Asian American Feminisms in Rap Music

I Bring that Yellow to the Rap Game: Asian American Feminisms in Rap Music

Margaret Hogan

Schulich School of Music McGill University, Montreal

August 2018

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Musicology

This thesis considers how three women rappers of Asian descent - Masia One, Rocky Rivera and Awkwafina – make statements of Asian self-representation through their interactions with hip hop culture. I identify how these women see themselves as at odds with the myth of the model minority and other objectifying stereotypes. Western portrayals of Asian women cast them as dragon ladies - fearsome, emasculating femme fatales or lotus blossom babies – modest, obedient and exotic girls next door. Both extremes center a voyeuristic sexual othering of Asian women, seeing their value as intrinsically connected to their exotic sex appeal, and craft an image of Asian women as ornamental objects whose purpose is to serve the pleasure of a white male protagonist. The act of self-representation connects the work of all three of these artists and this thesis examines their positioning as non- Black performers in the hip hop milieu. Through analyses of the artistic careers, musical style and deployment of visual media of Masia One, Rocky Rivera and Awkwafina, this work considers Afro-Asian transnationalism and the cultural exchange between two marginalized groups as an anti-racist form of seeking belonging for immigrants to North American society.

Abrégé:

Les représentations occidentales des femmes asiatiques dessinent celles-ci soit selon le modèle de la dame dragon – une femme fatale terrorisante de par ses pouvoirs d’émasculation ; soit selon celui du nourrisson en fleur — une fille modeste, obéissante et exotique. Ces deux extrêmes renvoient à une seule et même exclusion voyeuriste et sexuelle des femmes asiatiques ; une conception qui perçoit leur valeur comme étant intrinsèque à leur sex-appeal exotique, et qui construit une image des femmes asiatiques qui s’apparente à des objets d’ornements dont le dessein serait de servir les plaisirs d’un protagoniste blanc. En considérant la manière dont trois femmes rappeuses d’origine asiatique — Masia One, Rocky Rivera et Awkwafina — interagissent avec la culture hip-hop et créent des représentations d’elles-mêmes, j’identifie la façon dont elles se perçoivent comme étant en porte-à-faux avec le mythe de la minorité modèle, et autres stéréotypes qui réduisent la femme à l’état d’objet. L’autoreprésentation lie le travail de ces trois artistes, et ce mémoire examine leur positionnement en tant qu’interprètes non noires dans le milieu du hip-hop. À travers l’analyse de la carrière artistique, du style musical et de l’utilisation des médias visuels que font Masia One, Rocky Rivera et Awkwafina, cet ouvrage examine le transnationalisme afro-asiatique et l’échange culturel entre deux groupes marginalisés comme forme antiraciste qui fait appel au sentiment d’appartenance des immigrants dans une société nord-américaine.

2 Acknowledgements

The process and completion of this work would never have taken place without the support and understanding of women at McGill University. Unending thanks to my thesis supervisor Professor Lisa Barg, an inspiring scholar and accomplished educator. Her guidance and encouragement throughout my graduate school experience have been essential and the tools of critical thinking I have learned from her will continue to serve me for years to come. Her instruction not only informs my way of thinking, but also has instilled in me a confidence in my ideas that I would never have without her support. Thank you, also, to Professor Carrie Rentschler and Dr. Sheetal Lodhia for embodying intra-institutional radicalism and carving out spaces for activist engagement within an educational context.

I would also like to thank Professor David Brackett, whose instruction over the course of my studies at McGill University has been invaluable. To Professors Eric Lewis and Mark V. Campbell, thank you for finding real world applications for my research – I will surely draw on my experiences at IPLAI and Northside Hip Hop Archive in my professional life to come. Thanks also, to my colleagues in music research, especially Kaiya Cade, Kiersten Van Vliet, Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez, Claire McLeish, Jennifer Messelink, Vanessa Blais-Tremblay and Jackson Flesher for your helpful feedback as my project developed and changed.

I surely would not have completed this project if not for the love and validation from my family and friends. Eternal gratitude to my mother Raquel Wang and grandmother Man Jun Ma whose resilience and savvy as immigrants to Canada laid the groundwork for every feminist thought that was to emerge from my brain. Thanks to my father John Hogan for always challenging me intellectually, encouraging me to think critically and daring me to read outside my comfort zone. For my partner in love and life Tyler Reekie, thank you – your endurance of my stress and tendencies to stretch myself thin have been admirable and a true show of commitment. To Diya Mathur, close friend and brilliant scholar, thank you for always being a confidant and voice of reason throughout this process. To “Benetton Mob” – Stacy, Mitra, Christina, Jermaine, Emile and Andy – you are all shining examples of thriving as queers and people of colour and knowing you is an honour and inspiration.

Peace, blessings and thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you to all the above.

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstracts 2

Acknowledgements 3

Table of Contents 4

Introduction 5

Literature Review 11

Chapter 1. From the Land of the Trill: 22 Masia One’s Multiracial Hip Hop Authenticity from Tdot to Singapura

Chapter 2. Brown Goddess with War Paint: 42 Listening for Solidarity and resistance in Rocky Rivera’s “Godsteppin” and “Turn You”

Chapter 3. Drive that Corolla Right Into the Streets: 66 Awkwafina’s “Green Tea” and Anti-Racist Shame

Conclusion 89

Bibliography 92

4 Introduction

In 1973 Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly would burst onto the silver screen with the ground- breaking martial arts action film Enter the Dragon and by the next year, the film would be filling seats with Black and Latino youth at repertory cinemas on New

York City’s 42nd Street. A few years prior, Bruce Lee would be quoted as saying, “I am a yellow-faced Chinese, I cannot possibly become an idol for Caucasians”

(Prashad 2001, 127), but by the release of Enter the Dragon, he had ascended into idol status across racial lines, starring in a narrative in which a Chinese man and an

African American man fight against a mutual white enemy. Lee’s commitment to anti-racist ideology - which made him one of the first kung fu masters to train non-

Asians - came across in his films, establishing a link between underprivileged Black youth in America with kung fu for decades to come. The ubiquity of kung fu in hip hop culture in particular can be traced in the paintings of Fab 5 Freddy, to Wu Tang

Clan’s extensive Shoalin monk inspired catalogue (Prashad 2001; Hisama 2002;

Wang 2006), and most recently in the Kung Fu Kenny short films of rapper Kendrick

Lamar. Kung Fu and rap music continue to be rich meeting grounds for dialogue between African American and Asian American popular culture; this thesis will consider rap music as a place for Asian Americans to develop claims of belonging in

North America that exclude whiteness as the ideal standard for assimilation.

Among the earliest documented Asian people to arrive in North America were Chinese and Filipino sailors who acted as guides for early settlers on Spanish ships in the late 16th century. These sailors were valued for their seafaring expertise

5 and, as such, provided a lifeline on ships during the treacherous crossing of the

Pacific Ocean. Despite their skill, Asian crewmembers received fewer rations than their Spanish crewmembers and their wages were never paid in full. While these sailors left their island home with the intent of returning, many chose to stay in the

New World rather than risk death by starvation, illness or drowning on the perilous return journey in ill-equipped, filthy ships. Leaving behind their lineage and culture, they started a new life in a place that promised freedom (Lee 2015, 24-30).

Instead, they faced an emerging society arranged around a racial hierarchy, with whiteness prized and blackness reviled. The exploitative conditions of the

Spanish ships were to be echoed by each successive wave of Asian immigration to

North America. From the indentured slavery of Chinese “coolies” and aggressive anti-Chinese immigration laws to the internment of Japanese Americans and

Canadians through the Second World War, Asian groups have been united by a shared exclusion from the laurels of white American society (Lee 2015, 37; 90; 211).

Throughout the 19th century, aggressive media campaigns stoked the fires of resentment toward Asian immigrants in North America, resulting in violent clashes between the Chinese and their detractors. On October 24, 1871, for example, a mob of nearly 500 in Los Angeles dragged Chinese out of their homes, killing seventeen in a public lynching in the city’s downtown that would become the largest mass lynching in U.S. history (93). And while the post-civil rights era of the 20th century reduced instances of overt racism toward those of Asian descent, media representations of Chinese, Japanese and other Asian/Pacific Islanders as villains and perpetual foreigners who are poor at English, inscrutable and criminal appear

6 frequently in film, television and advertising (Chou 2016, 7). Moreover, anti-Asian mocking in the media, with its strong racist framing of Asians in North America, exists alongside reports on the achievements of Asian Americans in schools and workplaces which represent Asians as a “model minority.” While seemingly positive, this model minority representation has become a racialized myth that erases the various forms of discrimination most Asian Americans still face in their daily lives

(12). The model minority myth alleges the possibility of assimilation for people of colour in North America and access to equal rights and opportunities not through public protest but through hard, quiet work. The myth of the model minority works not only to silence Asian America, but also implies that Black and Latinx Americans remain socially disadvantaged as a result of a lack of model virtues rather than the reality of historically oppressive and racially biased public policy (13).

This thesis, first and foremost, is a project about Asian self-representation.

Western portrayals of Asian women cast them as either fearsome, hyper-sexualized dragon ladies or obedient and shy lotus blossom babies (Prasso 2009; Shah 2003;

Zhou 2016). Both extremes center a voyeuristic sexual othering of Asian women, seeing their value as intrinsically connected to their exotic sex appeal and craft an image of Asian women as ornamental objects whose purpose is to serve the pleasure of a white male protagonist. By considering how three women rappers of

Asian descent - Masia One, Rocky Rivera and Awkwafina - interact with hip hop culture and create representations of themselves, I attempt to identify how these women see themselves as at odds with the myth of the model minority and objectifying stereotypes. Each of these artists tackle representing their racialized

7 identities in different ways, articulating a range of Asian subjectivity in North

American, even from within the specific realm of hip hop.

In the spirit of Lila Abu-Lughod’s (1992) anthropology of the particular, a method that aims to challenge monolithic understandings of cultural groups by providing detailed accounts of individuals, I have chosen three East Asian women in rap who each come from a different set of geographical and cultural contexts and occupy different positions from within hip hop. Masia One is a Singaporean-

Canadian rapper whose big break came in 2003; a MuchMuch Video Award for Best

Rap Song saw her becoming the first woman and first person of Asian descent to be nominated for the prize. Raised in Vancouver, Masia One would launch her rap career in Toronto, the hip hop capital of Canada, then go on to work with such legends as Che Vicious and Dr. Dre as a songwriter for Aftermath Entertainment in

Detroit and Los Angeles. Having attained considerable mainstream success, Masia

One left the US rap industry behind in 2009 for Jamaica, finally settling in her birthplace of Singapore later that year. Her globetrotting approach to navigating her career in music has resulted in her uniquely hybridized sound that combines mainstream rap, reggae and hints of Chinese traditional music.

Rocky Rivera is a Filipinx rapper based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Having grown up in Oakland, her music reflects the diversity of her hometown while also acknowledging its history as a hub for Black culture (“Oakland Named the Most

Diverse City in America,” East Bay Express, December 17, 2014). Her overtly political lyrical content directly tackles industry sexism, systemic racism and police brutality and she is known for recognizing revolutionary intersectional feminist figures like

8 Angela Davis and Roxanne Gay in her performances. Her commitment to social justice also extends beyond her artistic output; she is a youth organizer in East

Oakland working to challenge practices in schools that funnel black and brown youth into the schools-to-prisons pipeline and is currently working on a reader to accompany her music, which will include lyrics from her projects and corresponding hip hop feminism-based pedagogical resources for educators. Her 2015 EP Nom de

Guerre finds her merging activist lyrical content with gangsta rap reminiscent production, making for a sonically militant appeal for Asian solidarity for Black lives.

She demonstrates a “hood”-centricity that is in keeping with the West Coast rap tradition, lending her a certain ease when it comes to participating in hip hop culture. All the while, Rocky Rivera never fails to center the Black progenitors of the genre.

Awkwafina is a rapper turned comedian, television personality and actress who grew up in Queens, New York City. In contrast with Masia One and Rocky

Rivera, Awkwafina’s lyrics are highly comedic and peppered with quick turns of phrase, laying out for her listeners her irreverent point of view as an Asian woman in rap. From her breakout single “My Vag,” a crass celebration of her genitalia, to

“Green Tea,” a collaboration with comedian Margaret Cho, Awkwafina’s output works to flip stereotypes through artful use of irony. Using rap as a platform for cultural commentary, she critiques hyper-masculinity, gentrification, assimilation and hetero-normativity. While her music makes the least overt overtures to Afro-

Asian solidarity and cultural blending of the three rappers I consider, her claims to

New York City nativity coupled with her satirical tone draw attention to the

9 cognitive dissonance associated with Asian women’s participation in hip hop culture. As an individual, Awkwafina’s identity is extraordinarily hybridized making any attempt to reduce her to boilerplate lotus blossom or dragon lady images of

Asian womanhood laughable.

This thesis will attempt to read each of these women as resistant figures, rejecting assimilation and model minority values through their embrace of hip hop. I read their participation in hip hop as a deliberate turning away from pressures to align themselves with the ideals that form a dominant, white culture; instead, they attempt to write unique representations of first and second-generation Asian-

American/Canadian identity drawing on the cultural heritage of their parents as well as the youth culture of the urban centres in which they were raised. Building on the work around model minority identity and the effects of assimilation, my project will define Rocky Rivera, Masia One and Awkwafina as empowered agents in the expression of their identities.

This project relies on Vijay Prashad’s (2001) notion of polyculturalism, a concept he puts forth to describe moments of cultural blending between two minoritarian groups that are united by a shared sense of oppression. Nitasha

Sharma (2010) builds on Prashad’s theories and connects them with music, describing South Asian participation in rap music as a kind of “polycultural sampling.” I account for three particular iterations of polyculturalism by East Asian women in hip hop, addressing how each of the forementioned artists formulate their own chopped up, mixed and layered identities that are informed variously by cultural heritage, gender, and geography. Masia One, Rocky Rivera and Awkwafina

10 defy stereotypes, each of them articulating their own, colourful, three-dimensional representations of East Asian subjectivity and each of them at odds with a monolithic understanding of what it means to be an Asian woman in North America.

Literature Review

W.E.B. Du Bois (2005) was one of the earliest and most notable scholars to centre questions of Afro-Asian cultural exchange in his considerations of race in America.

Seeing Black and Asian worlds as straddling a hemispheric color line, Du Bois championed Asian anticolonialism as a model for the liberation of all people of colour across the globe. He formulated provocative critiques of white supremacy and imagined a vision for a global, unified front of people of colour in the fight for equality. His foundational texts on Asia are collected in Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the

World Color Line; edited by Bill Mullen and Catherine Watson, this was the first edited volume to take Du Bois’s views on Asia as its central topic, with Mullen and

Watson arguing that “few if any of the major aspects of Du Bois’s thought and life are understandable without consideration of their relationship to Du Bois’s views on

Asia” (4). While a great deal of attention has been focused on his writing on pan-

Africanism and his proto-Afrocentric histories of Egypt and other early African civilizations, his writing on Asia was largely sidelined until the Mullen and Watson collection which recognizes Du Bois as an early adopter of theories recognizing cultural mixing and calling for interracial solidarity

Building on Du Bois, transnational scholars have attempted to account for the myriad of ways marginalized cultures interact, blend and challenge fixed notions of

11 racial identity and cultural discreteness. Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) considers strictly defined cultural identities as an essential tool for creating difference, and sees

Orientalism as an othering of the East by the West that is so rigid it becomes innate.

She argues that the mere reversal of this dynamic preserves difference and she proposes a strategy for avoiding the reification of difference - whether it be in the realms of gender, race or otherwise. She suggests that a move away from generalizations for an “ethnography of the particular” can be a means for scholars to consciously write against practices of othering and deconstruct the power dynamic of scholar over subject (149). A focus on particularities and questions of individuals from within a group, rather than on generalizations about a group as a whole, challenges monolithic understandings of cultures and accounts for the possibility of cultural blending experienced by individual subjects.

