research

Mapping the Digital Diaspora of a Dissertation Research Blog

May 4, 2009 – 4:43 pm

At the onset of my field research in summer 2007, I launched a blog – YellowBuzz.org – with the intention to: 1) archive and organize my field notes in textual and audio-visual form; 2) convey my research purpose and progress to informant musicians and the public; 3) self-position as a “participant” in the scene. Since then, I have made over 160 posts, some directly linked and others tangentially related to my research findings about the activities and media of Asian American indie rock musicians. Over the past one and a half years, my field research blog has received attention from both print and online media. Evidently, this blog has constructed a community consisting of musician- and music-enthusiast-visitors with an interest in Asian American and transpacific music-culture.

This past January, I began tracking the blog traffic by using Google Analytics. This service monitors the physical location of site visitors and their interactions with the pages on the site. The geographical data are analyzed in terms of the number of visits per unit of geographical organization such as city, country/territory, sub continent region, and continent. This information is also visualized in the form of an interactive map on which users can zoom in and out of specific locales and find site visit patterns specific to cities, countries, regions, or continents in the world.

Over the last four months, I have been playing with the May Overlay function projecting geospatial patterns of the site traffic on my blog. These interactive moments have helped me imagine interesting questions such as: What is the geography of an electronic community based on the topic of “Asian American music,” the tagline of my blog? What does the geo-spatial terrain of this “digital diaspora” look like? Are there any striking patterns at each of the organizational level namely, the city, country, sub-continental region, and continent? What spatial boundaries are transcended and created in these visualizations? Or, fancifully, how does the digital geography of my blog reconfigure the more general social geography of “Asian America” online or offline?

Today marks a 4-month anniversary of this thought experiment. I decided to take some screen shots of a few of the visualizations that I’ve found more meaningful in Google Analytics. This analysis uses data from a sample of 3,061 site visits collected from January 1 to April 30, 2009. I will highlight a few interesting findings below:

1) Here’s a map of blog visits in various U.S. cities. It appears that the visitors are concentrated in central Virginia (the home of yours truly), New York City, Boulder, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Other than central Virginia and Boulder, these are areas of high concentration of Asian Americans and indie rock activities. I’m not quite sure how to explain the traffic flow from the Denver area (Boulder and Aurora, ranked third and sixth in this map, respectively) other than to link it to the thriving indie rock scene in Boulder and the physical location of an Asian/Japanese music blogger Shay of Sparkplugged.

blog visits in U.S. cities

2) According to this chart, 76% of the site visits have occurred within the boundaries of the United States. Next on the list are Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia, all English-speaking countries with close historical ties to American music. In the continent of Asia, countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Singapore have among the highest number of visitors to my site. I attribute this pattern to my blog posts about U.S.-based artists who have a large following in these particular countries. Specifically, Hsu-nami (of New Jersey) and Johnny Hi-Fi (SF-based) has strong ties to Taiwan; Kite Operations (New-York) to South Korea; Plus/Minus (New York) to the Philippines and Taiwan.

site visits per country

3) This last chart represents the sub-continental spread of the site visits. North America takes the lead (taking 80% of all visits). Northern Europe and Eastern Asia tie as second, followed by South-Eastern Asian and Western Europe. I’m not quite sure how to explain the high number of visits from Northern Europe other than to link it to the popularity of a Taiwanese metal band Chthonic in North Europe. Chthonic has a strong international presence, having worked with producers in Denmark and the U.S. including Rob Caggiano, the guitarist of Anthrax. In 2007, Chthonic toured with the OzzFest and established close ties with Taiwanese-American-led erhu rock group Hsu-nami.

site visits per sub-continent region

So what does this all mean? YellowBuzz, a blog on “Asian American music”, has constructed a global, transnational readership. Asian America in the online digital environment exists beyond the boundaries of the United States and the Asian continent. These observations of transnational crossings work against the geography of Orientalism: a now-classical postcolonial theory referring to the representational control of the non-west by western-produced discourse. The transnational digital diaspora of YellowBuzz has tampered with the so-called east-west binary.

