand wrote songs directly tied into the major cultural tenets of the movement. On their self-titled album, released in 1972, it seems as if the band distilled down all the major tenets of the movement into a record: odes penned to panethnic identity, cross-racial coalition building, a class analysis of racial oppres- sion, a treatise against American imperialism in South East Asia, and calls for Asian Americans to take pride in their heritage. While much of this new Asian American political ideology was developed in the



limited space of college campuses, A Grain of Sand took the ideas, transformed them into song, and brought them out to a popular audience to take root and proliferate. Consider their song, "We Are the Children":

We are the children of the migrant worker / we are the children of the internment camp / sons and daughter of the railroad work- ers / who leave their stamp on Amerika / Sing a song for ourselves / what do you have to lose? / sing a song for ourselves / we got the right to choose.34

In this song, "we" is clearly a reference to Asian Americans sharing a common set of histories, not just a singular one. The "children of the migrant worker" refers to Filipino Americans. The "offspring of the concentration camp" were clearly Japanese Americans and the "sons and daughters of the railroad builder" symbolized Chinese Americans. However, rather than identify these groups individually, A Grain of Sand unites them under the pronoun "we," making the heritage of one the heritage of all. This shared history allows Asian Americans to one day "leave their stamp on Amerika" as not just an American, but as an international union of Third World peoples. Moreover, by saying "we got the right to choose," they point out how panethnicity is created through construction and involvement versus being a "natural" state of identity formation. To choose panethnicity meant to adopt a political and social identity because, for Asian Amer- icans living under the yoke of "Amerika," what did they have to lose? Moreover, their music was firmly situated within a familiar Amer-

ican musical idiom-folk-lending to it a certain identity politics based on music genre alone. With their two acoustic guitars (played by Iijima and Wong) and Miyamoto's piercing vocals, A Grain of Sand's arrangements and harmonies were clearly influenced and inspired by the works of popular folk artists such as the Kingston Trio and the Weavers. But folk music, as a genre, had already waned considerably in popularity by the mid-1960s and by the time A Grain of Sand and others, like the group Yokohama, California, had embraced its forms in the early 1970s, acoustic folk was all but an anachronism in American popular music. However, for A Grain of Sand, folk was not only a tactically useful

music-for its mobility and lack of electrical needs-but also, argu- ably, a symbolic genre as well. It is hard to ignore how closely A Grain of Sand's songs elided with uniquely American values long associated with folk music's practitioners and audience, namely social justice, working-class concerns, and communal struggle. In other words, by performing folk music, A Grain of Sand and other folk artists confirmed their "American-ness" through musical idiom alone.


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It must be carefully but emphatically stated that while A Grain of Sand represents one of the significant musical groups that emerged in this era, they were by no means the representative or archetype group. While their album was probably the most identifiably movement-related musical work to have come out in that era, they were far from the only Asian American musicians active at the time. More to the point, A Grain of Sand's target audience required a level of political sophistication, not to mention social acceptance, that would have stunted their ability to become truly popular with a mass audience. It's telling, for example, that in a recent exhibit of the musical and

visual arts of the 1970s at the Asia Pacific Cultural Center of Oakland

(California), titled "Music of a Movement," most of the bands included do not seem to be anywhere as politically charged as A Grain of Sand. Browsing the exhibit, what appears evident is that while many groups of this time, such as the Fabulous Mystifiers (later the Source), Abacus, and Max B, were inspired by the events of the movement, they were not necessarily composing songs that directly dialogued with the movement's ideologies or tenets. However, it could also be argued that the mere presence of Asian American bands-many of them deliber- ately panethnic in their composition with Chinese, Japanese, and Fili- pino members-was a political statement in and of itself given the relatively paucity of them in the mainstream music industry.