Vijay Prashad (2001, xi-xii) uses the term “polyculturalism” to describe moments of cultural blending. In an attempt to deconstruct the idea that cultures are discrete and bounded, Prashad sees the polycultural as “grounded in antiracism rather than in diversity” and “unlike multiculturalism, assumes that people live coherent lives that are made up of a host of lineages.” For Prashad, racialized groups are united by a shared oppression and, in proximity, the boundaries between their cultural backgrounds become permeable. Rather than accepting the terms of a

“vertical assimilation” that prioritizes majority culture, non-white immigrants to

North American can appeal to solidarity with Black Americans as they “seek recognition, solidarity and safety by embracing others also oppressed by white supremacy in something of a horizontal assimilation” (xii).

12 In their introduction to Minor Transnationalism entitled “Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally” Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih (2005, 2-7) pose a similar argument, “More often than not minority subjects identify themselves in opposition to a dominant discourse rather than vis-à-cis each other and other minority groups. We study the center and the margin but rarely examine the relationship among different margins.” The book privileges analyses that trace complex and multiple forms of cultural expression by minorities and diasporic people that do not necessarily accommodate a major-resistant reading, a move that they argue works against the reification of the boundaries of communities. Their aim is to problematize the binary model of defining the minor against the major that often tends to concretize the hierarchical relationship between the two rather than truly dismantle it.

Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman’s (2000) collection Music and the

Racial Imagination reviews the history of race in music and connects many of the models of cultural multiplicity proposed by transnational scholars with music’s materials. Speaking to the ambiguities proposed by music’s signifiers they write,

“music thus occupies a domain at once between races but has the potential of embodying—becoming—different racial significations” (8). As such, Radano and

Bohlman acknowledge music’s potential as a site for transnational cultural mixing, in what they and other scholars in the volume refer to as “hybridization.” In her chapter “The Asian American Body in Performance,” Deborah Wong (2000) frames the racialization of the Asian American in jazz through an exploration of discourse that understands jazz music as the struggle of black musicians over white

13 dominance. As such, an act of hybridization occurs when Asian Americans participate in the jazz tradition, making way for musical collaborations that enact

“political coalition as well as respect for the African American origins of jazz” (71).

Christi-Anne Castro (2007) also considers the Asian American body and performance as a means to transcend racial stereotype in “Voices in the Minority:

Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Asian American in Popular Music” arguing that

Asian American embodiment of Western popular music practices challenges perceptions of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma (2010) accounts for a similar form of cultural hybridization in Hip Hop Desis in which she combines Vijay Prashad’s above cited notions of the polycultural with her analysis of South Asian Americans in hip hop.

She likens moments of cultural mixture, which she calls “polycultural sampling” to sampling practices in hip hop production, arguing that South Asian American rap artists form their identities through “cut ‘n’ mix” formations, “Sampling numerous influences in hip hop production contests the claims of sole authorship and the idea that cultures are static and self-contained” (24).

One particular aspect of Asian subjecthood in North America that is questioned by Asian participation in hip hop culture is the myth of the model minority. A great deal of scholarship has been written on this topic in Asian

American studies, education, communications and cultural studies. Eric Mark

Kramer’s (2003) The Emerging Monoculture connects the model minority with pressures of assimilation and the authors in the collection approach the model minority in the context of various racial groups. Of particular note is Charlton D.

14 McIlwain and Lonnie Johnson Jr.’s (2003) chapter, which describes the impossibility of attaining model minority status for African Americans, providing insight into the destructive nature of the myth of the model minority for Afro-Asian solidarity. It is, rather, the deliberate rejection of model minority status on the part of Asian

Americans that allows for the recognition of a shared oppression with Black

America.

Daryl J. Maeda (2009) traces the history of Afro-Asian solidarity in his Chains of Babylon in which he argues that the dual claims of American racism and imperialism bind all people of colour in North America. The formation of Asian

American as a racial category occurs in dialogue and in dispute with both blackness and whiteness, creating a kind of racial triangulation; Maeda argues that a commitment on the part of Asian Americans to fight anti-blackness has provided a framework for Asian Americans to understand their own racial positioning.

Given the centrality of Black American struggle to Asian American self- understanding, this project also relies on scholarly work considering hip hop feminisms. Like many feminist projects, the scholarly work on women rappers began with efforts to correct erasure and create a revisionist history, acknowledging the contribution of women to rap music and their value as respected and vocal members of the hip hop community. Cheryl Keyes’ (2002) work on classifying women’s rappers roles in hip hop in her Rap Music and Street Consciousness has been helpful in understanding how the images projected by women rappers are representative of African American female identity in popular culture.

15 Revisionist histories can lay the groundwork for further critical engagement with women rappers, though while doing so, open themselves up for critique. In

Check it While I Wreck It, Pough (2004, 45) characterizes feminist revisionist work as “stop[ping] short of recognizing the multi-faceted contributions of black women.”

Feminist critiques pick up where revisionist histories leave off with a great number addressing the dialogue women rappers have with their male peers, analyzing their subversion of dominant representations of women in hip hop and considering the standpoint of women artists on their romantic relationships with men.

Tricia Rose’s (1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in

Contemporary America has become a foundational text in the study of hip hop, and her study on women in rap was one of the first to question pervading attitudes regarding these women’s contributions to the culture. Her identification of trends in scholarship, such as the lack of pro-women attitudes in critical commentary on rap music, addressing rap’s sexism and figuring women in rap as an opposing force to their male counterparts draws attention to the reductive tendencies of scholars that uniformly consider female rappers as progressive, antisexist voices in hip hop.

Instead, Rose proposes repositioning the work of women rappers as part of a dialogic process with one another, their male rap peers, Black men and women and

American popular culture at large. This application of Bakhtinian dialogism to rap music allows for the consideration of multiple social identities as they relate to one another within rap.

The work of Black women as cultural producers and their contributions to the public sphere is recognized by Patricia Hill Collins (2006) as an important facet

16 of contemporary Black feminist thought, especially as frustrations with the academy lead women to engage with popular culture. As a result, women’s movement mobilization for the hip hop generation is happening within popular culture and mass media (191). Sustained critical engagement with African American women’s discontent as expressed through their artwork can serve to reveal the contributions these artists make to Black feminism/womanism through their public records of

Black women’s social, political, cultural, spiritual, and sexual desires. Moreover, analyses that take seriously the development of hip hop feminism within the broader history of Black feminism work to historicize and legitimize its contributions to the feminist project.

Scholars considering hip hop’s place in a Black feminism acknowledge it as a platform for reaching youth through popular culture (Gaunt 2006; Hill Collins 2006;

Pough 2004), and some explore its pedagogical possibilities as a means to teach media literacy (Perry 2004), ask questions about gender and African Americans

(Springer 2002) or center a belief in Black youth of their value as knowledge makers and culture creators (Durham, Cooper, and Morris 2013). In her The Games Black

Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, Kyra Gaunt (2006) reframes this pedagogical potential for hip hop, making an argument that girls learn musical blackness through the kinetic orality of their musical games, 1 such as double dutch and hand clapping, and as such, they inscribe values of blackness onto

1 Gaunt figures ‘kinetic orality’ as embodied language and orality working in combination with one another. Her assertion is that musical blackness is a culturally transmitted set of practices, and is learned through a set of gesture and bodily significations in combination with language (38). 17 popular music, even as these values grow out of their games. Gaunt’s ethnography of

Black girl’s games is a notable work of scholarship on women’s contributions to hip hop because she reframes women and girls as originators of Black music, and assigns these women and girls agency in a realm outside of straightforward production of rap music.

Imani Perry (2004) takes another view on the affect of masculine values in hip hop culture on women rappers. Perry argues that through occupying symbols that are archetypally coded as male in their representations of hip hop womanhood, women artists are able to navigate the male-dominated realms of hip hop culture and carve out a space for themselves. Perry traces the tradition of the badman onto popular media forms and then examines the ways in which women artists take up this archetype for themselves in order to traverse and occupy both traditionally female and male spaces.2 One of the strategies for doing so deployed by women rappers is the expression of female-arbitrated violence in their music. Perry reads violence as hip hop feminist symbolism in four ways: 1) a demonstration of female violence in nation-building and an assertion of Black female nationalism, 2) the choice of violence over victimization, 3) the assertion of a space for rage and frustration in the Black female experience and 4) violent imagery creating spaces for depictions of Black female insanity (162-5).

2 The “badman” is taken from the folktales of Stagolee and Shine. He is an outlaw figure who challenges a societal order that represses the expression of African American humanity. He is constructed in opposition to white American fears regarding black male sexuality and as such, uses the female body as an object of his sexual prowess (Perry 2004, 129). 18 A final body of work that I draw from for my project situates Masia One,

Rocky Rivera and Awkwafina in hip hop history and popular music scholarship. Jeff

Chang’s (2005) Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation considers the socio-cultural factors that contributed to the formation of what we now know as hip hop culture, making the argument that hip hop, born out of the ashes of late

1970s South Bronx, is a revolutionary medium. While many other seminal histories of hip hop, such as Nelson George’s (1998) Hip Hop America, write women and non- black hip hop practitioners out of their accounts, Chang paints a vivid picture of a multi-racial cultural movement to which women have been contributing from its earliest days.

I draw heavily from both Adam Krims (2000) and Loren Kajikawa (2015) in my project, using their methods as a model for my case studies. In Rap Music and the

Poetics of Identity, Krims makes the case for a music theory of rap, one that rejects pitch-structuralist approaches to music analysis for a system that prioritizes timbre, rhythm and phrasing as the signifying elements of rap music. He also creates a genre system for rap music, connecting lyrical content with different styles of flow. While the book is mainly centered on late 1980s and early 1990s “golden era” rap music, his criteria for genre distinction within rap music continues to hold in a contemporary rap context.

Loren Kajikawa (2015) builds on Krims’s methods in Sounding Race in Rap

Songs and connects the aesthetic properties of rap music’s beats, lyrics and imagery with how rappers produce racial meaning. Like Krims, Kajikawa avoids traditional notation in favour of graphic transcriptions that demonstrate how producers

19 manipulate breakbeats; he combines a formal analysis with the socio-political context of each song he studies in order to connect the music’s materials with how racial meaning is inscribed into hip hop culture and rap music.

Tia DeNora’s (2001) ethnography of music’s structuring properties in everyday experience aims to account for the role of music in the construction of agency and identity. She describes music as a technology for making one’s identity visible to oneself; musical sound serves as an anchoring point for memory and through a “vicarious review of past experience” that “registers one’s self to one’s self as an object of self-knowledge, in the aesthetic construction that is memory” (65-

66). I connect her claim that “musical materials provide terms and templates for elaborating self-identity” with Kajikawa’s methodology in order to articulate how

Masia One, Rocky River and Awkwafina create distinct self-representations as Asian women in hip hop that articulate Afro-Asian solidarity while challenging stereotypical mainstream media representations of Asian womanhood (68).

Finally, I look to Simon Frith’s (1996) notions of collective identity and music in order to articulate how music allows for cross-cultural exchange amongst Asian

America and Black America. Like DeNora, Frith looks at how identities are composed by music and challenges assumption of cultural essentialism about the flow from social identity to musical expression. Frith proposes a model in which as scholars we look at how a given genre of music produces a sense of collective identity shared by its practitioners and fans. Musicians and listeners alike are involved in an aesthetic experience produced by the music that allows them to experience themselves in a different way. It is with this notion in mind that I trace

20 how hip hop culture and rap music allow Masia One, Rocky Rivera and Awkwafina to experience themselves in a new light. Rap music provides them space to shed the pressures of assimilation and the model minority and feel truly embraced by a musical culture that was born in the South Bronx and has since come to dominate charts and represent Black America around the globe.

21 Chapter 1: From the Land of the Trill: Masia One’s Multiracial Hip Hop Authenticity from Tdot to Singapura

In a 2014 series about hip hop’s past and its future possibilities in Vulture, drummer, multi-instrumentalist, DJ, music journalist and co-frontman of The Roots,

Questlove writes, “black cool, when it comes right down to it, is everyone’s cool. The baseline of the concept, in vernacular terms, in historical terms, is black… Black cool only works the way it works because it’s part of a relationship… We’re talking about a black culture and a white culture, a subculture within a mainstream culture”

(“How Hip-Hop Failed Black America, Part III: What Happens When Black Loses Its

Cool?” Vulture, May 6, 2014). Questlove argues black cultural practices contain something seemingly different and distinctive from the broader culture, making blackness visible; the true essence of what hip hop culture should be is a source of

“potential disruption or a challenge to the dominant.” In his formulation of black cool, Questlove invokes Roland Barthes’ assertion that a set of building blocks are made to inspire creation, while other toys are based on imitation, producing children who are users rather than creators. For Questlove, black cool, and by extension hip hop culture, must remain ungovernable, and thus, cannot be reproduced through imitation; authentic hip hop artists are not users of the tradition, but creators of a cultural vanguard.

Loren Kajikawa (2015) puts forth another side to hip hop authenticity in his

Sounding Race in Rap Songs in which he frames hip hop’s obsession with “realness,” asserting that the phrase “keeping it real” describes “the practice of staying true to one’s culture and values” (6). Ambivalently, hip hop culture is characterized by how

22 it “is transforming the way race is lived by encouraging its practitioners to abandon fixed, essentialist notions of identity and embrace a more fluid, ‘situational’ model”

(5). As such, while hip hop authenticity is certainly tied to a racial authenticity concerned with blackness, it is also a racial authenticity that is necessarily marginalized, ever-changing and shifting in the way that it represents itself and relates to the center. Hip Hop authenticity is fixed in the way that it consistently provides an answer to the ubiquity and supremacy of majoritarian culture, but each individual invocation of hip hop culture may problematize this majority with its own codes, sounds and construction of racial identity. The central question of this chapter, then, is how ones claims to hip hop authenticity can shift when one’s relationship to the center changes.

In 2003, Masia One shot to the spotlight with her debut album entitled

Mississauga, an eclectic release that pulled inspiration from many of the sounds of noughties Toronto movers and shakers; threads of Esthero’s doomy trip-hop,

Marcus Visionary’s dancehall-infused drum ‘n’ bass and Michie Mee’s golden era rap lyricism weave together throughout Masia’s vocals and producer DJ Flash’s beats. 3

The music video for lead single “Split Second Time” would go on to be nominated for the MuchVibe Best Rap Video at the 2005 MuchMusic Video Awards, making Masia

One the first ever woman to be nominated for the award. It also garnered her the attention of Grammy award-winning producer Che Pope, a connection that would

3 Specific examples include Esthero’s 1997 “Breath From Another” and Michie Mee’s 1991 “Jamaican Funk-Canadian Style”. Marcus Visionary’s DJing style can be heard on his Toronto radio show Prophecy on 89.5 FM, which is North America’s longest running drum and bass radio program. 23 result in Masia travelling the world promoting the tenets of hip hop culture. From a several year stint as a ghostwriter for Aftermath Entertainment to rubbing shoulders with Sizzla Kalonji and recording at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Studios,

Masia One gained a wealth of high-profile industry experience before relocating back to her birthplace of Singapore (“Local Rapper Returns After Working for Dr.

Dre” The New Paper, September 28, 2016). Soon after, she released her Che Pope produced album Bootleg Culture in 2012 and committed to delivering “irie” vibes to

Southeast Asia through culture, food, music and dance. As she says in a 2015 CBC

Arts profile “I hope to build more connections between the reggae communities of

Southeast Asia, and Canada, and of course, Jamaica. These are the first sparks to catch a fire. I know I’ve lived the best life doing what I love full time. This next chapter of my life is to building something bigger than myself” (“Masia One throws a punky hip-hop reggae party – in Asia” CBC Arts, December 10, 2015).

This chapter is concerned with the influence of location on the variety of strategies Masia One employs in order to claim a hip hop authenticity. I account for sonic and visual aesthetic processes responsible for the production of racial identity in two case studies. The first, her 2003 “Split Second Time” sees her at the beginning of her career, a young artist shaped by Toronto’s hip hop community attempting to breakthrough with an identity that remains highly underrepresented in rap music.