Now if I were serious about pursuing the research on the transnationality of Internet music journalism, I would look for a correlation between blog content and traffic patterns. This would require systematic, post-to-post observations. I would also consider mapping information regarding Internet access and user demographic with the intention to find links between the blog statistics and general Internet sociality. I would also look for statistical and mapping methods more powerful than Google Analytics.

But – to get back to my dissertation that asks: What paths do musicians and their music take as they establish routes crossing territories constructed by nation-states, corporations, international laws, etc? Unfortunately, these visualizations lack the analytical strength to provide an insight on the musicians’ perspective on the scene. They have offered a perspective on media, in particular in understanding the role of a music blog in constructing “Asian America.”

In the coming months, I will be working on a digital humanities project with Joe Gilbert at UVa’s Scholars’ Lab pursuing questions related to the musicians’ side of the story. I hope to unravel the terrain of musicians’ sociality within the transnational scene of indie rock music by mapping out their tours, social networks on (SNS), and record distribution. Meanwhile, I’m experiencing a bout of euphoria loving the fact that I have reclaimed a free market analytical tool offered by Google for my academic(-y) ethnomusicological thought experiment.

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This post was originally posted on May 4, 2009 on the UVa Scholars’ Lab Blog and my field research blog Yellowbuzz.

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pop culture & media

Dodging Bombs, Playing Heavy Metal: Reflecting on the Film Heavy Metal in Baghdad

April 13, 2009 – 5:40 pm

What’s it like to be an Iraqi musician playing music of “foreign”, “Western”, or American influences? How does one live as a musician or an individual in contemporary Baghdad? Produced and Directed by Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi and presented by VICE magazine, the documentary film Heavy Metal in Baghdad offers some answers to these questions contributing to a much needed public discourse about the social life of Iraqi citizens living on the cusp between life and death. The film premiered on the Sundance Channel last month.

The film documents the story of an Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda tracing its transformations from rehearsing in the basement of a commercial building during Saddam Hussein’s regime, through dodging bombs while facing death threats after the U.S. invasion and the reactive insurgences, to fleeing to exile in Syria. The story focuses less on the band’s music than on their lives as musicians and Iraqi citizens living in tumultuous war violence and tribulations. It also shows the emotional centrality of this music in the lives of these musicians and fans. Acrassicauda’s drummer Marwan Riyadh describes his powerful connection to heavy metal succinctly: “If I didn’t play drums as hard as I can, I’m going to kill someone.”


Acrassicauda perform a show powered by a generator at the Al-Fanar Hotel in Baghdad, 2005.

One member of Acrassicauda says, “It’s so amazing that we’re still talking and breathing.” Since the making of the film, Firas al-Lateef, Marwan Riyadh, and Faisal Talal of Acrassicauda have fled to Istanbul, Turkey. Recently, they resettled in the United States, with the help of International Rescue Committee and the director/producer of the film Alvi, now living in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. They’re working hard to get their ends met, finding instruments.

In Iraq, the band identified with the West and the United States singing in (North American) English, listening to Metallica, and wearing Slipknot tshirts. I’m anxious to follow the band after their relocation to the U.S. How will they survive in the U.S. declining economy as Iraqi refugees and musicians? How long would it take before they have sufficient time and funds to start playing music again? How will they distinguish themselves from all other U.S. metal bands? What will they write about in their songs? Will they change their sound?

A couple of weeks ago, Terry Gross of Fresh Air on NPR did a 40-minute interview with lead singer Faisal Talal, drummer Marwan Riyadh, and director/producer Suroosh Alvi. The interview highlights the in-between status of their political existence and the experiences of their forced migration. On the NPR story page, one can also screen the entire film. For those interested, VICE has made a page for those who consider making donations to the band.

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This entry was originally posted on April 13, 2009 on Yellowbuzz.