It should also be noted that while A Grain of Sand's lone album

was released on Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber's small, politically oriented Paredon label, other artists were making in-roads with larger music industry imprints. For example, Dakila was a Bay Area-based Filipino American rock / funk band that signed to Epic Records in 1972. Japanese American guitarist Michael Sasaki was an integral member and eventual producer for the San Francisco r&b band Cold Blood, which was signed to Warner, Reprise, and ABC. Neither group dabbled in ethnic politics. Dakila's liner notes told listeners that "the new flavor is Tagalog; it's the Phillipines. Just a taste more jungle than you're used to," eerily repeating the move to "foreign-ize" an American group just as James Shigeta had been similarly treated over a decade prior.35 It would appear that the idea of Americans of Asian descent forming a rock band was untenable to the label-they needed to mark the group as different, both as a potentially exotic sell- ing point, but also to explain their racialized difference in appear- ance and language.

However, the most successful among these groups to emerge in the 1970s managed to make popular art without having to sacrifice political commitment. If A Grain of Sand documented the political im- mediacy of the early 1970s, the music of the late 1970s and early 1980s started to move in more musical directions to explore the cultural di-



mensions of the community. Foremost among these groups was the panethnic ensemble of Hiroshima, led by Dan and June Kuramoto. Hiroshima began as a group based out of Japantown, San Francisco.

Spearheaded by the Kuramotos and Johnny Mori, the group named itself Hiroshima after the first city to fall victim to the atomic bomb but saw themselves as the phoenix that rose from the ashes. They remain, to this day, one of the most commercially successful Asian American groups in history, signed to Epic and Arista for more than ten years, with both a gold record (1985's Another Place) and Gram- my-nominated album (1983's Third Generation) among their many ac- complishments. Hiroshima began as a fusion group, not in terms of the commer-

cial genre they were seeking to fit into, but in terms of the melange of music and sound they dealt with. Like A Grain of Sand, Hiroshi- ma sought to create and reflect a new, unique identity through their music, but while A Grain of Sand relied mostly on the textual aspect of lyricism, Hiroshima added a musical element. In their conception, music was the way through which they could explore their identity, using sound to tease out the nuances that went into their concept of Asian America.

The main method through which Hiroshima tried to achieve this sound was by using traditional Asian instruments in their fusion band, namely taiko drumming, koto playing, and Asian woodwinds.36 In a 1975 documentary, Cruisin' J-Town, the drummer Mori elaborat- ed on how the sound of his drumming reflected his perspective on identity, saying,

I can relate more to a black or a Chicano than, I think, to a per- son from Japan. So that's why creating an Asian American thing, that I can feel comfortable with, I feel is very important. It was starting to dawn on me that music is another expression that I could possibly use to get into an Asian American identity type thing. And how that relates to taiko is playing a far out Japanese instrument and developing a new culture, a new Japanese Amer- ican culture."3

Mori refers to the traditional Japanese practice of taiko drumming, but for him taiko becomes an instrument through which he can express his unique identity and experience, thus changing the context of taiko from a Japanese musical form to an Asian American one. Like- wise, Dan Kuramoto expanded on Mori's points by adding,

Maybe it was kind of nervy, but we wanted to say something about Asian American people to everybody, everywhere, this is how we feel and these are the emotions that we have and these


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are some of the things that have meant a lot to us and created a lot of importance in our lives. This is our music and we share this with you. Can you begin to see us other than Charlie Chan and all this other stuff? We're real people with really real lives and we wanted to make a statement musically that way.38

For Hiroshima, this statement was expressed through sound. Their music often included the inclusion of traditional Asian instrumenta-

tion such as taiko drumming, kotos (zithers), and Chinese woodwinds. The resulting music had nuances of Eastern music, but was threaded into a pastiche of popular American styles as well: funk, rock, soul, and jazz. If Asian America was supposed to represent a forged identity from the confluence of East and West, Hiroshima's music provided a musical envisionment of what that mixture would sound like.

It is important to contextualize when and where Hiroshima was emerging on the popular scene. While the Asian American population was still tiny in the 1970s, less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, they were gaining recognition with formal social and political spheres. In 1978 the Japanese American Citizens League began a formal redress and reparations movement for Japanese Americans interned during World War II. The following year the Congress and Pres. Jimmy Carter signed a formal proclamation designating an Asian/Pacific Heritage Week to run for ten days in May (this was extended to a month in 1990). Also in the same year, the United States normalized diplomatic relations with China, leading to the reunifi- cation of Chinese American families. This was all happening with the backdrop of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and a new generation of South East Asian refugees entering the United States.