In the aforementioned CBC Arts profile, Masia One describes herself as “probably the first Asian female emcee to be featured on Canadian TV,” and as such, I am interested in how she crafts a space for herself as a newcomer in rap media. I follow her to Singapore for my second case study, her 2012 “Warriors Tongue,” in an

24 attempt to identify the signifiers she uses to refigure herself as a reputable representative of hip hop and reggae culture for Southeast Asian audiences.

Who Got the Keys to the Jeep?: Hip Hop’s Cultural Ownership, Multiracial Beginnings and Polycultural Potential

What we know today as hip hop culture is generally acknowledged as having emerged as a youth culture in early 1970s South Bronx as a grassroots response to rising gang violence in the neighbourhood (Chang 2005, chap. 3). This informal organizing on the part of Puerto Rican and African American youth in the Bronx saw these groups united in mutual struggles over heavy-handed policing, poor housing conditions, lack of job opportunities and poor healthcare. At the same time, they were brought together in celebration and defiance in the breakdance, emceeing and

DJing at block parties, and in the graffiti writing that was travelling the city on its subway system, as a new artistic tradition emerging from a blend of African

American, Jamaican and Puerto Rican cultural influences. Hip hop’s multiracial beginnings have been discussed by a variety of music historians (Chang 2005;

Harrison 2009,;George 1998), but as Kajikawa (2015) points out, “despite hip hop’s undeniable diversity, one can get very different ideas about race when turning toward rap as a genre of popular music… Although all kinds of people make and listen to rap music, the industry that produces it has tended to focus almost exclusively on cultivating and promoting black male artists” (5). Indeed, defining the authenticity of hip hop practice solely on the identity of its originators is “based on the idea that there is a bounded period of time in which what we now consider hip hop was initiated and crystallized” (Harrison 2009, 91). While recent scholarship

25 tends to emphasize a hybrid understanding of hip hop’s origins and racial makeup, it is balanced against a conception of hip hop’s distinct blackness which tends to be prioritized over its transnational histories (Harrison 2009, Rose 1994). Central to this ambivalence demonstrated by many scholars attempting to describe race in hip hop culture is a history of African American musical traditions that emerge to redefine the center of US society and are then co-opted and depoliticized by white commercial interests and audiences (with the whiteness of rock ‘n’ roll being the prime example). While genres like funk, soul and R&B maintain an association with their African American progenitors, rap music, even as its fan base has expanded to include predominantly white, suburban consumers, is a rare African American- originated popular music tradition that maintains a strong association with blackness and whose archetypal artist remains the black man.4

As such, one of the strategies non-black POC (person of colour) participants in rap music use to gain access to hip hop authenticity is what Vijay Prashad (2001) calls “horizontal assimilation,” a relationship of solidarity amongst non-white immigrants to North America and African Americans. “Since blackness is reviled in the United States,” writes Prashad, “why would an immigrant, of whatever skin color, want to associate with those who are racially oppressed…? The immigrant seeks a form of vertical assimilation, to climb from the lowest, darkest echelon on the stepladder of tyranny into the bright whiteness” (x-xi). Prashad argues that

4 In a December 16, 2017 Instagram post of a screen capture of the week’s top 10 rap songs sold in the iTunes store, Nicki Minaj wrote “it’s a great time to be a white rapper, huh?” Of the 10 songs listed, Migos’ “Motorsport” and N.E.R.D.’s “Lemon” are the only two performed by artists who self-identify as black. Perhaps after over three decades of existence, 2017 will be remembered the year hip hop goes white. 26 people who refuse vertical integration are deemed exclusionary and unassimilable by dominant society. Rather than accept the terms of vertical assimilation, “they seek recognition, solidarity and safety by embracing others also oppressed by white supremacy in something of a horizontal assimilation” (xii). United by a shared oppression, distinct cultural groups can find that in proximity, the boundaries between their cultural backgrounds become permeable, a type of blending that emerges as “polyculturalism,” which emphasizes points of contact and sharing amongst disparate cultures grounded in antiracism rather than the distinct and fixed cultural differences assumed by neoliberal notions of diversity and multiculturalism. Nitasha Sharma (2010) likens polycultural blending to sampling practices in hip hop production, arguing that South Asian American rap artists form their identities through “cut ‘n’ mix” formations, “Sampling numerous influences in hip hop production contests the claims of sole authorship and the idea that cultures are static and self-contained” (24). If the music industry’s textbook rapper is the black man marketed as the antithesis to a dominant, white cultural centre, then an artist like Masia One makes claims to hip hop authenticity through an active disregard for the promises of assimilation, finding anti-racism as a place of cross- cultural permeability in hip hop communities. Because hip hop’s multiracial origins are generally at odds with the commercial music industry’s conflation of rap music with black masculinity, Masia One legitimizes her voice within hip hop using appeals to hip hop’s culturally mixed histories while at the same time creating a representation of herself as someone who, like those of black male artists, can be defined against and challenge the centre.

27 Media Expands the Traits of Where We Came Through: Masia One’s Polycultural Debut

First-generation Chinese-American, chef, restaurateur, author, media personality, attorney and hip hop “head” and creator of ABC sitcom Fresh off the Boat, Eddie

Huang expressed frustration about pitching to media executives in a 2016 video interview, “because I’m Chinese there has to be this like, huge origin story about why I like hip hop… You kinda, you’re – as a kid, you see something you like, you gravitate toward it and it becomes a part of your life, you know? I constantly have to explain that or give some origin story, and then they’ll look at me,” he pauses and performs a look of approval, “as if my story is good enough for them” (First We

Feast 2016). Huang’s frustrations are exemplified by Masia One’s interviews with the press in which her earliest encounter with rap music is rehashed at every stage of her career, which occurs in almost every interview I found, from a 2004 feature in a Toronto-based independent blog (“From a Singaporean Marketplace to Canadian

Hip-Hop Domination,” Soulshine, August 16, 2004) to a recent piece in one of

Singapore’s highest circulating English-language newspapers and stalwart of the country’s corporate media (“Local rapper returns after working for Dr Dre,” The

New Paper, September 28, 2016). The frequency with which the question is asked is notable, and Masia One tells the story with the same details each time:

“I was in this bootleg market in Singapore… I was in grade 2, and I’d

just gotten Chinese New Year money from my grandmother. So I’m

running around and I find a tape store, and I pick up this tape with this

scope on it. I flipped it to the back and there was this guy with a clock

28 around his neck, and I’m, like, ‘Aw, cool! That’s like a cartoon

character!’ I bought it cuz I thought it was a kid’s tape” (“Masia domo:

Fab femcee sends up Asian stereotypes,” NOW Magazine, August 12,

2004).

The tape turns out to be Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us

Back, and the “cartoon” figure, the most enigmatic “hype man” in hip hop history,

Flava Flav.

As an Asian woman in hip hop, the question of ‘why rap music?’ is posed to

Masia One from both the Western and Eastern media, speaking to her outsider status as a racial minority, both in the context of western society and from within hip hop culture. Presented as a chance encounter, her story follows informal chains of distribution that brought a highly politicized album recorded in New York City to a bootleg marketplace halfway across the globe. This particular Public Enemy album was to become emblematic of the marriage of sound and social commentary in the

American rap music of its time, and while its status as polemic is centered in descriptions of the album’s historic importance, what spoke to a young Masia One was Flava Flav’s clock. Lacking the socio-cultural context of late 1980s America and the media savvy of an adult, Masia One’s first encounter with rap music was not a deliberate and premeditated turn against vertical assimilation but represents a moment of polycultural sampling at the hands of a music bootlegger. In this moment, the highly localized New York City hip hop scene jumps the Pacific and reaches the ears of a child it was never intended for, an example of how, as Will

Straw (1991) puts it, a “system of articulation is produced by migrations of

29 populations and the formation of cultural diaspora which have transformed the global circulation of cultural forms, creating lines of influence and solidarity different from, but no less meaningful than those observable within geographically circumscribed communities” (369). In some ways, Prashad and Straw are problematizing similar notions of static, uniform cultural spaces and both demonstrate an investment in tracing moments of instability within any given cultural space. It is no surprise then, that Masia One’s first foray into rap music sees her questioning the uniformity of both her Asian identity as well as hip hop culture.

“Split Second Time” and its accompanying music video merge Orientalist tropes with Toronto’s hip hop scene, a cultural blending that Masia One implies both musically and visually. The song opens with a sample of bianzhong (traditional

Chinese bronze bells) that is looped for the remainder of the song and forms its rhythmic basis (fig. 1). The sample is considerably sped-up for the song, making the tempo somewhat non-idiomatic for bianzhong, but the frenetic energy likens the sample to the sounds of lion dance drumming. Each style of lion dance uses different rhythmic figures that, in general, share a similar syncopated feel to this opening loop in “Split Second Time.” At the 0:08 mark of the song, a trilling string swell is layered on top of the bell loop, a tension building sonic signifier closely tied to the action-packed soundtracks of 1970s kung fu soundtracks. The bells and string elements remain throughout the song, and while hi-hat and kick drum patterns more typical of rap music production of the time enter at the 0:15 and 0:30 marks respectively, the samples DJ Flash combines to create the beat sets a distinctly

Asiatic underscore for Masia One’s rap.

30 Figure 1: “Split Second Time” bell loop

Curiously, while Masia One herself sees “Split Second Time” as an

“audiovisual jab at Asian stereotypes,” her contribution to the song’s musical materials tends not to frame her ethnicity (“Masia One Is Bringing a Reggae

Revolution to Singapore,” Noisey, January 11, 2016). Lyrically, she makes two references to her racial identity, both in the song’s third verse; at 1:42, “plan it on the East, call it peace, at least they do/ Find another skin tone, tell them that they hate you/ media expands the traits of where we came through,” and at 1:59, “you say all my shine come easy, cuz my chinky eyes.” Overall, her flow is what Adam

Krims (2001) would classify as “percussion-effusive” with its “focused points of staccato and pointed articulation… followed by brief caesuras that punctuate the musical texture” (51). The rhythmic quality of her delivery connects Masia One to prominent East Coast rappers Nas and Mos Def, two New York City-based rappers experiencing the peaks of their careers during the years of Masia One’s Mississauga and “Split Second Time” releases. Lightning fast and littered with sophisticated wordplay, Masia One meets all the standards of virtuosic emceeing set by those at the top of its field in the genre’s birthplace with “Split Second Time.”

31 Figure 2: Screen shot of “Split Second Time” music video, 0:13

The song’s music video overtly brings Asian stereotypes to the fore in a visual mish-mash of Oriental tropes – geishas, Japanese schoolgirls and kung fu fighters swirl around Masia One as she rhymes her way through the streets of

Toronto. Against the backdrop of Bay Street skyscrapers, she is carried like a

Chinese empress atop a bamboo litter. She wears a contemporary Chinatown dress in a red floral print with kimono-esque details. With these culturally non-specific signifiers of Eastern foreignness, Masia One presents herself to Canadian audiences through their own lens of acceptable, predetermined media roles for Asian characters. While she faced backlash from the Asian-Canadian community for the video (“Masia domo: Fab femcee sends up Asian stereotypes,” NOW Magazine,

August 12, 2004), I argue that is it precisely her embodiment of sweepingly two- dimensional pan-Asian characters in “Split Second Time” that serves to create tension for its predominately white, middle-class, suburban Canadian viewers. In an audio-visual bait and switch, Masia One draws her audience in with familiarly

32 deflated depictions of Asian subjecthood while exercising skill and expertise in the domain of rap music. Rather than “climb… the stepladder of tyranny into the bright whiteness” (Prashad 2001, x), Masia One exercises a form of horizontal assimilation with “Split Second Time.” Embracing her North American home and the array of popular cultural materials she can draw from, she complicates and expands Asian

Canadian subjectivity, merging her virtuosic, NYC-reminiscent flow with DJ Flash’s traditional Chinese musical materials, creating a sonic bridge between what, by dominant society, is considered to be Black and what is considered to be Asian.

Overall, the song acts as a polycultural meeting point for Afro-Asian connection; at the video’s 2:34 point a jump cut between Masia One rapping surrounded by kung fu fighters demonstrating their feats of agility, and Masia One rapping in a club surrounded by breakdancers demonstrating similar dexterity, highlights the similarities in two practices thought to be culturally exclusive. “Split Second Time” is

Masia One’s playground for exploding stereotypes and exploring solidarity, an act of horizontal assimilation that destabilizes whiteness and expands Asian subjectivity in its bid for hip hop authenticity.

Figures 3 and 4: Screenshots of “Split Second Time” music video, 2:34 and 2:35

33 Ying Yang, Changing and Creepin: “Warriors Tongue” and Asian Majoritarian Status

Tia DeNora (2001) describes music as a technology for making one’s identity visible to oneself. Musical sound serves as an anchoring point for memory and through a

“vicarious review of past experience, this stocktaking of ‘who one is’ or ‘where, interpersonally, one has been’, one registers one’s self to one’s self as an object of self-knowledge, in the aesthetic construction that is memory” (65). As a hip hop practitioner, Masia One is formed by the vicarious review of musical cultures she encounters as her career brings her through Toronto, Detroit, New York City, Los

Angeles, Kingston and finally to Singapore, just as her identity is made coherent in her practices of self-representations as an artist. As I move from “Split Second Time” to Masia One’s 2011 “Warriors Tongue” I consider how the sonic markers in these songs shift over time as she performs her identity in different cultural contexts.

In a discussion on Eminem’s 1999 “My Name Is,” Loren Kajikawa (2015) asserts that Eminem “had to do more than simply fit in with and match the talent of his African American peers; he had to transform how whiteness mattered in rap”

(125). In the particular way he made his whiteness visible, he “advanced a white identity both at ease with black culture and humble before it… emphasiz[ing] the contradictions in whiteness… allow[ed] him to recast himself as the ultimate underdog” (125). One of hip hop authenticity’s primary concerns is the genre’s status as a counter-culture, a force that defines itself against the values and cultural practices of the dominant mainstream, so Eminem rearticulates his whiteness through parodying normative versions of whiteness, suggesting that he himself is

34 the polar opposite. Eminem represents himself in relation to musical blackness, complicating the fixity of an imagined white ideal.

Masia One employs similar strategies in “Split Second Time” with her overt parodying of Orientalist tropes, but I contend that her marginalized status in North

America makes moves toward horizontal assimilation possible for Masia One that are not available to Eminem. When an artist functions as a member of dominant society, and is therefore not connected to blackness by a sense of shared oppression, claims to hip hop authenticity must involve some sort of challenge to the center and a questioning of its fixity, much in the way “My Name Is” defines Eminem’s racial identity in a manner that questions monolithic white dominance. In her 2011

“Warriors Tongue” Masia One maintains her practices of polycultural sampling, but as a member of Singapore’s dominant racial group, her appeals to hip hop authenticity shift. If, as DeNora (2000) argues “musical materials provide terms and templates for elaborating self-identity” (68), what materials do Masia One and her collaborators draw on to make her racial identity intelligible in the context of

Singapore?

The beat for “Warriors Tongue” was constructed by Grammy award-winning producer Che Pope (also known as Che Vicious and Che Guevara) whose prolific career has had him working with the likes of Kanye West, Lauryn Hill, Dr. Dre, Hans

Zimmer the RZA. “Warriors Tongue” opens with the sound of a siren and the voice of a Jamaican man saying, “Hey you, wherever I drop my musical anchor, never you’ll try to conquer” which is immediately followed by the powerful drop of the drum loop that acts as the central component to the song’s production. This dancehall

35 drumbeat is looped throughout with no accompaniment except for the occasional shattering glass sound effect to mark the downbeat of a new section (interestingly, each section is effectively irregular in length; the intro is 6 measures, followed by a

10-measure chorus, 18-measure verse and then another chorus verse set of 10 and

18 measures respectively), and a synth line mimicking the opening siren that comes in intermittently throughout the last chorus and verse. Unlike “Split Second Time,” the beat for “Warriors Tongue” makes no reference to Masia One’s Asian cultural heritage and instead, with its dancehall rhythms and Atlanta-based 808 Mafia production team inspired siren sound, it acknowledges the transnational histories of hip hop culture arriving in the United States via a tradition of Jamaican sound system parties.