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research

On “Asian American” Digital Identity Politics

February 4, 2009 – 5:02 pm

Everyday, I receive Google Alerts about any websites, blogs, or news feeds containing the keywords “Asian / American / music” in whatever order and combination that Google search engine finds. Most of the Alerts, unsurprisingly, point to stories related to U.S. politics. Interestingly, around the time of the 2008 Presidential Election, my InBox experienced a minor Google Alert “explosion” with news stories and criticisms listing all the color-based social groups, connecting Obama’s racial politics to the now dominant American ideology of multiculturalism. To my disappointment, none of these news stories included anything substantial information with regards to the Asian American (if there is such a thing) perspective on the Obama and Biden duo.

Is “Asian American” coming to stand in for a keyword, tag (in the speak of blogosphere), or a hip buzzword in our current media environment as digitally informed and constructed? Is there “real content” beyond the textual reference of “Asian” and “American”? If so, how do we assess this content considering the methods of information retrieval, i.e. Google Alerts, and the context of presentation, i.e. hypertextual state of Internet media?

Today, my Google Alerts linked me to a couple of exciting pages of content-worthy materials related to Asian American arts and culture. One of these is a New Yorker article titled “By the Skin of Our Teeth” about “The Shipment”, the new play by Young Jean Lee. The reviewer Hilton Als comments on the Lee’s “irreverent take on racial politics.” Commenting on her 2005 play “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven”, featuring the self-violence of an Asian American female character, Lee declares her attitude toward the state of identity politics in the U.S: “For this project, I decided the worst thing I could possibly do was to make an Asian-American identity-politics show, because it can be a very formulaic, very clichéd genre, and very assimilated into white American culture. It’s almost become part of the dominant white power structure to have identity-politics plays about how screwed-over minorities are. It’s such a familiar, soothing pattern. . . . It’s become the status quo.”

When I read the passage, I thought to myself, “now, here’s a kernel of wisdom” worth pursuing. What does she mean by “identity-politics show”? What consists of this ‘cliché genre’ of formulaic and assimilationist plays? A good content analyst would seek information about the playwright and this play. Before I jumped into my usual mode of performing a search on Google or Wikipedia search on Young Jean Lee, I slowed down and pondered about the path of information that allowed me to arrive at this intellectually compressed bit of information.

The New Yorker tags this article with the following keywords: “The Shipment”; Young Jean Lee; Korean-Americans; Douglas Scott Streater; Race Relations; Asian-Americans; “Pullman, WA.” Google search engines must have picked up this article because of the tag “Asian-Americans.” But search engines are not able to make a qualitative distinction between this article [or other substantive articles] from the sources that simply use “Asian American” as a stand-in for cultural multiplicity and diversity. Unfortunately, Asian America still exists, in the digital environment, mostly under a pile of diversity-bound laundry lists at best, or pornography and ads for mail-order brides or other forms of race-related sex industry, at worst.

The risk of being pigeonholed, tokenized, or even sexualized is no news to individuals of Asian descent in the United States. Playwright Young Jean Lee asserts provocative and vehement critiques for the discursive objectification of Asianness in her 2005 play which opens with a monologue by a woman with the name of “Korean-American”:

“Have you ever noticed how most Asian-Americans are slightly brain-damaged from having grown up with Asian parents? It’s like being raised by monkeys—these retarded monkeys who can barely speak English and are too evil to understand anything besides conformity and status. . . . Asian people from Asia are even more brain-damaged, but in a different way, because they are the original monkey. . . . I am so mad about all of the racist things against me in this country, which is America. Like the fact that the reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we . . . have lower self-esteem. It’s like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features.”

This is intellectually dense, emotionally heavy stuff. But the fact that it’s available in a point-and-click fashion is astounding. Google Alerts prevent information from fossilization. Without Google Alerts, I would find this article somewhere down the line when I do archival search, plowing through databases for historical artifacts. The newness and immediacy of this information would be lost. Also, it would take many more steps to link this article to other articles related to the subject of “Asian / American / music” published today.