A Grain of Sand and Hiroshima-along with other musical peers- came out of a generation of artists influenced-though not always reflective-of the political zeitgeist that surrounded them. While not archetypes, they helped inspire and predict groups that would follow in the 1980s such as the fusion groups Hot Cha and Noh Buddies, both of which featured panethnic ensembles playing a mix of Asian, Afro- Cuban, African American, and other music styles while still grounding themselves with some level of overt identity/ethnicity politics. These models-fusing music as well as fusing politics and aesthetics- would take greater shape throughout the 1980s, especially in the Asian American jazz community, but would confront a new challenge by the 1990s.39 Whereas what Asian Americans had to confront before was

the complexities of American society and its racial quagmire, what they now had to deal with was their own internal diversity, one that threat- ened the collapse of the very structure of Asian America that activists had fought to establish twenty years prior.



The New Asiatics: Asian American Music

in the 1990s and Beyond

One of the great ironies to emerge from the Asian American Move- ment is that just at the moment where it began to bear social changes on American society, larger forces began to unravel the delicate tap- estry that panethnicity spun. For many reasons 1965 would be a watershed year in American history (both political and cultural)- marked by both racial turmoil and political assassinations. However, 1965 was also the year that Congress passed an Immigration Act that would dramatically change American society in the decades to follow. Influenced by both Civil Rights Movement lobbying as well as cold war diplomacy considerations, the Immigration Act of 1965 over- turned the racial quotas established in the 1952 McCarran-Walters Act. Whereas Asian countries like China and Korea had severe quota limits prior (100 emigres allowed a year), these numbers now jumped to 20,000 a year. The Chinese American population, for example, more than tripled between the years 1960 and 1980 as a result of the act.40

The net effect of this demographic wave that would soon over- whelm Asian America is astutely recognized by sociologist Michael Omi, who writes,

It is indeed ironic that the term Asian American came into vogue, in the late-1960s, at precisely the moment when new Asian groups were entering the U.S. who would render the term prob- lematic. Ethnicity, class, nativity, and generational differences have manifest themselves in distinct political agendas.41

The panethnic model, forged through collective struggle by second- and third-generation Asian Americans, would now face the existence of new generations who were either immigrant-born or born after the events of the 1960s, creating a significant gap in historical experience between these two groups. Asian America shifted from being a primarily American-born population to a primarily immigrant-born community during the 1980s. This new population is largely removed from the historical events and significance of the 1960s and 1970s, at- tached to the Asian American Movement mostly through collegiate education, not direct participation.

This is not to say that Asian American panethnicity and the ideals of the movement have been on their last legs, however. The 1990s emerged as another watershed period. Asian America now is made up of very different class, cultural, linguistic, and generational communities, spanning the gap from wealthy Hong Kong businessmen with American MBAs to poverty-stricken Hmong refugees still struggling to create a written language, let alone learn English. Likewise,


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cultural politics around race and ethnicity are juggled alongside issues around gender, sexuality, class, and, increasingly, subculture as other sites for identity formation. Especially in backlash against the masculinist tone of early ethnic nationalism, Asian Americans are con- fronting issues of identity in more complex ways that include but are not limited to or beholden to ethnicity. Political commentator Eric Liu writes, "We are inventors, all. We assemble our selves from fragments of story. Every identity is a social construction, a drawing of arbitrary lines. But are all identities equally arbritary-and equally necessary?"42 Liu's desire is for a "cost- free, neutral, fluid" identity, one that is chosen rather than imposed. If Liu's viewpoints, as a post-1965, second-generation Chinese Amer- ican, are indicative of his other peers, then one can better understand the increasing ambivalence that Asian American musicians demon- strate toward identity politics in their artistic production. Another perspective on contemporary Asian American cultural politics is offered by Lisa Lowe, who reminds us,

Rather than considering "Asian American identity" as a fixed, established "given," perhaps we can consider instead "Asian American cultural practices" that produce identity; the process- es that produce such identity are never complete and are always constituted in relation to historical and material differences.43

This postmodern concept of ethnicity runs against the grain of the dominant form of ethnic nationalism that pervaded the movement's identity politics. While the movement attempted to create an identity by fixing its place with certain themes-pioneer histories, shared oppressions, similar class origins-by the 1990s the fallacy of such rigid identity constructions were laid bare for critique. The "historical and material differences" Lowe refers to are ever more apparent in the 1990s with the growth in this new second generation of Asian Americans, unlikely, unknowing, and sometimes unwilling heirs to the legacy of the movement.