Masia One’s flow is slower in “Warriors Tongue” than in “Split Second Time” and while her delivery in “Warriors Tongue” remains effectively percussion- effusive, she displays less overtly complex rhythmic virtuosity than in the 2003 single. Nonetheless, her stake as a masterful emcee remains as she exercises rap braggadocio and creates intricate wordplay throughout. As she crafts a persona in the lyrics of the song, she makes reference to multiplicities of disparate cultural components that meet in the hybrid nature of hip hop culture: from implications of lines suggesting expanded understandings of Asian subjectivity—like “ying yang changin and creepin” and “never seen a Chiney gyal so big and loud”—to more overt claims to blackness—like “skylark with that natty dread steez” and “they like to call me Daddy like my name was Kane”—Masia One is careful to express a plurality of cultural markers. She presents herself as a global figure and authority of hip hop,

36 sampling from her extensive travel and studio experience with rap’s greats to create a dynamic and polyvalent representation of the self.

In blog posts and press interviews of this period, Masia One repeatedly distances herself from the “lack of vibes in Singapore’s strict, soulless culture”

(“Masia One is Bringing A Reggae Revolution to Singapore”, Noisey) and frames herself as a figure that has arrived from North America to school the “snotty nosed

Lion City kids that bump 2 Chains instead the God [Wu Tang Clan]” (Masia 2014).

The music video for “Warriors Tongue” bolsters this image of Masia One as distinct from the average South East Asian. The video was filmed in Manila, Philippines and opens with shots of the city’s skyline and its many bridges, and cuts to a young boy aiming a shotgun at the camera in the city’s Tondo district. Manila’s colourful cultural heritage is showcased with shots of ceremonial masks and dancers and drummers dressed in ethnic garb marching down the streets, intermixed with footage of everyday life in Manila – people crammed in busses, street vendors and families outside their homes and children playing in alleys. Interspersed throughout are shots of Masia One breakdancing and rapping wearing a black hoodie over her eyes with black jeans and black sneakers. Masia’s wardrobe appears in stark contrast with the brightly coloured street clothing and traditional attire of the

Manilans shown in the video, and her performances of breakdance before the onlooking children further demarcates her from the South East Asians that form a seemingly uniform ethnic majority in the clip.

Figure 5: Screenshot of “Warrior’s Tongue” music video, 1:35

In a 2016 blog post, Masia One speaks back to Singapore’s New Paper, after a feature was published that she felt misrepresented her, saying “I spoke at length with the reporter about racism and mounting xenophobia in Singapore… I addressed how Reggae music encourages multiculturalism and the simple concept of One Love. I shared that when I first pushed Reggae in SG I was met with very racist responses.” A huge influx of immigration to Singapore since the early 2000s has led to increasing animosity toward those who are deemed outsiders, a tendency highlighted in media in stories like “I’m a Brown Person And I Live In A Racist

Country” (XO Jane, 2013) and “The racist reality of house-hunting in Singapore:

‘Sorry, your wife is Indian’” (Quartz India, 2016). Colorism (the preference of light skin over dark skin) is a main feature of beauty standards across Asia, and by extension, prejudice arises based on the colour of one’s skin. Curiously, while

Singapore is the only country in the world outside the People’s Republic of China where ethnic Chinese constitute the majority of the population, Singaporeans feel 38 that after more than a century of cultural divergence, they are vastly different from the mainland Chinese. With many speaking English as a first language, Chinese

Singaporeans are considerably more westernized than their mainland counterparts and as such, mainland Chinese are considered even more undesirable than “Indians”

(rather than describing people from India, in Singapore, this term is a catch-all for any people perceived to be of South-Asian descent). The outright rejection of this group of people who, racially speaking, are the exact same as them, suggests the tendency for Singaporean-Chinese to identify themselves against other Asian nations whose cultural practices remain in part, uninfluenced by the West. In a bid to increase their proximity to their British colonizers, Singaporean-Chinese cultural practices demonstrate a kind of vertical assimilation on a global scale.

Masia One sonically and visually distances herself from her Singaporean-

Chinese identity in “Warriors Tongue” and with this move she also distances herself from Singaporean-Chinese superiority and intolerance. Where she is perceived to be a member of a dominant group, Masia One, like Eminem, represents herself in relation to a musical blackness. With “Split Second Time,” Masia One presents a version of Asian identity that is hybridized and dynamic for a dominant audience that rarely sees non-stereotypical media representations of Asian subjects, but in

“Warriors Tongue” she embodies blackness in order to mirror back for Chinese-

Singaporeans a polycultural version of themselves. In a bid for modernity,

Singaporeans look to reduce their ties to traditional Chinese cultural practices with the hope of being taking seriously in the eyes of their British colonizers. Masia One is able to challenge Singaporean cultural narratives as a Western authority; having

39 been around the world and back she too distances herself from her cultural origins but rather than seek access to whiteness through vertical assimilation, she repositions her own identity as something distinct from Singaporean-Chinese identity.

In the sense that hip hop authenticity is about occupying a position that opposes the culture of a dominant centre, Masia One succeeds with “Warriors

Tongue.” Embodying a sort of cookie-cutter Black American urbanity, Masia attempts to present herself as counterpoint to Singaporean elitism and colourism.

However, unlike “Split Second Time,” her resistance to the center in “Warriors

Tongue” tends to reify the chasm between the Singaporean-Chinese superiority she rejects and the black musical culture she represents. Suggesting her own otherness in comparison to a Singaporean-Chinese centre, she inadvertently figures blackness as a catchall for resistance. While the position she holds in the song is one of a polycultural figure, her turn away from Singaporean-Chinese identity fails to challenge the fixity of the Singaporean dominant and a black periphery.

In both “Split Second Time” and “Warriors Tongue” Masia One makes appeals to a hip hop authenticity by staying true to histories and traditions in hip hop culture that center it as a disruptive force and sharp counterpoint to hegemonic powers. As Questlove asserts, black cool exists in opposition to whiteness in

America, and without this binary, black cool becomes incoherent; the basis of hip hop’s polycultural potential is a commitment to anti-blackness and a unification through shared oppression. As a member of a marginalized group in Canada, Masia

One’s strategies for self-representation present a complex and vital minoritarian

40 subject within Western society. In Singapore, she rejects dominant society and its desires for vertical assimilation and figures herself as a purveyor of values she sees as truly indicative of her experiences in the West. She aligns herself with a global understanding of Afro-Asian solidarity, combining sonic signifiers from her time in the United States and Jamaica to present to Singaporean-Chinese a version of themselves that reflects the reggae ethos of “one love”. Where Singaporean-Chinese seek to define their superiority against groups they deem to be culturally antiquated, Masia One attempts to challenges the fixity of Singaporean-Chinese identity by bringing it into conversation with hip hop’s polycultural constitution.

While she succeeds in questioning racial hierarchy in Singapore, wearing hip hop as a cloak that separates her from the Singaporean centre unfortunately reifies the idea of blackness as other. Paradoxically, it is her explicit performance and articulation of her Asian subjectivity from within hip hop culture in “Split Second Time” that sees her destabilizing racial categories and creating aesthetic bridges for Afro-Asian solidarity.

41 Chapter Two: Brown Goddess with War Paint: Listening for Solidarity and Resistance in Rocky Rivera’s “Godsteppin” and “Turn You”

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in

October of 1966 to combat police brutality against African Americans in Oakland,

California. While many of their early campaigns were performed on a local level, their ten-point program articulated demands for Black freedom and equity at the community level, national policy changes and international recognition of global trends of anti-blackness, making Oakland a hub for radicals in the fight for civil rights through the late 1960s (Alkebulan 2007, 5-8). Following Huey Newton’s arrest for allegedly shooting a police officer in 1967, the Black Panther led “Free

Huey” movement grew from a local group that forged lines of solidarity with other

Oakland-based radicals groups - such as the Red Guard - to an international organization disseminating news and Black Panther ideology around the globe.

The story of hip hop music too, is a story that moves from the local to the global and Oakland’s contributions to hip hop culture are considerable. In a KQED

News interview, Oakland-based journalist and writer Eric Arnold argues that while hip hop’s beginnings in New York City are well documented, many of the culture’s elements were appearing on the streets of Oakland simultaneously, an oftentimes overlooked narrative parallel to the established hip hop origin story (“Interview:

Oakland Hip Hop History and the Current Scene,” KQED, November 4, 2011). Less controversially, Oakland rapper Too Short is considered by many to be the first major West Coast rapper (Ross 1989; Liu 2007). His 1983 debut album Don’t Stop

Rapping introduced elements that would come to be the trademark of West Coast

42 rap with its dirty rhymes, party atmosphere and thick, booming production. His early ventures into cutting rap records would make way for hyphy rap, an upbeat, gritty genre of rap music that was the Bay Area’s answer to crunk and trap music of the south (Voynovskaya 2015). The genre emerged in the 1990s, and having seemingly come and gone by 2000, experienced a major resurgence beginning in

2010 with productions by Oakland’s DJ Mustard for Compton-bred rapper YG.

Today, DJ Mustard is one of the most highly sought after producers in rap music, with his string of Top 40 hits - from Rihanna’s “Needed Me” to Jeremih and YG’s

“Don’t Tell Em” – blowing subwoofers in club systems worldwide.

This chapter focuses on the work of fellow-Bay Area rap artist, Rocky Rivera

(née Kristine de Leon), a former hip hop journalist turned feminist rapper and activist who champions Philippine culture and Black and Asian solidarity in her lyrics and music. Her overtly political lyrical content directly tackles industry sexism, systemic racism and police brutality and she is known for shouting-out revolutionary intersectional feminist figures like Angela Davis and Roxanne Gay in her performances. Her commitment to social justice also extends beyond her artistic output; she is a youth organizer in East Oakland working to challenge practices in schools that funnel black and brown youth into a schools-to-prisons pipeline and is currently working on a reader to accompany her music, which will include lyrics from her projects and corresponding hip hop feminism-based pedagogical resources for educators. Rocky Rivera’s dossier of achievements as an activist validate the assertion that her music is political and with lyrics like, “I’ma turn you to a feminist/I’ma show you how good it is/To have your woman on top handlin’ biz,”

43 Rocky Rivera’s cards are laid on the table. This activist streak in her music makes her an ideal representative for Asian womanhood in Oakland rap – both Oakland’s radical history and its hip hop legacy intermesh in Rocky Rivera’s music.

While commentators have recognized her for her overtly political lyrical content, little attention has been given to the musical strategies she deploys in the name of identity formation. Rocky Rivera positions the six songs on her 2015 EP

Nom de Guerre as components of a suit of armour that come together to form a coherent contemporary social justice warrior identity, bringing to light intersectional feminist issues, questions of women’s solidary, motherhood as resistance and the ongoing police violence against black youth in America. Drawing on Adam Krims’s (2000) genre system for rap music and his rhythmic-stylistic terminology for describing flow in rap music, I will illustrate how Rivera’s invocation of reality rap and frequent use of rhythmic rupture in her songs

“Godsteppin’” and “Turn You” are means of musical resistance that trouble categories of music and identity. I argue that it is from this vantage point of reimagined racial and gender categories that she is able to call for interracial identification in her music. I begin with “Godsteppin’,” identifying musical characteristics that corroborate Rocky Rivera’s political stance.

*******

Rocky Rivera’s 2015 EP, Nom de Guerre invokes the warrior spirit of Filipinx resistance groups such as the Katipunun and Hukbalahap, who fought against colonization and subjugation in the Philippines by the Spanish and Japanese respectively (“Rocky Rivera on Rapping Her Way into Piany Warriorhood,” East Bay

44 Express, October 12, 2016). Nom de guerre literally means “name of war,” referring to a pseudonym one uses in battle. The song “Godsteppin’” makes direct reference to

Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, the three of whom were victims in the notorious police shootings of over 200 unarmed black Americans over the two year span of 2012-2014 (Mapping 2015). The lyrics assert that Rocky Rivera is a soldier in the fight for African American freedom, and the song centers practices of

Afro-Asian solidarity and resistance.

In a 2016 interview with the East Bay Express, Rocky Rivera describes feeling a sense of responsibility to create positive, multi-faceted representations of Asian

Americans, and in particular, Filipinx in America, aiming to “erase the stereotype that Filipinos passively accept [their] role as servants to [their] oppressors” (“Rocky

Rivera on Rapping Her Way into Piany Warriorhood,” East Bay Express, October 12,

2016). Her songs and music videos seek to combat a model minority configuration of Asian Americans, and with her music, Rocky Rivera embodies and performs an

Asian womanhood that is empowered, outspoken and enraged.5 In order to imagine and embody new resistant forms of Asian American identities, Rocky Rivera confronts histories of anti-Black racism within Asian American communities and seeks avenues for cross-racial identification. Participating in rap music allows for her to shed preconceived expectations for her artistic identity as an Asian woman,

5 Rocky Rivera is not the first Filipinx American to look to hip hop as a site in which to negotiate gender norms and familial expectation. For more, see, Ellie Hisama’s (2014) “DJ Kuttin Kandi: Performing Feminism” and Antonio Tiongon Jr.’s (2013) Filipino’s Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity and the Hip-Hop Nation. 45 and provides for Rocky Rivera a space to articulate shared experiences between

Asian American and African American communities.

The release of the music video for “Godsteppin’” in July of 2016 was especially timely, not only given the increasingly tense climate between police forces and Black Lives Matter protestors in the wake of the fatal shooting of Freddie

Gray in April of the same year, but also because of the proliferation of overtly anti-

Black sentiments by Asian American communities following the indictment of Peter

Liang in the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley in February 2016 (18millionrising 2016).

Pro-Liang protesters argued that Liang, the first New York City police officer to be found guilty of killing a citizen while on duty in more than a decade, had been scapegoated and that his conviction of second-degree manslaughter blatantly exhibited the exclusion of Asian American police officers from the protections their white colleagues enjoy. In direct opposition to this camp, anti-racist Asian

Americans were among some of the loudest voices calling for justice for Akai Gurley, contending that holding Liang accountable was the first step of many in achieving a vision for transformative justice in the United States. Regardless of which side they took, the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley and Peter Liang’s subsequent conviction of manslaughter brought to light for Asian Americans the continued fluctuations of their status in the nation’s racial hierarchies and their histories of complicity in reifying these hierarchies. While Rocky Rivera never directly addresses the death of

Akai Gurley in “Godsteppin’,” the release of a protest song centering Afro-Asian solidarity in the wake of growing divisions within the Asian American community on questions of police brutality and interracial cooperation is significant for an artist

46 whose artistic identity is largely formed around a minoritarian identification- through African American struggle.

Straight From the West, Oakland is the Best: Situating “Godsteppin’”

Adam Krims’ genre system for rap music from his Rap Music and the Poetics of

Identity (2000, 55) provides a theoretical basis for understanding Rocky Rivera’s participation in hip hop. I am particularly interested in how rappers strategically deploy genres within rap music as a means to communicate a specific affective stance. In brief summary, Krims, uses the style of musical track, MCing style or

“flow” and lyrical subject matter as parameters by which he identifies four main sub-genres of rap music: 1) Party rap, characterized by danceable musical tracks, memorable and consistent flow and topics of celebration; 2) Mack rap, with its R&B- oriented musical tracks, often features sung choruses and smooth, sensual flow with lyrical content focused on braggadocios accounts of sexual prowess; 3)

Jazz/bohemian rap, whose musical style and flow are eclectic, often contains samples of jazz or live jazz components and centers around politicized, intellectual topics emphasizing the accumulation of knowledge; 4) Reality rap, characterized by densely textured musical tracks, displays connotative “hardness,” rhythmically elaborate flow and accounts of ghetto life. Krims describes his relatively open genre system as a “blunt instrument,” and I would argue that its broadness has facilitated its relevancy sixteen years after its publication. New subgenres of rap music have emerged since 2000, for instance, trap and hipster hop, but generally fit into Krims’ categories, in this case, reality rap and jazz/bohemian rap respectively.