The other noteworthy piece Google Alerts linked me to is an interview of jazz pianist Vijay Iyer by RVAjazz blog entitled “Intellect Meets Creativity.” Iyer speaks reflexively about his role as an Indian American musician in the Afro-centric tradition of jazz music: “I’m just fortunate to be able to interact with the music from my perspective, and to reconsider what resonances there might be with my own experience, or with anyone’s. The point is to honor that legacy and not commodify it, but also to learn from it. I think that America was invited to reconsider a lot of this in light of the ascent and success of Obama. Those are symptoms of a larger development in our culture – it’s about who we are and where we are and what time it is!”

The juxtaposition between the New Yorker article on Young Jean Lee’s play and Vijay Iyer’s interview is intellectually curious. Iyer’s perspective on race in America is less dystopic than Lee’s. In fact, his alliance with African American culture and struggle speaks to a larger discourse about race in terms of minoritarian politics, quite contrary to the uncritical multiculturalist orientation. Iyer’s interview could tap into the historical and contemporary moments of Afro-Asian connections formed in anti-racist solidarity.

My research aims to track these moments deliberately and shamelessly, making links and disconnects among them as they occur in real time. Information as such, categorized and recategorized based on similar or dissimilar terms, is generated and circulated at high volume daily on the Internet. Digital technologies allow discourse to flow in disparate, rhizomatic directions. The hypertextual state of Internet media is overwhelming to sort through, but this quality allows information to seep into unexpected cracks and generate surprising juxtapositions. Similar to keywords and tags, identity categories, also reproduce themselves in a semi-irrational, hypertextual fashion in our time. These contradictory patterns as discovered in the digital environment may best represent the schizophrenic style of identity proliferation that would mark our post-identity-politics (or post-Race) age.

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This post was originally posted on February 4, 2009 on Yellowbuzz and the UVa Scholars’ Lab blog.

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pop culture & media teaching

Race and “Air and Simple Gifts” at the Presidential Inauguration

January 27, 2009 – 9:08 am

I’m teaching a 400-level seminar called “Music in Asian America” this semester. Last Tuesday, instead of a class meeting, I created an “inauguration assignment.” The objective of the assignment is to ask the students to examine the musical representations at the inauguration ceremony in light of the current media discourse about Obama’s politics with regards to race and ethnicity. The assignment first asks the students to read SF Gate’s “Asian Pop” columnist Jeff Yang’s controversial article: “Could Obama be the first Asian American president?” and explore a slew of responses to Yang’s article. Then it asks them to post their analysis to the class blog.

The class did a marvelous job discussing the representational politics of multicuturalism exuded by the classical music performance at the ceremony. Immediately, they noticed the seemingly contrived selection of four minority musicians: Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman, Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, African American clarinetist Anthony McGill, and a U.S.-based Venezuelan national pianist named Gabriela Montero.

Introducing a Puritanesque theme, McGill plays the familiar “Simple Gifts”, 19th century Shaker hymn most notably known for American composer Aaron Copland’s citation in Appalachian Spring. Combined with the “Air”, a popular song form of the 16th and 17th century England, this arrangement by pop classical music composer John Williams presents a continuity of the American ‘folk’ culture from its European/English roots. Most explicit part of the musical message perhaps is couched in the role of “Simple Gifts” in the arrangement. In this section of the performance, the musicians, working in intimacy and collaborating with a performed (lip-synched!) vigor, displayed Obama’s politics of social unity in a literalist and sensational way. Also, the reference to Appalachian Spring is no coincidence. Similar to the effect in Copland’s ballet, the “Gifts” citation symbolizes freedom as promised by living a hardworking and simplistic life. Associated with the American ideology of meritocracy or the American Dream, the themes of freedom and hard work, also are evoked by Obama during his inauguration speech.

In his controversial article, Jeff Yang links Obama’s belief in educational achievement and work ethic to what he calls “Asian values,” the impetus to pull up by the bootstraps as perceived to be adopted by Asian immigrants. One student pointed out in class that Yang’s assumption risks reinforcing the model minority myth. Yang’s thesis is better argued in his NPR interview. In it, Yang claims “race more as a metaphor”, as a transmigratable concept away from biological and cultural essentialism, away from the binary and toward the multiplistic approach. I think he’s onto something here. Obama’s multiracial ethnicity and transcultural/transnational upbringing could embody a more fluid way of conceptualizing race and ethnicity. Yang finds these qualities in the present Asian American communities.