This ambivalence emerges in the musical forms that Asian Ameri- cans have involved themselves with this decade, creating two parallel developments running alongside one another. On one hand, there are still musicians connected and committed to a sense of communi-

ty, social justice, and identity politics in the same way Hiroshima and A Grain of Sand were in the 1970s. On the other hand, a wave of young Asian Americans are now entering into the popular music industry as singers, rappers, rockers, and musicians. While they have yet to crack the glass ceiling in the recording industry (merely a handful are signed to major labels), they have become a viable and, in some cases, seminal force in popular music. They are spearheading a ma-



jor push into the popular media by working independently and thriv- ing in smaller niches of the music market. In contrast to the previous generation, who made music "for, by and about" Asian Amerians, many of the new artists seek to make music for an audience beyond their ethnic constituency. This doesn't equate to a rejection of an ethnic audience, but they're not seeking dialogue solely with that community. Their music is, as the cliche goes, "for everyone." We can see the range of perspectives just by looking at Asian Amer-

ican hip-hop and how it has changed since the 1990s. Hip-hop, as performance artist Coco Fusco writes, "is perhaps today's most reso- nant cross-cultural American language for defiant self-affirmation."44 It is little surprise that Asian American youth would become involved in the musical form. However, there is a marked difference between the rap groups of the early 1990s and their peers a decade later. At the beginning of the 1990s, many rap groups, of all ethnic back-

grounds, were under the sway of politically oriented hip-hop, led by icons such as Public Enemy, the X-Clan, and Ice Cube. This was music meant to educate, incite, organize, and illuminate, music "for the people," for the promotion of ethnic pride and power. Asian Ameri- cans were no less attracted to this clarion call than anyone else. Groups like the Seoul Brothers (Seattle), Fists of Fury (San Francisco), and Yel- low Peril (New Jersey) formed, adapting Public Enemy's description of rap music as "the Black CNN" and molding it into a soapbox. Davis Yee, of the Davis, California-based hip-hop group the Asiatic Apos- tles, noted, "We need to be very vocal, because Asian Ameicans are still an 'invisible minority."' Thus, through their hip-hop performanc- es, the Apostles hoped to reach an Asian American constituency and educate them on community affairs and concerns. Yee continues, "Rap is becoming more and more popular among Asians.... I want our group to stir up controversy and talk about important issues."45 This is essentially an updated version of what folk artists like A

Grain of Sand were saying in the 1970s. Today's hip-hop groups, like yesterday's folk artists, are taking a popular form and using it to reach an audience of their peers with the hopes of educating and organiz- ing them. As we can see, the influence of the movement lives on in these rap groups-both in terms of the key issues (antiracism, social justice, fighting stereotypes) as well as using music as a vehicle to communicate these issues.

For example, in the opening verses from Fists of Fury's "After School," rapper C.Y.A.T. (Cute Young Asian Terrorist, a / k / a Darow Han) says,

School / it's a place where we're sent as children/many times the teacher torment [unintelligible] / separate the class into what? /


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her favorite students from the darker-skinned whites / many of us Asians were thus sent off / as a model minority / forget the class majority / seen as the smarter ones / never ever the poor- er ones / still we fight over crumbs.46

In this song, C.Y.A.T. addresses the construction of the model-minority myth among Asian American students and its inherent racial di- visiveness. For him, hip-hop is the means through which he can reach an audience to educate. Han says in a personal interview, "We just felt that it [rap] had a lot of strengths as far as being a cutting edge medium. Probably politically, it had the most potential. It was the music that most young people who were politically attuned would be listening to."47 The idea Han expresses, rap as a medium for political discourse, is crucial here because the major change that occurs moving into the mid-1990s is the presence of more Asian American hip-hop artists who are interested in rap music as a career or culture. I argue that artists like Asiatic Apostles and Fists of Fury were the lingering manifesta- tion of postmovement activist/ artists to exist in the 1990s, but since then the new generation of Asian American youth have focused on other issues through their music. This newer generation is exemplified by artists such as Los Ange- les' Key Kool (a third-generation Japanese American) and by the Mountain Brothers, a trio of Chinese American rappers from Phila- delphia. The Mountain Brothers are not trying to promote a colorblind philosophy; they mention that they're Asian in their songs, but unlike Fists of Fury identity politics doesn't land in the center of their musical map. In their song "Days of Being Dumb" the Mountain Brothers' Chops begins by rhyming,