47 “Godsteppin’” proves to be somewhat ambiguous. While Rocky Rivera’s flow and lyrical content fit the parameters of jazz/bohemian rap, the musical track over which she raps doesn’t bear much resemblance to other contemporary jazz/bohemian rap songs, such as Murs and 9th Wonder’s 2015 “God Black/Black

God” with its sample-heavy construction and laid-back, drum beat comprised of samples of live drum sounds. In contrast, “Godsteppin’” features much more aggressive, electronic drum sounds and in the choruses, the hi-hat explodes into sixteenth note subdivisions more commonly associated with mainstream trap music than conscious, jazz/bohemian rap styles. In fact, “Godsteppin’” seems to be an outlier even in its own producer, Fatgums’s catalogue. Fatgums, best known for his work with the now defunct Native Guns, has rarely ever strayed from his hip-hop’s- golden-era-inspired production style in the sixteen years he has been actively releasing music. He exhibits what some practitioners might refer to as an “organic” approach to production, relying heavily on advanced sampling techniques like the now-classic, “low-end theory,” multi-sampling and velocity layering to manipulate the soul and funk libraries he samples from.6 As such, the heavily quantized synthesized hi-hats in “Godsteppin’” are a far cry from Fatgums’ signature lo-fi, chopped-up drum sounds.

6 The “low-end theory” refers to extracting the bass and kick drum sounds from a sample by sampling through a low-pass filter. Multi-sampling is a technique by which a sample can be distributed across the notes of a keyboard or across the pads of a sampler, and velocity layering has a single pad triggering multiple samples or layers of samples depending on where the pad is struck, or the force with which it is struck. 48 Reality rap, or what practitioners generally refer to as gangsta rap, is a significant genre for rap music in Oakland, especially considering its proximity to

Los Angeles, the city often credited as the birthplace of gangsta rap (Chang 2005).

While the drum sounds in “Godsteppin’” share rhythmic conventions with trap music, the rest of the instrumental track with its lush, heavily edited choral samples and gentle, high frequency arpeggiated synth lead loop deviate from bass-heavy, fast-paced Bay Area trap songs released in 2015 such as Lil Goofy’s “Trap House” or

J. Stalin’s “Selling Crack.” Sonically, “Godsteppin’” tends to align most with Oakland’s reality rappers, such as Meezy with his “Time is Money,” which like “Godsteppin’,” features a sparse texture in the verses comprised of drums sounds and arpeggiated bell loops. The choruses of both songs break into denser texture with hi-hats playing on sixteenth-note subdivisions over layered samples.

Even in comparison with other songs on Nom de Guerre, which squarely meet the criteria for categorization as jazz/bohemian rap, “Godsteppin’” is unusual in its association with reality rap. In this context, reality rap is differentially highlighted, suggesting Rocky Rivera’s strategic deployment of the genre for its connotative value. According to Krims (2000), jazz/bohemian rap is often consumed by elitist fans that scorn other genres of rap and as such is commonly pejoratively referred to as college-boy” rap, “probably referring less to any official demographic than to a perceived projection of artistic arrogance among some of this genre’s devotees.”

(65). Political consciousness and, at times, exclusive intellectualism in jazz/bohemian rap’s lyrical content also contribute to its status as a highbrow form of rap music. I would suggest that Rocky Rivera’s invocation of reality rap in

49 “Godsteppin’” is a move away from the highbrow, elitist associations of jazz/bohemian rap, allowing her to assume a posture of inclusivity as she calls for solidarity between Asian American and African American communities. If, as

Deborah Wong (2004) suggests, “the American color line is Black and White, so an

Asian American can be a banana (yellow on the outside but White on the inside)… but for Asian Americans to choose to move in the direction of color is literally unimaginable” (187), then Rocky Rivera’s association with the “hardness” of reality rap excludes her from model minority practices that promise a conditional affiliation with whiteness. While Wong argues that “the cultural tropes [Asian

American rappers] rely on create a discursive environment in which, by rapping, they can’t be White” (187), I would add that Rocky Rivera’s participation in reality rap as opposed to the more connotatively elitist jazz/bohemian rap for

“Godsteppin’” suggests a similar move in the direction of color, one that suggests an astute awareness of racialized signifiers in rap’s subgenres.

I Am the Sound of a Million Marches: Rhythmic Resistance in “Godsteppin’”

Krims (2000) has developed his own rhythmic-stylistic terminology for describing flow in rap music, which I will draw on for my analysis of flow in “Godsteppin’.”

Krims identifies three main streams of rhythmic delivery employed by rappers.

Sung style refers to rhythms that parallel those found in sung rock or pop songs and generally feature accents on strong beats, rhythmic repetition and regular, on-beat pauses. He also identifies two types of “effusive” styles: speech-effusive and percussion-effusive. Both types of effusive style tend to feature phrases that spill over the rhythmic boundaries of the meter, but a hallmark of speech-effusive style is 50 enunciation and delivery that imitate spoken language. By contrast, percussion- effusive style, which Krims notes, “is not necessarily quick and may even fall into fairly regular and predictable rhythmic patterns” (51), is marked by pointed articulation that is often followed by brief caesuras that subdivide regular rhythmic units.

I notate rapped rhythm in “Godsteppin’” using a grid system based on beat classes. The first row counts quarter-note values zero through three and the second row counts sixteenth-note subdivisions. An x marks each attack of a syllable. Figure

1 illustrates Rocky Rivera’s first verse of rapping in “Godsteppin’.”

Figure 1: The opening 8 lines of “Godsteppin’” 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 --3-- x x x x x x You were given a chance --3-- x x x x x x x To acknowledge my greatness --3-- x x x x x x Benefit of the doubt --3-- x x x x x x I pardon your lateness --3-- x x x x x x x x x More than a feminist, more than a

x x x x x x x rappin' activist with kids

x x x x x x x x more than mommy, more than his

x x x x x x x x wifey, more than a jour nalist.

The first four measures of Rocky Rivera’s rap suggest a percussive-effusive rhythmic style, with the triplet figure on beat class 2 drawing the listener’s ear to her deliberately accentuated and staccato delivery of these lines. Interestingly, each 51 measure opens with a caesura, creating a series of three-beat phrases subdividing the regular four-beat measure. These caesuras also serve to punctuate the musical texture; where the introduction featured lush, layered vocal samples and dramatic filter sweeps, the verses are considerably sparser with the tight, snapping synthesized snare sound serving as a sonic point of focus. The roll of the snare drum brings to mind military snare cadences, foregrounding Rocky Rivera’s lyrics as a call to arms. I read the use of triplets and caesura in these first few measures as a means of musical resistance; Rocky Rivera’s rhythmic style challenges both the structure of the four beat measure, as well as the impulse of duple meter.

Rocky Rivera’s first on-beat entry in this verse occurs on beat class 1 of the fifth measure, with the words “More than a feminist.” The following lines are an assertion of Rocky Rivera’s identity, and I would suggest that her first on-beat entry in the song occurring on a weak beat serves to punctuate her braggadocio and sense of personal greatness. In “A Style Nobody Can Deal With,” Tricia Rose (1994) argues that verbal and rhythmic moves by rappers highlight points of rupture and Rose translates these musical ruptures into strategies of resistance: “Let us imagine these hip hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation… But also be prepared for rupture… When these ruptures occur, use them in creative ways which will prepare you for a future in which survival will demand a sudden shift in ground tactics” (82). In this first verse of “Godsteppin’,” I read her shift to on-beat entries and away from the previously established triplet figure in the last four measures of the verse as a type of rhythmic and lyric rupture. Having finished speaking directly to her critics, Rocky Rivera directs the focus to her self-identification; she is “More

52 than a feminist,” “rappin’ activist,” “mommy” and “wifey” – all positive roles, and yet somehow inadequate. Rocky Rivera is invested in creating a representation of herself, and by extension, Asian American womanhood, that transcends categories of all sorts—even stereotypically positive ones. It is from the vantage point of categories deconstructed that she is able to call for interracial identification in the chorus.

Figure 2: First iteration of chorus in “Godsteppin’” 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3

Godsteppin, I'm x x x x x x x Godsteppin

See what they done did x x x x x x now

Told them if they push us x x x x x x x too

x x x x x x far, I will come out. Re -

x x x x x x mind them that I'm holy

x x x x x x Hands up don't shoot, If I

can't breathe then you x x x x x x x x can't breathe, If you

x x x x x x rush me then I rush you.

Another rhythmic rupture occurs in the choruses (Figures 2 and 3). Where her verses fit squarely into a percussive-effusive style of flow, the choruses contain different rhythmic-stylistic features. Rocky Rivera’s entries in the choruses occur on beat class 0 of each measure. Overall, the choruses feature considerable rhythmic 53 regularity, less syncopation than the verses and a proliferation of on-beat accents, characteristics that align this section with sung style flow.

Figure 3: Second iteration of chorus in “Godsteppin’” 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3

x x x x x x x Godsteppin, I'm Godsteppin

x x x x x x See what they done did now

x x x x x x x To them if they pushed us too

x x x x x far I will come out

x x x x x x x x Bury me in a shallow grave

x x x x x Next year I'll bear fruit

x x x x x x Eric Garner, Mike Brown

x x x x Hands up, Don't Shoot

x x x x x x x x Bury me in a shallow grave

x x x x x Next year I'll bear frui t

x x x x x x Eric Garner, Mike Brown

x x x x Hands up, Don't Shoot

There are numerous stylistic justifications for a switch from percussive- effusive style in a song’s verses to sung style in the choruses. This configuration, for instance, fits with what Nicole Biamonte (2014) has called the loose-verse-tight- chorus form in popular music. Choruses, generally written to be the most

54 memorable part of a song, benefit from sung style’s rhythmic regularity. In the case of “Godsteppin’” I would not rule out any of these justifications, but would add that sung style directly corresponds to the way rhythm is used in protest chants. Rocky

Rivera’s direct glossing of slogans from Eric Garner and Michael Brown protests (“I

Can’t Breathe” and “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” respectively), suggest that she is willing to put her body on the line in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Her suggestion that “if I can’t breathe/than you can’t breathe” projects an identification- through the African American experience. “Godsteppin’” is a demonstration of the god-like power that can be achieved by marginalized people through deliberate solidarity and the empathetic understanding that what hurts one of us hurts all of us.

I’m Your New Girl: Black Feminist foundations in “Turn You”

In “Godsteppin’” Rocky Rivera formulates an understanding of shared oppression amongst all people of colour, and she deepens this radical and anti-assimilationist stance in her intersectional feminist anthem “Turn You.” If “Godsteppin’” is a call to arms for solidarity in the fight against anti-Blackness, then “Turn You” is Rocky

Rivera’s refusal of model minority values and assertion of gender equality. The particular brand of feminist thought that Rocky Rivera prescribes to throughout

“Turn You” rejects both second-wave feminist centering of a white, middle-class experience and also turns against patriarchal structures that often come part and parcel with nationalist or ethnocentric movements within racially marginalized groups. She centers her own womanhood throughout the song, establishing hers as feminism on its own terms and she challenges her male partner to rise to these 55 ideals. The song’s music video also supports Rocky Rivera’s claims to intersectional feminism in her lyrical content. Throughout, we see her performing her song on stage to an audience of predominantly Asian women, and this live show footage is intercut with more realist images with her riding a city bus and walking through

Oakland. She always appears on her own, foregrounding her independence.

As in “Godsteppin’,” with “Turn You,” Rocky Rivera embodies a representation of Third World womanhood that is multifaceted and complex. In her opening lines, illustrated below in Figure 4, Rivera describes a process of consciousness-raising:

Figure 4: Opening lines of “Turn You” 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3

x x x x x x x x x x x You think I live happily ever aft er?

x x x x x x x x x x This ain't a motherfuckin' fairy tale

x x x x x x x x x Yeah I was caught up in the rapture

x x x x x x x x x But now common sense must prevail, huh

x x x x x x x x x I ain't a motherfuckin' princess

x x x x x x x x x x x Even though I do enjoy the finer things

I read these lines as the foundation for her argument against model minority conceptions of women’s identities. The traditional gender roles prescribed by fairy tale narratives of female protagonist subservience and devotion to a heroic male saviour, to which Rocky Rivera makes reference in these lines, echo the roles of women in Black and other nationalist movements by people of colour (Hill Collins

56 2006); where men were considered the figureheads of the cause, women were thought of as infrastructure, whose domain remains the home sphere. Seen as important from the standpoint of lineage, the policing of women’s bodies was central to the preservation of a minoritarian, ethnocentric racial block. As such, women were looked upon as both literal mothers as well as mothers to their community, creating a tension for third world women whom, under these circumstances are forced to chose between a feminist fight or a racial fight.

These sentiments, coupled with second wave feminism’s blindness to the needs of women of colour are what created the demand for Kimberle Crenshaw’s

(1989) oft-cited theory of intersectional feminism – an approach that accounts for the experience of multiple oppressions by a single individual. The idea that layered and crossing oppressions create particular needs for those that experience multiple forms of marginality is revisited by Anna Carastathis (2013) who shines a spotlight on another one of Crenshaw’s metaphors in her “Intersections and the Basement.”

She argues that while intersectionality theory has become widely accepted in feminist circles, “unitary categories of identity have not been supplanted and continue to be mobilized in essentialist terms, even when ‘intersected’” (703). She identifies an asymmetry in the manner that the gendered experiences of white women are still taken as generalizable to all women, while the gendered experiences of Black women are seen as racialized, and thus not generalizable.

Carastathis identifies Crenshaw’s intersection metaphor as a spatial representation of the convergence of multiple experiences of oppression, and argues that the application of intersectionality theory all too often serves simply as a means to

57 identify and cordon off intersectional identity categories from their essentialist counterparts. As an antidote to this issue, Carastathis turns the spotlight on a second metaphor Crenshaw deploys in her “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and

Sex”: the basement metaphor. Like the intersection, the basement is also spatial, but accounts for temporality and is able to account for the social progress of gendered race and class formation. Crenshaw’s basement contains all people who are marginalized in terms of race, sex, class, sexual preference, physical ability and age.

They are stacked in the basement with those who are multiply disadvantaged on the bottom, and those who are disadvantaged in just one way on the top, where their heads brush against the basement’s ceiling. In Crenshaw’s words:

Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside… A hatch is developed through which those placed immediately below can crawl. Yet this hatch is generally available only to those who—due to the singularity of their burden and their otherwise privileged position relative to those below—are in the position to crawl through. Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch. As this analogy translates for Black women, the problem is that they can receive protection only to the extent that their experiences are recognizably similar to those whose experience tend to be reflected in antidiscrimination doctrine.” (1989, 151-152)

On its own, the intersection metaphor, useful for conceptualizing multiply- oppressed identities, tends to flatten power relations, functioning as an ahistorical construction of multiple power relations. The basement metaphor gives us a sense of three-dimensionality, a means to consider the role of social hierarchy in the formation of oppression.

58 Throughout the second verse of “Turn You” Rocky Rivera directly addresses her male partner, instructing him on how to treat her, ending with the lines “Papa shoulda taught you to acknowledge your emotions/ ‘Specially when your baby mama walking out.” In the pre-chorus that directly follows this verse, Rocky Rivera continues her instructive tone, but the lines read as celebratory and a reclamation of women’s power:

Figure 5: Second pre-chorus of “Turn You”

0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3

but it's more than just x x x x x x x x x philosophy

You can have the world, I got the universe inside of x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x me

You can have the fame, I got my family to ride with x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x me.

Take my last name but you x x x x x x x x x x x x x can't deny my history.

I'ma show you what it x x x x x x x x x x x x x means to have equality,

I'ma make my ancestors x x x x x x x x x x proud of me.

I'ma help you redefine x x x x x x x x x x x x masculinity

My fate is greater than the x x x x x x x x x x x x x x gender you assign to me.

59 The 01:59 mark in the music video corresponds to these lines, and depicts

Rocky Rivera reading a copy of Haitian-American feminist thinker and cultural critic

Roxane Gay’s (2014) Bad Feminist. I see this as an overt centering of black feminist thinkers on the part of Rivera as well as an acknowledgement of her place in

Crenshaw’s basement. Ideas that writers like Gay and Crenshaw propose are truly

“more than just philosophy” – they are nuanced accounts of their particular experiences of marginality; their lived experience as Black women in America allow for revelations about redefining masculinity and seeing an entire universe within themselves. Most of all, Black feminist thinkers provide for all racialized women a means to define themselves on their own terms, without referring back to a masculine, or white feminist center. If, as Rocky Rivera says, she is “liberated, ain’t nothing you can do about it,” her liberation is made possible by standing on the shoulders of Black feminist thinkers.