Present-day identity politics is not one-dimensional as once it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. Identity politics could work in such a way to allow room for identification “as” and “with.” Many individuals of social groups identify with Obama. And Obama’s unity politics seems to allow him to breach various social divides. Yang’s article should’ve been more accurately titled as “Could Obama identify with Asian America?”

I asked my students, “are there any dangers in conceiving of race as a metaphor? Is race really transmigratable?” Histories of oppression associated with race are still around us. We decided that only parts of race can be deconstructed through cultural criticism, although we hope that someday that race as an social institution and ideology will transmigrate completely and sublimate into thin air.

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This entry was originally posted on January 27, 2009 on Yellowbuzz.

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research

“Digital Credibility” in Field Research

January 5, 2009 – 5:04 pm

I’m an ethnographer/blogger.

My dissertation research investigates the social and musical lives of American rock musicians of Asian descent. On the one hand, I follow the conventional methods of participant observation as I travel to ‘field sites’ such as nightclubs, bars, and coffee shops to witness live performances and hang out with musicians. On the other hand, I participate in the indie music scene by blogging (on yellowbuzz.org) about my field research experiences. My online participation, however disembodied and virtual, is significant due to the centrality of user-produced or independent media in the indie rock music scenes. For the most part, these research methods take on two distinct lives. Sometimes they intersect and yield interesting results.

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Ethnographic work on performing arts can sometimes be logistically challenging in our intensely mediated worlds. Typically I carry a number of recording devices including a digital SLR camera, a mini-DV recorder, a handheld digital audio recorder, a laptop computer, and a notebook. This list can be extended or shortened depending on the nature of activities (interviews vs. live performances). Sometimes it is contingent upon whether I expect to make music during my visits.

Early this fall, I took a series of field research trips to New York City. On one of these trips, I doubled (well, actually tripled) my identity: field researcher, musician, and scholar. I was invited to perform and speak with students at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. I took the chance to double-dip this visit by scheduling some interviews and making plans to attend shows in New York. So I had a four-bag system: a backpack (my laptop, notebook, show flyers, The Village Voice, other paper products), a carry-on suitcase (audio-visual recording devices and clothes), an electric guitar case, and a guitar pedalboard (assorted guitar effect pedals).

After the mini-residency at Wheaton College, I took the Amtrak to New York City. Long story short, my case of guitar effect pedals (worth $1500!) got stolen on the train a few stops north of New York Penn Station. I frantically filed a report with the Amtrak Police. No recovery prevailed. Bummed out as I was, I dragged myself to a midtown bar for an interview with Johnnie Wang of the band A Black China. After I told Johnnie about my misfortunes, he offered to buy me a beer. That was the beginning of our friendship. We bonded over being musicians first, then being Americans of Taiwanese/Asian heritage.

My meeting with Johnnie invigorated me and reminded me of the purpose of my dissertation research. I went to a show the following night in New Jersey and had an interview meeting with Joe Kim of Kite Operations right before my flight back to Charlottesville, with one bag short.

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It took me a while to figure out the educational values and perhaps the theoretical fruitfulness of this experience. This experience can be seen in light of a few issues: methodological approaches to technology, empathy (and relationship) with informants, and researcher’s ‘field identity.’  So, does technology enhance or hinder field research? Frankly, I didn’t end up using most of my recording devices on this trip. During interviews and other exchanges, my informants and I chatted away while I took mental notes. My field-note-taking took place only after the meetings ended.

But oddly, (the loss of) technology brought me closer to my informants. The story of losing my guitar gear generated a sense of empathy from my informants. I share with them an intimate engagement with music-making technology. They too often travel with gear for both music-making and recording purposes and some have encountered experiences, personally or vicariously, with gear problems. In many ways, it’s not strange at all that I carry so much gear with me. The physical and social attachment to technology is a central part of being and moving around in this media-blasted world. In this case, technological gear adorns me as a tech-media savvy researcher and blogger. This kind of ‘digital credibility’ has helped me earn not only access to, but also empathy and respect from my field informants.