flippin' the page / back in the days / when this little, fat Asian kid would sit makin' beats in the basement / on a basic roll and drum box / stolen from Scott's / sneakin' and listenin' to Dr. Rock-N'-Dallas in the PM on weekends.48

In this example, ethnic identity is normalized; Chops mentions his ethnicity, but it's only one of the many signifiers he lays out. In the brief bars we listened to, he references retail stores, radio personali- ties, and his own interest in producing-all dimensions to his per- sonality and experience that define who he is. Ethnicity is part of it, but it is not necessarily the most important or anything to draw attention in an overt, political fashion. The connections-the "identity allegiances," if you will-that Chops draws are beyond just ethnic; they are geographic, they are generational. Even musically speaking, the kind of lush, organic production of Chops's beats on "Days of



Being Dumb" recalls the same kind of open, full-sound pioneered by Philadelphia soul artists like Gamble and Huff, Dexter Wanzel, the O'Jays, and MSFB. Thus, on multiple levels, both musical and textual, Chops is signifying his spaces of identity, couched as much (if not more) on being a hip-hop generation Philadelphian. The audience he tries to communicate with on this implicit level doesn't avoid or ignore Asian Americans, but it isn't exclusively targeted at them either. In contrast, groups like the Fists of Fury and Yellow Peril adopted

relatively generic forms of production, ones that signified that they were drawn from the rap music aesthetic but that lacked a sense of place or time. Bluntly said, they were functional beats that gave the artists a medium to rhyme over, but beyond that, they don't make the same kind of statement that Chops is able to in his work. Both sets of artists are serious about their music, but whereas Fists of Fury are more focused on the politics, the Mountain Brothers seem more polished in their aesthetics. This movement, from the political to the aesthetic, has taken place among Asian American artists before, most notably in the 1980s in both music and film. Wei chronicles,

Although aesthetic Asian American artists share the same themes (identity, cultural conflict, alienation, etc.) as political ones, they are less concerned with the political content of their work than with whether it fulfills their artistic vision and standards. They are also often more interested in exploring the universal rather than the particularistic aspects of those concerns and seek to make them recognizable to as wide an audience as possible, including non-Asian Americans.49

Wei's dichotomy between "aesthetic" and "political" art is danger- ously reductive and too easily separates the two fields. To simply separate art into either "aesthetic" or "political" work seems to obviate the possibility that many artists, whether consciously or not, were working in both realms. Moreover, Wei avoids talking about how audience members might make up their own minds as to a particular artwork's political or aesthetic value. Nonetheless, if we use Wei's argument as a rough description for a shift in focus, it would appear that in the 1990s groups like the Mountain Brothers have followed a similar path-seeking universal appeal rather than marketing themselves solely to Asian Americans. The Mountain Brothers' producer, Chops (a/k/a Scott Jung), notes that "our core audience is really lyric and beat heads. Those are the ones that will be able to fully appreciate what it is that we do."50 There's no mention, either implicitly or explicitly, of race or ethnicity. Instead they seek to appeal to "lyric and beat heads," that is, fans who would appreciate the Mountain Brothers based on their aesthetic tastes. What's crucial here is that the