Figure 6: Screenshot of “Turn You” music video, 01:59.

The passage’s significance is also marked musically. Excepting one line at the end of verse one, the lines “You can have the world I got the universe inside of me/ 60 You can have the fame, I got my family to ride with me/ Take my last name but you can’t deny my history” are Rocky Rivera’s only entries on beat class 0. Most other lines in the song begin on or within beat class 1, leaving a space for echoed ad-libs, marking this passage as the most rhythmically dense lines of the entire song. The insistence of her flow over the languid, yet jubilant brass sample droning underneath combine to create a moment of assertive identity formation for Rivera;

Black feminist thinkers have laid for her the foundation for a self-affirming worldview that rejects model minority values as well as the essentialist claims of white feminism.

Take My Last Name but You Can’t Deny My History: “Turn You” and Feminist Space-Making

While Rocky Rivera generally leaves silence for the duration of beat class 0 throughout “Turn You,” there are several instances in the second half of verse two where her use of enjambment sees her rapping through beat class 0, as shown in

Figure 7 below:

Figure 7: Second verse of “Turn You”

0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3

let em know I was the one who held you x x x x x x x x x x x x x down with a

day job, when you dropped your first x x x x x x x x x single

x x x x x x x x x I don't tolerate that fake pimp shit

x x x x x x x x coward -ass, flashy limp-dick shit

61 x x x x x x x x x x x x x If you rap about fellatio again, I'ma

come to the conclusion that you really on x x x x x x x x x x x x x x some simp shit

x x x x x x huh, go 'head and Drake it out

cry it out, hug it out, you know what I'm x x x x x x x x x x x x x talkin' bout.

Papa shoulda taught you to acknowledge x x x x x x x x x x x x your e-

motions, 'specially when your baby x x x x x x x x x x x x x mama walkin' out.

The content of this verse tends to be more personal than in the first verse; where in verse one Rocky Rivera is laying out a statement of “[her] own rules now/ you need to get with,” this verse draws on autobiographical material describing her relationship with Bay Area underground rap legend Bambu de Pistola. Each instance of leading into beat class 0 with her use of enjambment corresponds to an increasingly harsh revelation, from asserting her role as breadwinner and calling out de Pistola’s lyrical content to questioning his emotional maturity, Rocky Rivera simultaneously emasculates her partner and challenges his behaviour. Imani Perry’s

(2004, 157-159) study of negotiating space for women in hip hop, “The Venus Hip

Hop and the Pink Ghetto” finds that in order to be taken seriously as artists, women have to become subjects instead of objects, and in order to achieve this, a certain amount of gender transcendence must occur. For some artists, this is achieved through presenting as masculine in their dress, and for others, like the hyper

62 sexualized Lil’ Kim, they occupy a male space linguistically and simultaneously call into question the masculine designation of these spaces.

I read Rocky Rivera as similarly engaging in a form of gender transcendence in these enjambed lines. In the first, “let em know I was the one that held you down with a/ day job, when you dropped your first single,” she problematizes De Pistola’s dominion over the realm of hip hop, centering her behind-the-scenes contribution to his success. The second instance of enjambment, “If you rap about fellatio again,

I’ma/ come to the conclusion that you really on some simp shit,” sees Rocky Rivera calling De Pistola’s sexual braggadocio into question and reducing the power of his player status and centering of male sexual pleasure to something she sees as simple minded. Finally, the third enjambment, “Papa shoulda taught you to acknowledge your e-/ motions, ‘specially when your baby mama walking out,” asserts the traditionally feminine realm of feelings and sensitivity as a means of salvation for De

Pistola, and identifies his lack of engagement with such matters as an intergenerational product of toxic masculinity. As Perry (2004) describes, a rapper like Lil’ Kim performs gender transcendence by emerging as possessor of the gaze, a sexual subject with prowess that far outweighs those of her male counterparts. In the case of Rocky Rivera, her gender transcendence operates more in the question of private and public spheres; where the woman’s domain is traditionally in the private world of the home, Rocky Rivera reconfigures the masculine designation of the public sphere and particularly of hip hop culture as a space where women’s contributions are paramount. The critiques she launches against her partner displace him as the ideal subject of hip hop artistry, creating a means for her to

63 assert her artistic agency as well as redefine her contributions to rap music as equally, if not more significant than those of the more famous Bambu De Pistola.

This figurative space-making is echoed in her navigation of rhythm in these passages; where previously her statements were contained between beat classes 1 to 3, here, her lines expand outward, pushing the limits of the musical space she occupies.

Rocky Rivera’s work is overtly political and deeply concerned with fighting anti-Black racism. In contrast with Masia One, and as we will see, Awkwafina, Rocky

Rivera’s musical output is less concerned with self-representation as an Asian woman, and more focused on finding pathways of solidarity with African American communities with whom she finds herself in proximity to. With her 2015 EP Nom de

Guerre Rocky Rivera endeavoured to create, as her homepage describes, “a safe space to deconstruct the mechanisms of oppression, while never losing musicality” and the first two singles from the project, “Godsteppin’” and “Turn You” pointedly delve into questions of racial and gender hierarchies. With “Godsteppin’,” Rocky

Rivera has created a protest anthem specifically calling for Asian American solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and the African American community at large. Her careful navigation of sub-genre in rap music communicates a deliberate move against model minority behaviour, a turn away from the promise of a precarious doorway to privilege and toward an identification of color.

Furthermore, Rocky Rivera demonstrates a deep familiarity with the hip hop tradition, deploying varying rhythmic-stylistic techniques to convey both resistance and solidarity as musical strategies. Asian American participation in hip hop culture

64 is, in many instances, still problematic, but in the case of “Godsteppin’,” Rocky

Rivera’s voice in a black art form gives credence to its creators while envisioning new roads for Afro-Asian solidarity.

Rocky Rivera builds on the question of Asian American participation in hip hop culture with “Turn You,” where she engages with Black feminist theories in order to rewrite hip hop as a space for feminine mastery. In recognizing her place in

Crenshaw’s basement, Rivera acknowledges the important contributions of Black feminist thinkers in her own liberation. She builds bridges between Asian American and Black American communities by performing her identity, while looking to hip hop culture and intersectional feminism with reverence. Identifying shared experiences with Black feminist thinkers, Rivera finds moments of polycultural blending in hip hop culture, and in doing so, she is able to articulate an Asian

American feminist identity that ultimately results in an act of gender transcendence, legitimizing her claims to hip hop culture as a non-black woman of colour. With

“Turn You,” Rocky Rivera acknowledges the work of Black feminists in her own liberation and in “Godsteppin’” she reminds us that by fighting for the freedom of

Black women, we fight for the freedom of all women.

65 Chapter Three: Drive that Corolla Right Into the Streets: Awkwafina’s “Green Tea” and Anti-Racist Shame

While cities such as Atlanta, Oakland and Houston have developed their own histories as hip hop meccas, there is no place more intrinsically tied to the story of hip hop than New York City. In the South Bronx’s Morris Heights neighbourhood,

1520 Sedgwick Avenue - a 102-unit apartment building - towers next to Interstate

87, outfitted with a cheeky street sign reading “Hip Hop Blvd.” Founding father of hip hop music DJ Kool Herc hosted the earliest parties that we now associate with the elements of hip hop culture in the recreation room of this hub for the neighbourhood’s working class families (“A Museum Quest Spins On and On” The

New York Times, September 3, 2010; “40 years on from the party where hip hop was born” BBC, October 21, 2014).

Figure 1: Google Street View image of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue (left) Figure 2: Invitation to a Kool Herc party (right)

The association with hip hop’s origins and the South Bronx is strong, with DJs

Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa following close on Kool Herc’s heels with record crates full of funk and soul singles to be remixed into a new musical style, but the Bronx is not the only borough that has a stake in hip hop’s development. 66 Grandmaster Flash would cross the Harlem river, bringing his cross-fader and early hip hop DJing techniques like the “merry-go-round” to clubs in Manhattan, lighting the sparks that would ignite a localized youth culture into a global musical phenomenon (Chang 2005). As hip hop culture spread outward, essential acts continued to rise from New York City: Run-D.M.C.’s Adidas were to roam all over

Queens; Public Enemy showed the world that Long Island was a force to be reckoned with; Doug E. Fresh made beat boxing mainstream whilst representing for

Harlem; Staten Island remains synonymous with Wu Tang Clan and little else; and

Biggie Smalls brought notoriety to Brooklyn long before it became a hub of ironic- cool in the 2000s (“Best New York hip-hop: The 50 greatest NYC hip-hop artists,”

TimeOut, March 19, 2013). Now, four decades after Kool Herc’s seminal block parties, the contribution of rappers from the city continues to be cutting-edge, with the hard hitting flows of artists like Princess Nokia, Mykki Blanco and Leikeli47 setting the bar for artists worldwide, all while maintaining a distinctly New York- edge to their style.

Nineteen eighty-eight is considered to be an important year in the history of rap music, with a string of genre defining hits on high rotation – Eric B. and Rakim’s

“Microphone Fiend,” Big Daddy Kane’s “Set It Off” and Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” are just a few of the iconic singles to emerge from New York City rappers that year (Alridge and Stewart 2005), leading some hip hop critics to consider it the peak year of rap’s golden era. For ’88 baby, Nora Lum, the year bears a different type of significance; born and raised in Queens, she was launched into a vibrant world of cultural blending and the bombastic sounds of New York’s finest. The daughter of a

67 third-generation Chinese-American father, and South Korean immigrant Lum embodied a stereotypically quiet and passive stance as an Asian woman until she created her alter-ego, Awkwafina, at the age of 16. As she describes in a profile with

Entertainment Weekly, “Awkwafina is someone that I think never grew up, never felt the need to be filtered, that is extremely confident… Nora is brooding, neurotic, overthinking, completely full of anxiety, and Awkwafina kind of deafens all of that noise.” (“Who the hell is Awkwafina?: Let the star of Ocean’s 8, Crazy Rich Asians tell you herself,” Entertainment Weekly, April 23, 2018). Her artistic beginnings as a bedroom producer and aspiring rapper came to a fold in 2012 with the release of a

Court Dunn directed music video for her debut single, “My Vag”. A response to

Mikey Avalon’s “My Dick”, “My Vag” and its comedic, excessive and explicit lyrics celebrating female genitalia went onto become a viral hit, launching Awkwafina to internet stardom (“Awkwafina: ‘I was just rapping about my genitalia – not making a feminist message’,” The Guardian, December 28, 2017). With the momentum of

YouTube notoriety driving her career forward, she would release her 2014 LP

Yellow Ranger, and after a short hiatus, came back with her 2016 single “Green Tea” in collaboration with Korean-American stand-up comedian Margaret Cho. In addition to releasing music, following her YouTube success, Awkwafina embarked on an acting career and has now been credited with several impressive roles, including Peik Lin in the Warner Bros. film Crazy Rich Asians and as Constance in the all-female Oceans Trilogy spinoff, Ocean’s 8.

Comedy is central to Awkwafina’s career and her self-deprecating and explicit sense of humour was a significant factor in her early viral success. Known

68 for its lifestyle content and satirical tone aimed towards millennials, Vice Media has been a home for Awkwafina throughout her career. She has been the subject of multiple written features on the platform, has appeared on the web series Huang’s

World and was the inaugural guest on Desus and Mero, a late-night talk show on the broadcasting company’s multinational television channel Viceland. Her sarcastic and at times disparaging tone is a natural fit for the Vice brand, and I would argue that her typically-millennial use of satire is a means for her to question the pristine nature of the model minority and corresponding stereotypes of Asian female docility. Her endearing awkwardness and signature shamelessly embarrassing interview revelations allow her to create a representation of herself that is deeply divergent from classic Western expectations of stock stereotypes for Asian characters.

In both acting and music, Awkwafina makes expanding media representations of Asian American women a priority. As she stated in a 2018 interview with website HYPEBAE, “I will always use my platform to fight for what’s right and that includes walking out of auditions for one dimensional roles and standing up against ignorance from people who could potentially employ you. All my life, I’ve surprised people simply by interacting with them. By simply being me, I changed traditional attitudes on what people expect Asian women to be”

(“Awkwafina: With Great Platforms Come Great Responsibilities,” Hypebae, May 21,

2018).

This chapter will consider how Awkwafina tackles these traditional expectations of Asian American women’s identities in her 2016 single and music

69 video featuring Margaret Cho, “Green Tea.” The video critiques both racial and gender stereotypes through Awkwafina’s use of musical references as well as video director Tony K’s prolific use of visual gags and tropes from Asian cinema. I consider the intergenerational interactions between Awkwafina and Cho with particular attention to the varieties of Asian womanhood each embody and I analyze both figures for their deployment of assimilationist and anti-racist ideas. As well, I consider the centrality of shamelessness in their comedic styles. In particular, I read

Awkwafina and Cho both as figures that embody and reject the notion of the Asian as perpetual foreigner in the context of North American society.

***

In Stamped From the Beginning: A History of Racist Ideas in America, historian Ibram

X. Kendi (2016) identifies three camps of theories on race. Kendi refers to the most easily identifiable camp of racist thinkers, those whom figure Black people as biologically distinct and inferior to white people, as segregationist. He identifies a second group as assimilationist, those that embrace biological racial equality but that point to environmental factors, such as poverty, culture and climate, as the root of Black difference. As such, they encourage the adoption of white cultural traits and physical ideals and justify what they view as inferior Black behaviour as the root of racial disparities. More hopefully, Kendi asserts that while segregationist and assimilationist ideas have dominated American racial discourse, a persistent line of antiracist thought has challenged these lines. Antiracists, who form Kendi’s third camp of racial theorists, argue that racial discrimination has been a cornerstone of

America’s founding and that this explains the persistence of racial disparities.

70 “[U}nlike segregationists and assimilationists, antiracists have recognized that the different skin colors, hair textures, behaviors, and cultural ways of Blacks and

Whites are on the same level, are equal in all their divergences” (Kendi 2016, under

“Prologue”).

Kendi traces the history of racist ideas in America with a focus on interactions between Blacks and Whites. In this chapter, I identify assimilationist and antiracist thinking in Awkwafina’s “Green Tea,” expanding his analysis to include non-Black people of colour. I justify this move by looking to Patricia Hill

Collins’s (2006) formulation of racial classifications in American society. Hill Collins describes a racial continuum where “raceless” White individuals lay at one end, and at the other lies an intensely raced Black group. Latinos, Asians, indigenous peoples and other racial and ethnic minority groups “jockey for a place between these two poles, forced to position themselves between the social meanings attached to White and Black” (179). Hill Collins argues that across these different racial formations, the closer one approaches Whiteness, the more likely they are to be seen as an individual rather than as a member of a group and accordingly, will gain increasing access to first-class citizenship. Those racialized individuals existing in the liminal space between Black and White have the options of assimilation - which will afford them a temporary and conditional pass to first-class citizenship - or of antiracist solidarity - working toward building bridges for relating across our differences as equals.

71 Peep that mess Jay-Z call a stadium: Awkwafina and New York Nativity

Due in part to the White-Black racial continuum of North American racial politics and in part to history of exclusion and anti-miscegenation policies in the United

States and Canada (Lee 2015; Castro 2007), Asian subjecthood is cast as perpetually foreign in North America. Despite the presence of Asians in Canada, Mexico and the

United States dating back to the seventeenth century, early twentieth century mass media representations of Chinese, Japanese and other Asians and Pacific Islanders portrayed these groups as dangerous outsiders or villains with poor English and loose morals (Chou 2008, 7). Men were cast as sexually impotent opium addicts or stingy, sneaky criminals and women as exotic beauties who were either emasculating dragon ladies or docile, subservient lotus blossoms- stereotypes that combine to express the white majority’s fear of the “yellow peril.”7

The racial framing of Asians in North America today reflects a more ambiguous anti-Asian stance, with the myth of the model minority formulating a strong positive image of Asian Americans. However, this apparent reversal still serves to other Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. As discussed previously,

Asian American success is discounted as the result of exotic cultural practices that produce high achievement at the cost of social integration, an attitude so commonly held by white executives of Fortune 500 firms, “Asian Americans are often hired as engineers, computer experts, and technicians, but no matter what their qualifications are they are rarely considered for management” (Chou 2008, 13).