Excess technological devices can weigh down users. But this is not only an academic concern specific to field research methods, as it is a more pervasive issue in the digital age. My responsibility is to figure out the best logistical and theoretical approaches to both online and offline interactions in my field research. I’m still working on it.

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This entry was originally posted on January 5, 2009 on Yellowbuzz and the UVa Scholars’ Lab blog.

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pop culture & media

On Race and Obama

March 28, 2008 – 9:25 am

Presidential candidate Barack Obama explicitly discusses the issue of race for the first time in his campaign speech last Tuesday (3/18/08). He does so in part responding to a speech made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Obama puts forth his definition of race as a color-based ideology that leads to inequalities and social divisions. Recognizing the history of black oppression – slavery, Jim Crow, Brown vs Board of Education, Obama makes clears that he is aware of the fact that minorities in the United States still experience the social, political, cultural and even psychological consequences from this racist history. Obama taps into the current discourse regarding social emotionality as he diagnoses the causes of “black anger” and “white resentment.” He then attributes the conflictual sentiments to the issue of race “that we cannot afford to ignore right now.”

Obama is quick to point out the racialized response to the presidential election campaign, i.e. the bipolarization between African American and white votes split between Obama and Clinton, the prediction of white majority’s favoring McCain. This conspicuously leverages his campaign strategy of promising a “union” across the racial and economic divide. This union is a union of “the people,” particularly for and from the children, with the central issue being education. Pitted against the “people” are implicitly the immoral corporations and political lobbyists with self-interested motivation and power to advance for profit. I like that he targets the corporations and the politicians. But I ask, who are these “people”? The American people? The citizens? I dare asking, what about the non-citizens? What about the immigrants?

The compelling effects of Obama’s speech have much to do with the colorblind discourse presently dominating the American public. He’s right to say that there is much cynicism in the current cultural and political atmosphere, and not enough serious discussions about racial equality and justice. He is even progressive-hip to censure the neo-conservative contradiction in “reverse racism” and American public’s compulsory to be politically correct. But unfortunately, this is where he stops.

A good student of American history perhaps, Obama draws the cause-and-effect relations between the historically known facts about African American oppression and the current racial inequalities in the U.S. Obama understands the “white resentment”, particularly toward pro-minority policies such as the Affirmative Action, as a reaction to white American citizens’ claim to their “immigrant story” and the American Dream. Obama criticizes the majority’s blind faith in “equal opportunity.”

The immigrant story is not just a story, it’s a reality. In the resolution portion of his campaign speech, Obama advocates for a sense of hope for change. To the African American voters, he promotes hope and stands behind their grievances for justice. He conflates the conditions of an economically disadvantaged “immigrant father” to the minority side of the divide.

It seems, the immigrant figure can flip-flop from the white majority to the African American minority side of the picture rather conveniently. Obama apparently side-steps the issue of immigration most pertinent to Latinos and Asians living in the U.S..

Race is not just only an issue related to the domestic black-white relations. Race is also central in the polemic about immigration and foreign policies. When Obama denigrates corporations for outsourcing, he ignores an important part of the story: both working Americans’ animosity toward “foreigners” working within the border of United States as migrant workers, or working for an U.S.-based company. The discourse around the War with Iraq and anti-terrorism is undeniably tainted with racializing ideologies about the people of the Middle East and the Islamic faith, both abroad and domestically. Immigrant rights as well as race-based profiling and hate crimes against American citizens and immigrants of Central Asian ethnic and religious affiliations have been downplayed in presidential debates.

Race and Racism come in various shapes and colors. Some are black; some white. And some are brown, some yellow. Whiteness (or blackness) is sometimes defined by while being pitted against brown-ness, yellow-ness, or Muslim-ness. Obama’s “new politics” fails to address an age-old problem about the interethnic and interracial tensions within the United States and abroad. Until the issue of race is addressed multi-dimensionally with nuances regarding citizenship and border, race remains a stultifying divisive force. There is conceivably no true union, if the union is based on hate and exclusion across various borders within and along the U.S., and not on the domocratizing ideals of this country.