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group is not repudiating politics-as per Wei's observations in the 1980s-but more than just their focus lies in a self-defined artistry that is neither explicit with nor absent of politics. Just as Pat Suzuki and James Shigeta's presence in the 1950s music industry was surely a startling aberration, to some degree, so too are the presence of artists like the Mountain Brothers within the black / white color line of the rap industry. Just to complicate this even further, there are artists such as Jamez (a / k / a James Chang) from Flushing, Queens, who calls his rap music part of an "Azian/Pacific Renaissance." Through his music he tries to educate young Asian Americans to their "cultural heritage of music" that he feels is lacking in his generation. To do so, Jamez blends traditional Korean and contemporary hip-hop aesthetics in an attempt to reach Korean American youth through the universal experience of music. Drawing from his own personal narrative, Jamez feels like his discovery of Korean music better enabled him to explore the nuances of his identity. He shares, "in the past, I had always tried to be somebody else (black, white, Latino, etc.) because I never felt comfortable speaking in Korean. I spoke other people's experiences, listened to other peoples' dialects. Learning about Korean music was like learning my native tongue, albeit musically."51 For his audience, Jamez suggests, "So many of us are influenced by Western standards of beauty, speech and music. I want to expose Asian Americans to their rich legacy of music. Our beat of life."52 Jamez partially resembles a fusion of the parallel paths of Asian American musical development since the 1990s. While he is informed by a political perspective that is postmovement in origin, he is not necessarily solely focused on Asian America per se. Specifically, as a Korean American himself, Jamez is trying to educate Korean Ameri- cans to their specific cultural heritage. In this way, Jamez's works are not like A Grain of Sand's "We Are the Children" with its panethnic vision. Instead, Jamez actually engages a cultural/political viewpoint that may be described as transnational or diasporic. He perceives culture in a more global perspective and his hip-hop is the bridge between traditional Korea and Koreans raised in America. This is a de-

cidedly different outlook compared to postmovement artist / activists who saw their work as contributing to the formation of an Asian American nation. Jamez falls between the cracks-or perhaps rises above them-but either way, his work suggests an even greater diversity in thought among the newer generation.53

In the midst of these new and still unanswered questions, what is starting to become clear is that the Asian American community is one marked by difference, ambivalence, and a changing attitude toward identity. The community is struggling to deal with the so-called post-



modern moment and the belief in antiessentialism, where identities become fluid and nonproprietary. The music of Asian Americans since the 1990s suggests that they are now as concerned with their careers as entertainers and artists as with their roles as community represen- tatives in the cultural arena. While their mere existence as legitimate players in the music industry is not unprecedented, the volume of artists is. In the past year, artists like Chinese American r&b singer Coco Lee and Filipino American rap producer Chad Hugo (of the Neptunes) have come into prominent, national attention, taking their place along longer known stars such as Mixmaster Mike (DJ for the Beastie Boys), DJ Q-Bert and James Iha, guitarist of the now-defunct Smashing Pumpkins. Especially when Coco Lee, already an international star in Hong

Kong and Taiwan, came back to the United States for her first Amer- ican debut, publications like the Village Voice predicted that Lee might lead an influx of Asian artists that would rival the Latin pop explo- sion of 1999 which propelled the careers of Ricky Martin and Jenni- fer Lopez.54 Such a moment has yet to break but if and when it does, the question needs to be asked: would that be a sign of America's embrace of Asian Americans? Or simply another example of Ameri- ca's hunger to consume ethnic chic fashion?

Concluding on Consumption

One question that has gone unasked in this discussion is where consumption fits in. While the examples cited above look at how Asian Americans have produced music, how they consume music is an equally valid path of inquiry. Deborah Wong has already started to push for thinking on this topic, writing, "Asking what music an Asian American listens to is a way into considering how and why Asian Americans make choices about identity, pleasure, and location, not least because very little public culture is Asian American."55 As noted, many of the artists discussed thus far have generally

struggled in order to gain any kind of visibility. Wong suggests that in the absence of "Public Displays of Asianess," as a recent confer- ence on Asian American popular culture named itself, consumption becomes a crucial site to look at how consumerism is an act of iden-

tity formation just as much as cultural production. Almost as if in dialogue with Wong, Joseph Lam takes the matter of consumption one step further:

Asian American includes all musics they use to express themselves. The ethnic identity or the composer who created the music or the historical origin of the styles and genres offer no fool-


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proof tests of what is and is not Asian American music. The tests are in the ways Asian American meanings are constructed and negotiated by composers, performers, and audiences within specific contexts of sponsorship, mass media, recognition, and other musical and social forces.56