7 Many scholars in Asian American studies and cultural studies have discussed these gendered stereotypes and their effects, including Prasso (2009), Shah (2003) and Zhou (2016). 72 Thus, the myth of the model minority serves to absolve the white majority for any racial barriers that Asian Americans might experience, because the relative educational and economic success of a particular group of Asian Americans is extrapolated outward; Asian Americans that do need the support of social services fall through the demographic cracks. The narrative of the model minority myth also denies other racialized groups, such as Black and Latinx folks access to social support and reparations because dominant groups can point to Asian American bootstrapping in order to put pressure on Black and Brown bodies to assimilate.

Ultimately, the myth of the model minority, while a seemingly positive stereotype, is dehumanizing for Asian Americans and all other racialized groups, because it continues to reify the “raceless” achievements of the white majority as reflective of individuals, but the achievements, or lack of achievements of racial groups as reflective of the whole.

The myth of the model minority essentially rewards Asian Americans for their assimilation into whiteness while punishing other racial groups for their failures on this front. Simultaneously, it rejects individuals of Asian descent from any claims to North American nativity, because it frames Asian American success as exotic – the very cultural practices that are believed to contribute to Asian American success distinguishes them from dominant culture. This new Asian stereotype places them above other racial groups in a white-black continuum, separating and distinguishing Asians from Blackness while simultaneously precluding them from access to whiteness. It is a move that obstructs Asian Americans from pursuing avenues of solidarity with other racialized groups in North America, as the promise

73 of relative privilege built into the model minority myth comes hand in hand with its anti-Black sentiment. Asian Americans then, ride on a conveyor belt of vertical assimilation that abruptly grinds to a halt before they can make any real claims of belonging to North American society. The very traits that make the model minority a good American also make them un-American.

Awkwafina, a fourth-generation American with mixed Asian heritage, embodies the simultaneous insider-outsider status experienced by many American- born Asians. As Nora Lum, she embodies model minority traits “brooding, neurotic, overthinking, completely full of anxiety” (“Who the hell is Awkwafina?: Let the star of Ocean’s 8, Crazy Rich Asians tell you herself,” Entertainment Weekly, April 23,

2018), which lie in contrast to her bombastic, shameless and at times, immature rap persona. She is at ease as an American and reflects the gritty hustle of a New York

City native in her various media pursuits, but finds “that not a week will go by without someone leaving some nonsensical, grotesquely racist comment on one of my social media platforms” (“13 Awkward Questions with Rapper Awkwafina,”

Mochi Mag, Winter 2014). Awkwafina’s mere existence complicates the idea of

Asian as perpetual foreigner – while she is excluded from whiteness, the move to exoticize her achievements that the model minority myth attempts is thwarted by her embodiment of New York City nativity.

Throughout her career, Awkwafina overtly frames herself as a New Yorker.

Her third single, 2013’s “NYC Bitche$” is a viciously hilarious celebration of born and bred New Yorkers with the swaggering hook “New York City Bitch, that’s where

I come from/ Not where I moved to on Mom and Dad’s trust fund/ New York City

74 bitch, that’s how I’m rolling/ You out-of-state fakes get your iPad stolen.” The verses of the song see the rapper touring around the five boroughs, identifying her favourite spots and dragging clichéd tourist destinations through the mud. She is also recognized by other New Yorkers as an authority on the city; in an episode about New York on the Vice Munchie’s series Huang’s World, she appears as one of

Eddie Huang’s guides in Manhattan, sampling the fares in Chinatown and providing tips on embodying New York authenticity (Munchies 2014). On top of this, her pièce de résistance of New York insider information comes in 2015 with the release of her book Awkwafina’s NYC. Framed as a tourist guidebook, it features ten walking tours littered with historical facts, excellent food and drink recommendations, ten places to pee and the typically sardonic tone of a New Yorker.

Figure 2: Image of Awkwafina from Awkwafina’s NYC

In her music, book and various media appearances, Awkwafina emphasizes the dichotomy between native New Yorkers and newcomers to the city, “Natives see

75 the ugly and the gritty before they see the city of dreams, and I think Awkwafina wouldn’t exist had she not been raised in New York.” (“Awkwafina: With Great

Platforms Come Great Responsibilities,” Hypebae, May 21, 2018). In the same interview, she speaks of the city’s diversity, “In New York, you see everyone and everything is uncensored, and that experience affects you as a child — it hardens you. You meet any and every kind of person here… You struggle to understand the concept of racism and xenophobia, because your idea of American is every different color.” Awkwafina finds acceptance in New York City’s rich cultural tapestry – for her, the cultural blending that occurs in a tightly populated urban center where people from disparate backgrounds live in close proximity is the definition of being

American.

Awkwafina’s experience of New York City diversity contributes to her anti- racist, horizontal assimilationist stance in her rap music.8 Her comedic songs are not overtly political in the way we consider activist rapper like Rocky Rivera as political, but her content necessarily speaks to identity politics. She seeks to represent herself from within the hip hop mileau – something she accomplishes with aplomb and authenticity, but while she personally feels at home in rap music, as an Asian woman, her marginality brings the political nature of her statements to the fore. For

Awkafina, representation is most meaningful when the marginalized can talk about

8 Vijay Prashad’s theory of horizontal assimilation versus vertical assimilation is discussed at length in chapter one, “From the Land of the Trill.” For more, see also Vijay Prashad, Everybody of Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001) and Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness and a Global Race Consciousness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 76 themselves rather than focusing on the nature of their marginalization, and her insider-outsider status in hip hop as both New Yorker and Asian woman situates her ideally for questioning ideas of the Asian as perpetual foreigner and examining the potential of Afro-Asian cultural blending.

Figure 3: Screenshot of “Green Tea” music video, 0:12

The nature of her flow in “Green Tea” as well as the lyrical content in the song’s first verse work to frame Awkwafina as simultaneous hip hop insider and exotic other. For the first shot in which she appears, Awkwafina is wearing crisp white Nike Air Max sneakers, a t-shirt, casual black pants, and over all this, an ornate yellow and black kimono. She struts forward, rapping, “Flip a stereotype/ how an

Asian bitch got concubines?” lines that set the stage for the mood of the verse to come. Throughout the song and video, Awkwafina dons herself in Asiatic attire, from a dragon lady inspired business outfit to a casual street wear look topped with a dragon-embroidered bomber jacket, overtly illustrating her connection to her heritage whilst also making claims to rap authenticity and hip hop as a place of belonging.

77 Awkwafina boasts her way through the first verse with typical rap braggadocio but she closes it with the lines “‘fina wasn’t born with the gas/ As a matter of fact, I was born with a rash/ As a matter of fact, got a concave ass/ Still the hoes line up like a paragraph.” Here, she acknowledges her outsider status and calls attention to her Asian body in the excessive and hypersexual world of rap music.

Still, her appeal to “the hoes” alludes to her prowess as rapper - that despite her repeated and deliberate embrace of her status as Asian woman, she has earned her way into the laurels of rap music with her authentic New York nativity that comes through in her flow and production style.

This iteration of Awkwafina sees her at her anti-racist best. Finding a home in a genre that is culturally marked as Black American, she locates a path for Black

Americans and Asian Americans to connect across cultural and racial difference. She raps with the assurance and ability that comes with a lifelong engagement and study of the genre and the general youth art movement that comprises hip hop, a dedication that secures her place in the genre without the incorporation of inauthentic pantomiming of Blackness. Throughout her work, she deliberately draws attention to her Asian heritage, creating spaces for the Asian subject within hip hop and by doing so, she escapes the restricting group identity of Asian

American to write her own identity as an individual. Awkwafina: Asian, and also rapper, comedian, actor and New Yorker.

We Got that Bomb Pussy: “Green Tea” and Intergenerational Shamelessness

Awkwafina’s “Green Tea” opens with a swooping crane shot of Margaret Cho dressed in a formal hanbok. Her matte, pancake makeup is a few shades lighter than 78 her natural skin tone and the downturned peak of her eyeliner toward her nose gives an exaggerated almond shape to her eyes. As the camera pulls back we see her taking long hauls from a THC vaporizer – customized with her own name, no less – and holding a half-consumed bottle of soju while reclining next to one of the small dogs that have become synonymous with her personal brand.

Figure 3: Screenshot of “Green Tea” music video, 0:07

This depiction of Cho is incongruous with our expectations of a middle-aged Asian woman – while her stern expression, traditional dress and heavy accent indicate typical perpetual foreign status, she widens her eyes as the camera passes over them and inexplicably states, “With every pussy, a pair of shoes will go to a child in need.” Her attitude, open consumption of drugs and alcohol and unabashed reference to female genitalia strikes against formulations of Asian womanhood as subservient, docile and deeply entrenched in shame.

The centrality of shame to East Asian and especially Confucian societies has been explored at great length amongst scholars, especially in psychology (Zhong

2008, Wong 2007, Johnson 2015). The collectivist nature of Confucian ideals means 79 that shame is not only experienced individually as a result of one’s actions, but can also be experienced through the family system as a result of an individual’s actions.

Avoiding a “loss of face” (diulian in Mandarin and chemyeon in Korean) becomes a social contract – bringing shame on oneself causes a disruption to one’s family and ethnic group’s sense of solidarity. As such, an East Asian woman engaging in behavior considered shameless can be read as a direct rejection of these collectivist values in favour of the individualist configuration of Western society. From this standpoint, Awkwafina’s longtime admiration of, and eventual collaboration with comedian Margaret Cho is especially significant because Cho provides for

Awkwafina a model of belonging as a West-raised East Asian woman.

Awkwafina describes discovering Margaret Cho as a girl, watching her comedy specials on television alongside her grandmother, “Margaret Cho influenced me in more ways than I can describe, solely based on the fact that she was an unashamed Asian woman and I had never, ever seen that growing up. Ever!” (“The

Year of Awkwafina: The Actor and Rapper on Ocean’s 8 and Her Very Big 2018,” W

Magazine, January 30, 2018). In an interview with Forbes Magazine she expresses the same admiration of Cho’s lack of shame, and defines shamelessness as “being all in on what you believe in and what speaks to you” (“Awkwafina Explains How To

Turn Awkwardness Into a Superpower,” Forbes, April 16, 2018). This definition of shamelessness evacuates the negativity from the concept; for fourth-generation

American, Awkwafina, being shameless is about expressing one’s personal beliefs rather than the breaking of a social contract. As Asian women in the media, both

Awkwafina and Margaret Cho navigate a shameless sense of individuality that is, in

80 large part, the product of their Western upbringing, while simultaneously balancing an awareness that their Western audiences see them as representatives of the perpetually foreign Asian other.

English and gender studies scholar Rachel C. Lee (2004, 115) describes Cho’s comedy as a means of avowing and disavowing abjection. Where the historical power structures of the United States prevent women of colour from seeing their experiences as legitimate, comedy and camp are spaces that allow for the articulation of these experiences. Cho’s shamelessness is a central feature of her stand-up; she describes her promiscuity, her “fag hag” status and her overweight body in terms that are simultaneously prideful and laughable, whilst also framing her Asian heritage as exceptional and erasable by the American media landscape.

In her stand-up, the conditions of East Asian shame and Western respectability politics overlap – merely by discussing such subject matter, she fails to preserve

“face” for her family line and in doing so, she makes evident for her largely white audience that the demands of North American society on an Asian woman are the same as those placed on her by the East Asian cultural background. Where shame culture in East Asia acts as a social contract and means of belonging, Western respectability serves to police the foreign body. As Korean American woman, Cho’s place in the American media landscape is contingent on her embodiment of Asian stereotypes of deference, meekness and exotic beauty – instead, she is overweight, crass and sexually explicit. As such, her comedy makes visible her abject status in both East Asian and Western society. In a sense, her shamelessness acts as a form of horizontal assimilation; as unashamed Korean American woman, she embodies

81 American ideals of individualism and self-expression while still rejecting the narrow path of assimilation deemed respectable by white American expectations.

The video for “Green Tea” sets Cho in this liminal space of abjection – contemptible from both Korean and American standpoints. In a running sight gag that unfolds throughout the course of the music video, Cho, who is stylized as

Sadako Yumamura, the central antagonist of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film Ringu, pursues a terrified Awkwafina. While both Cho and Awkwafina embody various stereotypical media representations of Asian women in “Green Tea,” the choice of this particular horror movie villain is significant. Ringu’s box office success in Japan inspired the 2002 Hollywood remake of the film, The Ring, which in turn spawned a wave of Hollywood remakes of so-called “J-Horror” films including The Grudge

(2003), Dark Water (2005) and Pulse (2006). This trend solidified Asia as the motherland of subtle terror and caused a sea change in the focus point of Hollywood horror from slasher films to psychological thrillers (“Japanese Cinema Series,” The

Diplomat, March 24, 2010). What was referred to by film critics as “The New Asian

Horror” (Balmain 2008), would come to represent a new type of yellow peril in the

West; Asia’s most significant contribution to Hollywood through the noughties was its ability to scare Western audiences not with the gratuitous violence of a psychopathic murderer, but through a scorned child’s ability to seize their imagination and make them profoundly uncomfortable. Cho is the champion of audience discomfort in “Green Tea,” and her embodiment of Asian horror as well as her overt caricatures of unassimable Asian characteristics plagues Awkwafina throughout the music video.

82 The majority of “Green Tea” is rapped by a confident and highly adept

Awkwafina, with Cho contributing just a few lines at the top of the second verse:

“Hello, this is taste of jasmine/ Never been, never will be a has-been/ Rub it, you’ll feel like Aladdin/ I’ll dish it cause I might be into casting.” In contrast to

Awkwafina’s distinctly American voice, Cho delivers these lines in a semi-Korean accent. With this accent, she overtly frames her foreigner status both in America as well as in the realm of rap music. Interestingly, Awkwafina follows Cho to close out the verse with: “Us yellow bitches livin’ fancy gettin’ beef like Kobe/ Us yellow bitches datin’ white boys that look just like Moby/ Us yellow bitches eatin’ fruits and shit at karaoke/ Pull up in a second hand Mazda/ Pull up in a Hyundai Elantra.”

These lines differ from her stance in the first verse, where rather than flipping the stereotypes, Awkwafina proudly affirms these attributes that are considered typical of Asian women. Having taken the time to assert her place in rap music in the first verse, she attempts to widen the definition of rap authenticity to accommodate the atypical appearance of a figure like Cho in a rap song.

Figure 4: Screenshot of “Green Tea” music video, 1:08

83 Nonetheless, Cho’s portrayal of various Asian stereotypes serves to cause considerably more audience discomfort than Awkwafina’s. In a scene where

Awkafina wears the Asian woman’s equivalent of a power suit, Cho, in contrast, appears in a too-tight blouse with the asymmetrical collar of a Chinese qi pao with booty shorts that are, strangely, styled with a pair of panties over top of them.

Throughout the video, Awkwafina deliberately portrays herself in a way that frames her Asian heritage, but she never looks as though she is wearing a costume. By contrast, Cho, as both slutty Asian and scary Asian, is presented as caricature.

The song is bookended by Cho’s heavily accented declaration, “With every pussy, a pair of shoes will go to a child in need,” but as the T.I.-inspired pop-trap beat of the song fades out, Awkwafina replies. “Why would you- Why the accent?