If you haven’t watched it yet, please do:

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This entry was originally posted on March 28, 2008 on Yellowbuzz.

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press

Magazine Interview about Asian Pacific American (APA) Music

February 24, 2008 – 9:29 am

I recently participated in an interview conducted by Inkstone, a UVa-based, student-run magazine devoted to Asian Pacific American (APA) literary arts and culture. The coming issue will feature a few UVa scholars (faculty and graduate student) who research APA arts. The issue will be released in late Spring this year. Below are contents most relevant to Yellow Buzz:

// What is Asian-Pacific-American music the way you understand it? //
Oh gees. This sounds like one of the questions on my comprehensive exams! APA music has yet to be canonized, although a number of academics and record labels have attempted to do so. For instance, Itchy Korean Recordings, based out of Houston, TX, released a compilation titled Wok and Roll featuring 14 multiethnic or Asian American punk and hardcore rock bands. Similarly, New York-based label Born in Chinese put out a compilation titled CompilAsian: A Collection of Asian American music, featuring 12 Asian American recording artists and groups of rock, pop, soul, and R&B. These recordings, in part, seek to shatter the silence or invisibility of Asian American representation in mainstream media. Also, MTVchi, an offshoot of the MTV network that broadcast program featuring Chinese American and other Asian American artists and VJ’s in order to cater to and create an Asian American audience, is another example of an institutional attempt to define APA music. This network, however, went off-air in 2005.

In many ways, I think, we’re still struggling with the baggage that otherizes Asian (or Orientalizes) culture inherited from the historical structures of the U.S. music industry. Specifically, the oppressive black-and-white racial binary still to this day informs our commonsensical understanding of commercial musical genres. There are white music genres such as country (historically known as “hillbilly” records) and rock. And there are music categories associated with African American performers and listeners, for example, hip hop and R&B, or the historical genre of “race records.” The racial binary that governs music genre division leaves a conundrum or a dilemma with which Asian American musicians grapple in their everyday struggle to express themselves authentically through the idiom of music.

Contrasting the general lack of APA musical representation is the active presence of Asian American musical production (consumption) at the grass-roots level. The current musical heterogeneity in Asian America resonates with the social diversity of the community. This makes it difficult to derive any generalities about the sound or content of this music. I personally resist the notion of APA music because it has not had a prominent existence in practice. What’s undeniable is the presence of APA musicians, professional, amateur, performing in all musical genres. Part of my academic (and musical) effort is to conjure (however) truthful images and narratives about the lives – and music – of these below-visibility APA musicians. For now, my working definition of APA music is the music made and listened to by individuals of Asian descent in the U.S. The broadness of this definition marks the yet exploratory state of this research.

// What does a reader/listener of APA music have to look forward to? //
Some of the most interesting music in Asian America emerges from the creative ways in which musicians have played with genre conventions. Anime punk (rock) is an example of this. Anime punk is the general subculture of anime in North America. Anime punk bands, mostly based out of New York, LA, and Tokyo, make frequent appearances at anime conventions in the United States.. Many of these bands perform in “character” in ways to resonate existing characters in familiar works of anime or more abstractly, to represent the general aesthetics of anime fashion and imagery. Peelander-Z, a self-identified “Japanese Action Comic Punk” band from Brooklyn, usually dress up in costumes and combine the raw sounds of punk and the interactive techniques from Japanese (as well as Korean and Taiwanese) game shows in performance. Their interactivity with the audience is astounding. I went to their show in Richmond last November and had a blast banging on pots and pans and watching them do “human bowling” offstage. By the way, they are coming to Charlottesville on March 5.

There are many other APA musicians who are doing innovative genre-bending. Carol Bui from DC blends in elements of Vietnamese pop singer Khanh Ly’s vocal style in her Sonic-Youth-and-Riot-Grrrl-inspired post-punk songs. And on her new album Everyone Wore White, Carol covers a traditional Vietnamese folk song a capella. Also, indie experimental rock band Kite Operations, led by Korean American Joseph Kim, just recently covered a Korean pop song in a free-jazz, late-Coltrane style. And, the Korean members of the feminist art rock band Taigaa! from Brooklyn cite “bbong jjak”, a pre-80s style of Korean pop music, as one of their main influences.