In essence, by looking at how Asian Americans utilize music, rather than just producing it, Lam suggests that what constitutes the field can include musical works not even created by them. And while one can argue that such an open statement practically negates the use- fulness of defining Asian American music to begin with, Lam opens up the idea of culture-not just music-to include the actions of not just producers but consumers as well. Culture thus becomes more meaningful than just a one-way delivery of products and artifacts (films, books, songs) and suggests that there is a constant exchange of meanings between those who create art and those who consume it. Lam's open-ended treatise on Asian American music allows for an involvement of players that isn't simply generous but radically changes how they-as both a community and also as individual agents-help constitute their own cultural forms and practices.

For example, in writing about how young South Asian Americans (known as desi) have absorbed and appropriated elements of hip-hop style and fashion in New York, cultural studies scholar Sunania Maira argues against any simple reading that would either conclude that desi youth have claims to some kind of hip-hop authenticity or that there are practicing a new kind of minstrelsy by rejecting their brown skin and replacing it with black style. Her conclusion is far more nu- anced in trying to understand how, when, and why patterns of consumption enter for desi youth, especially in the context of understand both the migratory flows of bodies across borders (vis-a-vis immigration) and flows of culture that run globally. Maira's work points to ways of thinking that could well assist future scholars in trying to unpack the complexities around consumption, noting,

There is no "authentic" reading of the consumption of hip hop by desi youth, but there is indeed a politics of authenticity that has meaning to the lives of these youth, and that is constantly being negotiated with references to their positionings in a larger Indian diaspora and to global flows of culture.57

Clearly, consumption is fast becoming a fertile ground for scholarly inquiry and needs to play some role in any future theorization around Asian Ameican musical practices.

As noted earlier, these contemporary times offer a new challenge to understanding the contours and directions of Asian American pop-



ular music and its relationship to their community. It has not been my intent to argue that there is a one-to-one relationship between the two. Eyerman and Jamison write, "Music, like art generally, opens experience to the potentialities of life, but it does not necessarily pro- scribe them or even describe them."58 Listening to music cannot fill in all the blanks that we have in regards to the trajectory the community has taken across history. Yet at the same time, I am remind- ed of George Wolfe's quest to locate "the secrets and truths and rhythms of a time period" through song and dance and I believe that such an exploration of Asian American music can yield such hidden histories. Asian American music, like Asian America itself, comes about from the willful effort of people to imagine new spaces of being, new ways of living. Thus the story we find between the notes of Asian American music is sometimes nothing less than the story of Asian America itself.

NOTES

1. Taken from the musical's production notes. 2. I use the term public culture to denote that I'm primarily interested in expressive

culture within the public sphere. 3. Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, N.H.: Wesley-

an University Press, 1993), 57. 4. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New

York: Penguin, 1989). 5. Takaki has been criticized for this practice since he tends to conflate literary piec-

es as historical fact.

6. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 176.

7. Joseph Lam, "Embracing 'Asian American Music' as an Heuristic Device," Jour- nal of Asian American Studies 2, no. 1 (Feb. 1999): 47.

8. Ibid., 30.

9. Adelaida Reyes, Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free (Philadelphia: Temple Uni- versity Press, 1999), 168.

10. See Simon Frith, "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music," in Music and Society, ed. Richard Lepper and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 133-49, or Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

11. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 6.

12. Frith, "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music," 140. 13. By "pre-panethnic," I mean the time before Asian Americans adopted a unified,

panethnic political/ social identity. 14. Taken from an exhibit hosted at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, Wash-

ington, circa 1997.

15. George Yoshida, Reminiscing in Swing Time: Japanese Americans in American Popu- lar Music, 1925-1960 (San Francisco: National Japanese American Historical Society, 1997); Forbidden City, U.S.A., directed by Arthur Dong, DeepFocus Productions, 1989.


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16. See Roger Daniels's Prisioners Without Trial (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993) for a detailed history of the internment process and experience. 17. See Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, chap. 10. 18. Ibid.; Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York: Twayne,

1991). 19. Chan, Asian Americans. 20. More will be said about this landmark piece of legislation but, in short, the 1965

Immigration Act abolished racial quotas on immigration, leading to massive waves of Asian immigration in the decades to follow.