Okay… I feel like we didn’t necessarily agree to that.” Here, Awkwafina situates herself as higher on the creative hierarchy than Cho, and as hip-hop authority within the context of “Green Tea.” In this moment, Cho finds herself shamefully abject, even in the eyes of her collaborator. Awkwafina’s discomfort with Cho’s accent reveals a vertically assimilationist stance – in a song like “Green Tea” it is a given that Asian women should have access to the world of hip hop and rap music, but certain features that denote foreign status, such as an accent when speaking English, precludes specific individuals from claiming such access. Their exchange continues:

Awkwafina: I don’t think we have to- Margaret Cho: Hello? Awkwafina: Okay. Hi. Hi, yes. Margaret Cho: How come you never call me? Awkwafina: I think the accent is unnecessary. Margaret Cho: How come you never call me?... Finally, call me… Press 1 for pickup, press 2 for delivery

With this, Awkwafina delineates the bounds of acceptable behaviour for Asian women in the Western media; a certain degree of shamelessness is permitted alongside a healthy dose of model minority underpinnings, including exceptional artistic merit and achievement, speech that is unmarked by foreign accent and adeptness at navigating Western society. Awkwafina’s involvement in hip hop is not the typically anti-Black vertical assimilation we see from model minorities, but I would argue that that the space Margaret Cho takes up in the realm of hip hop in

“Green Tea” reads as more radically anti-racist than Awkwafina’s. Cho’s abject status throughout the video highlights the discomfort we feel when presented with an

Asian participant in hip hop and draws attention to the shame that Awkwafina feels toward unassimilable Asian characteristics. Embracing the individual lifestyle choices associated with rap music and shamelessness is condoned, but doing so with an accent that marks one as foreign is not.

In an introduction to her 2002 concert film Notorious C.H.O., Margaret Cho’s parents are interviewed and her mother comments on Cho’s use of accented English in her stand-up, “She makes a joke of me, the way I’m talking - my accent, you know?

And yeah, she makes a good impression of me” (William 2015). By performing jokes about her mother and taking on her accent, Cho brings her mother, and by extension, other newly immigrated East Asian women into focus in the Western media. This group of women, who are generally considered too foreign to be American, receive the chance to be represented in the media through Cho’s mimicry. In fact, Cho is not unlike Awkwafina in terms of the place she holds in Western society – she is

85 American born, fiercely independent, crass – attractive as an exoticized other because she is not entirely different from a typical Caucasian comedian. She leverages the opening the entertainment industry offers her as a result of model minority characteristics such as exceptional talent and eloquence to exemplify the most foreign, least assimilated members of her own community. The power of her shameless mocking of her own cultural markers is that she is able to demonstrate that, while difference may be what defines the most unassimable members of

American society, we are not so different that we can’t laugh together.

In the same interview, Cho’s father addresses the explicit sexual content in her stand up, “It is certainly embarrassing, you know, listening to her jokes in some sense, because she is talking about these sexual matters which you do not talk about in front of your children or your parents. On the other hand, this is the matter, which is so close to all of us” (William 2015). While Cho’s shamelessness means a rejection of the collectivist, shame-based social contract in the culture of her parents, it also provides a means to connect across the individualistic culture of her upbringing. She maintains filial ties in a distinctly hybrid cultural approach finding common ground with the parents generation over the embarrassing things like sexuality or the aural markers of learning a foreign tongue. The intergenerational connection in “Green Tea” is also exemplified by Awkwafina’s relationship to Cho; as the song’s outro begins, Cho says, “Came out my belly with a suture, Awkwafina is the future.” While Awkwafina acknowledges Cho’s profound influence on her humour, and the way she sees herself as a shameless Asian woman, Cho distinctly positions herself as mother figure in these lines of the outro.

86 In an interview with Vice Media’s Broadly, Margaret Cho discusses the role of shame in her work, “Comedy is an empowering art form because it has a lot to do with the efficacy of your shaming technique. If you can shame people well, you likely will be a good comedian, and shaming people for the things that they shouldn’t be doing like their sexism and racism and homophobia is actually really positive”

(Broadly 2015). In a way, perhaps the defining feature of East Asian motherhood is the development of one’s advanced shaming techniques; shaming one’s child in a society where shame is a defining part of the social contract is love. Cho’s unabashed imitation of her own mother’s accent brings to light the shame Awkwafina experiences when confronted with these overt markers of Asian perpetual foreign status. However, even after asserting herself as hip hop native and creative leader in the world of “Green Tea,” Cho gets the last, nonsensical word, parroting the Chinese restaurant worker whose automated phone menu might never have another chance to appear in a rap video.

In “Green Tea,” Awkwafina and Margaret Cho both communicate anti-racist stances; Awkwafina’s place in rap music as a result of her skills, authenticity and

New York nativity forges pathways for Black Americans and Asian Americans to relate across differences, and Cho’s championing of the most abject versions of

Asian subjecthood expands the criteria for who can have the privilege of being considered American. Together, Awkwafina and Cho negotiate the question of shame, reformulating an East Asian shame-based social contract to express shamelessness that connects disparate individuals through a mutual embarrassment. As two unashamed East Asian women, they represent different

87 individual stances when it comes to representing themselves – an act that individualizes and humanizes each of them; their differences serve to deconstruct group understandings of East Asian women. What “Green Tea” teaches us, is that individually, each Asian American is unique, and it is through shared experiences and artistic cultures that allow us to connect across differences both across racial boundaries and within our own cultural communities.

88 When the Pumps Come Out, Y’all Gon’ Speak Chinese: Concluding Remarks

Just because I’m Asian doesn’t mean I can speak about everything in Asian America. I can only speak about the things I know. We need to hold the power to define ourselves. I want Asians in rollerblades, I want Asians in mountains, I want Asians flying planes, I want Asians driving garbage trucks – it’s just like – I want us to be viewed as whole people, not as people who can only do this, or only do that. -Eddie Huang (Time 2015)

The history of Asian subjectivity in North America is a story of opening and closing doors. The floodgates are lifted in times where Asian bodies are necessary to fill a need – as miner, railroad worker and launderer, or accountant, developer and dentist – and quickly shut when the quotas are reached. In one moment, Asians in

North America can be considered models of assimilation and neo-liberal success, and in the next, dangerous foreign aliens representative of a distant and exotic dark cabal. And if, as Patrician Hill Collins (2006) argues, whiteness promises the dignity of being seen as an individual rather than as representative of a group, then for

Asian America - despite their best attempts to find a place in Western society - the door to one’s individual history, identity and process of Westernization remains firmly shut.

This thesis accounts for the particular ways Masia One, Rocky Rivera and

Awkwafina navigate self-representation as Asian women in North America. Through their participation in hip hop culture and rap music, they create representations of themselves that are at odds with model minority formulations of Asian subjecthood.

Each of them approaches rap music from a different angle, and illustrates a desire to find belonging in a world where the dominant culture sees them in terms of stereotypes of perpetual foreigners. The Afro-Asian cultural exchange and blending

89 that occurs within the realm of hip hop creates the opportunity for anti-racist interactions between these two racial groups; there is the both the space for coexistence across difference as well as self-identification across difference.

On a personal note, I arrived at this research project because of a desire to consider the role of identity politics play in my own artistic practice. Having grown up connected to jazz, soul and rap music, then pursuing an education in jazz performance and finally going on to become a rap artist, I felt that investigating why

I might have such a strong pull toward the music of Black folks would be a significant exercise of self-reflexivity in my artistic life.

That a music created out of the specific conditions faced by Black and Latino youth in the South Bronx of the late 1970s can serve as a platform for me, as second generation Chinese-Canadian woman to express my individual truth, speaks to the profound shared experiences we hold in North America across racial categories.

Musical genres like jazz and hip hop that are inscribed with a strong association with African Americans are profoundly Western and have the capacity to serve as a place of anti-racist, cross-cultural blending – a means for Asians in North America to shed their foreign status and to write their own scripts for how and why they become Westernized.

Most importantly, participating in hip hop culture and rap music gives Asians in North America a pathway for integration into Western society without necessarily adopting the values of structural oppression. Cultural exchange between minoritarians allows for the identification of shared experiences, values, interests and goals; Asian participation in hip hop is in many ways the anti-thesis of the myth

90 of the model minority in that in aligns the Asian American experience more closely with the African American experience, rather than position Asian Americans as more assimilable and therefore more acceptable - more human - than their African

American counterparts. As racialized groups in North America, the sharing of cultural knowledge and practices across racial difference can open up pathways for healing and self-representation that exist outside the expectations of the dominant culture, and the potential for Afro-Asian transnationalism in this context is for both

Asian Americans and African Americans to create representations of themselves that circumvent the oppressive stereotypes created for them by North America’s history of white supremacist logic.

91 References

18millionrising. 2016. “Asian Americans Demand Justice for Akai Gurley.” YouTube video, Posted April 11, 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVZ4cF4na3o&feature=youtu.be.

Alkebulan, Paul. 2007. Survival Pending Revolution : The History of the Black Panther Party. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Alridge, Derrick P. and James B. Stewart. 2005. "Introduction: Hip Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future." The Journal of African American History 90 (3): 190- 195.

Balmain, Colette. 2008. Introduction to Japanese Horror Film edinburgh university Press.

Beatrock Music. 2015. “ROCKY RIVERA || GODSTEPPIN || PRODUCED BY FATGUMS || DIRECTED BY COOLREVE.” YouTube video. Posted June 30, 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZef2WVBOs.

--. 2016. “ROCKY RIVERA || TURN YOU || PRODUCED BY FATGUMS.” YouTube video. Posted May 25, 2016. https://youtu.be/SW2KUk0IC7g.

Biamonte, Nicole. 2014. "Formal Functions of Metric Dissonance in Rock Music." Music Theory Online 20 (2).

Broadly. 20150. “Margaret Cho on Power Bottoms and Surviving Bullshit.” YouTube video. Posted September 25, 2015. https://youtu.be/aReRSKaTwto

Carastathis, Anna. 2013. "Basements and Intersections." Hypatia 28 (4): 698-715.

Castro, Christi-Anne. 2007. "Voices in the Minority: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Asian American in Popular Music." Journal of Popular Music Studies 19 (3): 221- 238.

Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can't Stop, Won't Stop : A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. [1st Picador ed.] ed. New York: Picador.

Chou, Rosalind S. and Joe R. Feagin. 2016. The Myth of the Model Minority : Asian Americans Facing Racism. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." U.Chi.Legal F.: 139.

92 DeNora, Tia. 2003. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge ;: Cambridge University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B., Bill Mullen, and Cathryn Watson. 2005. W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia : Crossing the World Color Line. 1st ed. ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Durham A., Cooper B.C., and Morris S.M. 2013. "The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay." Signs 38 (3): 721-737.

First We Feast. 2016. “Eddie Huang Gest Destroyed by Spicy Wings.” YouTube video. Posted May 31, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFdR240qaXA.

Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites : On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Fox, Richard G. 1991. Recapturing Anthropology : Working in the Present. School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Gaunt, Kyra Danielle. 2006. The Games Black Girls Play : Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press.

Gay, Roxane. 2014. Bad Feminist Hachette UK.

George, Nelson. 1999. Hip Hop America. New York: Penguin Books.

Harrison, Anthony Kwame. 2009. Hip Hop Underground : The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hill Collins, Patricia. 2006. From Black Power to Hip Hop : Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Politics, History, and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hisama, Ellie M. 2002. "Afro-Asian Crosscurrents in Contemporary Hip Hop." American Music Review 32 (1): 3.

Hisama, Ellie M. 2014. "DJ Kuttin Kandi: Performing Feminism." American Music Review 43 (2).

Johnson, Matthew D., Linh Nguyen, Jared R. Anderson, Wenli Liu, and Amber Vennum. 2015. "Shame Proneness and Intimate Relations in Mainland China." Personal Relationships 22 (2): 335-347.

Kajikawa, Loren. 2015. Sounding Race in Rap Songs. First edition. ed. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

93 Kendi, Ibram X. 2016. Stamped from the Beginning : The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books. Keyes, Cheryl Lynette. 2002. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kramer, Eric Mark. 2003. The Emerging Monoculture : Assimilation and the "Model Minority". Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

Krims, Adam. 2000. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism. Cambridge ;: Cambridge University Press.

Lee, Erika. 2015. The Making of Asian America: A History Simon and Schuster.

Lee, Rachel C. 2004. "“Where's My Parade?”: Margaret Cho and the Asian American Body in Space." TDR/The Drama Review 48 (2): 108-132.

Lionnet, Françoise, Shumei Shi, and Fran�coise Lionnet. 2005. Minor Transnationalism / Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Liu, Marian. 2007. “The long career of Too Short.” The Mercury News, May 10, 2007. https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/10/the-long-career-of-too-short/.

Lum, Nora. 2015. Awkwafina's NYC. First edition. ed. New York: Potter Style/Publishers.

Maeda, Daryl J. 2009. Chains of Babylon : The Rise of Asian America. Critical American Studies Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mapping Police Violence. Mapping Police Violence. 2015, http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/. Accessed 16 December 2016.

Masia One. 2014. “Ghostface Killah + Raekwon in Singapore Hosted By Masia One.” Personal blog. Last modified February 14, 2014. http://www.masiaone.com/blog/2014/2/14/ghostface-killah-raekwon-in- singapore-hosted-by-masia-one

---. 2016. “In Dialogue with Singapore’s New Paper.” Personal blog. Last modified September 28, 2016. http://www.masiaone.com/blog/2016/9/28/how-to-turn-a- pr-mistake-into-a-positive

Munchies. 2014. “Huang’s World – NYC – Part 3/3.” YouTube video. Posted November 1, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZB6ZXclMgE

Perry, Imani. 2004. Prophets of the Hood : Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham: Duke University Press.

Pough, Gwendolyn D. 2004. Check it while I Wreck it : Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2001. Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting : Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press.

Prasso, Sheridan. 2009. The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient PublicAffairs.

Radano, Ronald Michael and Philip V. Bohlman. 2000. Music and the Racial Imagination. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rose, Tricia. 2004. "A Style Nobody can Deal with." Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies: 341. ---. 1994. Black Noise : Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Music/culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Ross, Michael E. 1989. “Rap by the Bay: Oakland Emerges As a Force in Pop.” NY Times, September 10, 1989. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/10/arts/rap-by-the-bay-oakland- emerges-as-a-force-in-pop.html.

Shah, Hemant. 2003. "Asian Culture” and Asian American Identities in the Television and Film Industries of the United States." Simile 3 (3): 1-16.

Sharma, Nitasha Tamar. 2010. Hip Hop Desis : South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness. Refiguring American Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Springer, Kimberly. 2002. "Third Wave Black Feminism?" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (4): 1059-1082.

Straw, Will. 1991. "Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music." Cultural Studies 5 (3): 368-388.

TIME. 2015. “Eddie Huang: ‘Don’t Tell Me What Needs To Be Offensive To Me.” YouTube video. Posted February 14, 2015.

Tiongson Jr, Antonio T. 2013. Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-Hop Nation University of Minnesota Press.

Wang, Oliver. 2006. "These are the Breaks: Hip-Hop and AfroAsian Cultural (Dis) Connections." AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics: 146-166.

95 Wong, Deborah. 2000. "The Asian American Body in Performance." Music and the Racial Imagination: 57-94.

---. 2004. Speak it Louder : Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge.

Wong, Ying and Jeanne Tsai. 2007. "Cultural Models of Shame and Guilt." The Self- Conscious Emotions: Theory and Research: 209-223.

William, Sonya. 2015. “Margaret Cho {The Notorious C H O } Stand Up 16+.” YouTube video. Posted May 10, 2015. https://youtu.be/XGYpgu7aygo?list=PLmhQWyZXQRbBIy_DsUMnbaNspIOLFg 6q0

Voynovskaya, Nastia. “The East Bay Hip Hop Scene Will No Longer Be Ignored.” East Bay Express, April 1, 2015

Zhong, Jie, Aimin Wang, Mingyi Qian, Lili Zhang, Jun Gao, Jianxiang Yang, Bo Li, and Ping Chen. 2008. "Shame, Personality, and Social Anxiety Symptoms in Chinese and American Nonclinical Samples: A cross-cultural Study." Depression and Anxiety 25 (5): 449-460.

Zhou, Yanyan and Bryant Paul. 2016. "Lotus Blossom Or Dragon Lady: A Content Analysis of “Asian Women” Online Pornography." Sexuality & Culture 20 (4): 1083-1100.