Musicians sometimes use conventionally Asian instruments in the context of American pop or rock music. For example, Jack Hsu of the Hsu-Nami fronts a New Jersey-based hard rock band playing amplified erhu, a traditional Chinese 2-string bowed instrument. Jack plays the erhu standing up with it clipped to his waist. He even shreds on his erhu! His main influences include Steve Vai and Slash of Guns N’ Roses.

There are many musicians who consciously derive musical inspirations from contemporary popular music genres in Asia such as JPOP, CPOP (MandoPOP, CantoPOP, and TPOP) and KPOP. Of course, there are many musicians of other genres that are transgressing ethnic/national boundaries. Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project example is a well-known classical music example. Generally speaking, many of these musical links between US and Asia lead to or are products of actual transnational social connections between APA musicians and their Asian peers. This is especially made possible when APA musicians tour in Asia or when Asian groups tour in the U.S. This kind of transpacific social and musical connection – particularly the grassroots ones – is totally exciting to me.

// What will a reader/listener of APA music be disappointed with? //
I think the general lack of visibility of Asian Americans in music is disappointing. Hardly ever we see an Asian American person on mainstream TV network or on the cover of Rolling Stone, Spin or Vibe. There have been, of course, a few iconic Asian/Asian American figures in the U.S. cultural landscape: James Iha of Smashing Pumpkins, Joseph Hahn and Mike Shinoda in Linkin Park, Tony Kanal of No Doubt, Joey Santiago of the Pixies, Allen Pineda in Black Eyed Peas, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Lyrics Born, etc.

One thing that I find quite disappointing is there is much Asian American internal solidarity in music. While there are hip hop groups comprised of all Asian American members, such as the Mountain Brothers, most Asian American musicians perform and collaborate with white American musicians. So far I’ve only encountered a few bands composed of all Asian American members. I would like to see more of that.

// Describe the great and not-so-great moments of APA music history. //
One great moment in APA music history has to be Yoko Ono’s 2007 album release of Yes, I’m a Witch. Ono has unfortunately bore the onus for breaking up the Beatles for the last 35 years (which by the way was constructed mostly by media rumors and gossips). The vast and stimulating works of art and music has yet to be received much positive attention. This 2007 release consists of recordings of Ono’s music re-rendered and re-produced by leading indie rock, hip hop, and electronica figures including Cat Power, DJ Spooky, Le Tigre, Peaches, Flaming Lips, Antony (of Antony and The Johnsons), and many more. This album introduced Ono’s ahead-of-her-time songwriting skills and vocal style to a wide audience. And it has inspired listeners and critics to take Ono’s music and art seriously, possibly for the first time in history.

The appearance of William Hung on American Idol and subsequently in media marked a peculiar moment in APA music history. On the one hand, his performance yielded an array of responses. Some people uncritically embraced him for comic relief or commended him for being “clever” and achieving instant fame. Others vehemently censured his image and accused him of reinscribing the stereotype of the “Asian gook.” There were of course individuals who took his image literally thus perpetuating the Asian model minority myth. This was a very awkward moment for me. I felt like on the one hand, I had to come forward to assert my opinions about the William Hung “phenomenon”. On the other hand, I was intellectually curious about the complex construction and reception of his stardom. Politically, I would say, it was a not-so-great moment for Asian American representation in music.

Other than that, there are quite a few moments that scholars have discussed: the musical Flower Drum Song, with a mostly Asian cast, depicts the bicultural social life of Chinatown in San Francisco on Broadway and big screen first time in history; the Grain of Sand’s political folk songs that led and reflected the spirit of the Asian American identity politics movement in the early 1970s; and the Chinese American rapper Jin’s winning of “Freestyle Friday” on BET and his subsequent record deal with Ruff Ryders.

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This entry was originally posted on February 24, 2008 on Yellowbuzz.

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