21. Jimmy Shigeta, Scene One, Silver Slipper (LP 5000). 22. It should also be noted, however, that the other three critics cited, Cobina Wright,

Harold Hildegrand of the Los Angeles Examiner, and George Jackson of the Herald-Ex- press do not make mention of Shigeta's ethnicity at all and speak instead to his singing and acting talent. Again, this is likely deliberate on the part of the label packagers.

23. Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 179.

24. Flower Drum Song: Original Broadway Soundtrack, songs/lyrics by Richard Rodg- ers and Oscar Hammerstein, Columbia, 1959 (OS 2009).

25. Chop suey is entirely a Chinese American invention-the dish does not exist in any traditional Chinese cuisine.

26. See Amerasia Journal 15, no. 1 (1989), commemorative issue, "Salute to the '60s and '70s Legacy of the San Francisco State Strike." Also William Wei, The Asian Ameri- can Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

27. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 31. 28. William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and Ameri-

can Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 9. 29. This is not to say that various Asian ethnic groups in America didn't have cul-

tural identities. I am focusing on the notion of a panethnic Asian American cultural identity.

30. Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 6. 31. Wei, Asian American Movement, 64. 32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 35. 34. A Grain of Sand, "We Are the Children," A Grain of Sand: Music For the Struggle

by Asians in America, Paredon, 1973 (P-1020) 35. Dakila, Dakila, Epic, 1972 (KE 31756). 36. It should be noted that traditional South Asian instrumentation, particularly ta-

bla drumming and sitar playing, was already making its way into white and black jazz and rock fusion bands of the same era. There is undoubtebly social/ cultural implica- tions arising from this practice, but I argue that they are different than Hiroshima's use of instruments from "their" heritage.

37. Cruisin J-Town, directed by Alan Kondo, CrossCurrents Media, 1976. 38. Ibid.

39. I have left out a significant musical community that follows Hiroshima in the early 1980s but precedes most of the artists I talk about in the 1990s: Asian American jazz musicians. There are two reasons for the exclusion: (1) this community has already been discussed at length in works by Deborah Wong (1993), Susan Asai (1995), and other Asian American music scholars; and (2) their integration of political and aesthetic ideas is close enough to Hiroshima's work that most of the points I could make about their relationship to Asian America would largely be redundant. Nonetheless, I would be remiss in not at least acknowledging the importance of such jazz artists as Jon Jang, Francis Wong, Fred Ho, Mark Izu, and Tatsu Aoki (among many others) to establish-



ing a successful and prominent Asian American musical movement. See Susan Asai, "Transformations of Tradition: Three Generations of Japanese American Music Mak- ing," Musical Quarterly (Fall 1995). Also Deborah Wong, "Just Being There: Making Asian American Space in the Recording Industry," in Musics of Multicultural America: A Study of Twelve Musical Communities, ed. Kip Lornell and Anne Rasmussen (New York: Schirmer, 1993). 40. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 421. 41. Michael Omi, "Teaching, Situating, and Interrogating Asian American History,"

Magazine of History 10, no. 4 (Summer 1996): 21. 42. Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (New York: Random House,

1998), 64. 43. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 64. 44. Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion In the Americas (New

York: New Press, 1995), 32. 45. Darow Han, "Asian American Nation," S.F. Weekly, June 24, 1992. 46. Fists of Fury, "After-School," demo tape, ca. 1992. 47. From a telephone interview conducted in the fall of 1992. 48. Mountain Brothers, "Days of Being Dumb," Self, vol. 1, Pimpstrut, 1998 (MBPS

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50. From a personal interview conducted in the winter of 1996. 51. From a personal interview conducted in the fall of 1998. 52. Jamez, Z-Bonics, F.O.B., 1998. 53. Amy Ling, ed., Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts (Philadelphia:

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ing," unpublished paper, 1999, 3. 56. Lam, "Embracing 'Asian American Music' as an Heuristic Device," 53. 57. Sunaina Maira, "Henna and Hip Hop: The Politics of Cultural Production and

the Work of Cultural Studies," Journal of Asian American Studies 3, no. 3 (Oct. 2000): 338.

58. Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 46.


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