Played For Laughs — Considering The Narrow Casting Calls For Asian Artists
Here’s a joke. How did a trio of some of the only true outsiders to then exist in contemporary hip-hop, from backgrounds previously unrecognized by the rap game, break out and introduce a sound unlike that of any artist that had come before them? By repeatedly shouting in asinine sing-song for three straight minutes variations of the declarative mantra: “I’m at the Pizza Hut, I’m at the Taco Bell, I’m at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.”
But that’s not the punchline. This is: Das Racist are not an exception in music history. Rather, they represent its insidious unspoken rule — that the most common route for immigrants to establish an artistic career is by first building their name as its own pejorative.
Ten years ago, the improbable rap troupe of Heems, Kool A.D. and hypeman Dapwell released their debut single to the world, and from it leveraged enough attention to deliver during a brief-but-potent four year stint a radical perspective in hip-hop couched in irreverence. Their point of view, arriving as part of the wave of unanimous popularity for M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” and the awards season blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire, eventually helped shatter a dominant norm in pop culture whereby platforms for minority voices were granted solely under the implication that they exclusively addressed the existing sensibilities of the majority.
Initially, however, Das Racist struck a deal with the devil. Intellectual satirists skewering cultural appropriation with citations from the history of the Kentucky Derby are largely indecipherable, if not actively hostile, to the presiding social hegemony. So the group sold their message short to appeal to such a crowd, licensing the age-old hip hop tradition of “talking their shit” by way of first presenting themselves as innocuous novelties that could not possibly have shit to say. Their model is one that has since proven customary, and continues to ring true for the current Asian American hip-hop underclass striving to be heard amongst the mainstream.
Brian Immanuel’s career, coming nearly a decade later, followed Das Racist’s in parallel. Now a legitimate commercial force of the streaming era rapping under the moniker Rich Brian, Immanuel had to first rely on the point-and-laugh theatrics directed at the “unexpected” juxtaposition of his skillful flow alongside a disarming boyishness. Talent would never be enough for Immanuel to stand on alone; the presumption with “Dat $tick,” the Indonesian-born teenager’s debut single, was that it was genuinely surprising to see a Chinese person boast such command over a microphone — an image that goes against the persistent stereotypes of East Asians in Western society.
The song’s video knowingly leaned into this discrepancy in perception, contrasting Immanuel’s ethnic “otherness” by dressing it in “conventional” hip-hop markers played for laughs. All of this was packaged under Immanuel’s original stage name “Rich Chigga,” an ignorant but incidentally strategic set-up that relied on a universal tendency for perverse rubbernecking to draw an audience. The cause of notoriety eventually fades into a footnote, but the name recognition can be capitalized on indefinitely.
Simply put, Rich Brian sold himself as a caricature, doing so with awareness that to attempt arriving fully formed as an artist of Asian descent is to come out onstage to an audience of none. As a culture, we have only been able to float the notion of an Asian rapper if he’s marketed as a YouTube personality, one sending up the genre instead of participating in it. By pursuing virality before musicality, Brian has become in just a few months hip-hop’s most popular Asian representative while careerists from the onset like Dumbfoundead remain at its periphery.
Similarly, Das Racist were written off the moment they were first written about. For its inane conceit, “Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell” was a song with serious merit, composed alongside respected musicians like Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, and in the same session as four other songs the group simultaneously put up on MySpace that failed to pull a crowd. Their narrative was affixed onto them by structural design, and it outlined a limited path as the most plausible one forward.
“We were definitely pigeonholed as joke-rap from the beginning because of ‘Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell,’ but I suppose that’s preferred to being a one-hit wonder or not being discussed at all,” Heems told me in an interview for this piece. “We often referred to CPHTB as a Trojan Horse of sorts used to get our foot in the door. While it worked in that respect, the exhaustion of constantly having to prove ourselves probably contributed to our eventual break-up.”
To be fair, the ones who most belittled Das Racist’s output were the group members themselves. But their combative indifference reads in retrospect as premeditated self-defense against the loaded suggestion that their creative pursuit was simply them fucking around. The question of whether or not they were serious never failed to be brought up, nor did anyone particularly heed their answer anyway. Speaking to The Village Voice in 2010, Heems recalled in frustration one profile where the writer “took about three hours of our time over two days: We really got into the crux of who we are and the music we make and why we make it. And then the piece came out. Most of the article discussed how I was (temporarily) banned from a bar for some drunken antics that took place the week before, and the title called us ‘smart stupid’ guys or something.”
Even after multiple mixtapes and an album that proved their craft multifaceted and deadly sharp, the notion prevailed broadly that Das Racist were nothing more than spoof, as inconsequential to their chosen medium as such a designation denotes. In their prior interview with the Voice, Heems spelled out their inborn ethos as such: “EVERYTHING WE DO HAS A SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT. THIS IS THE BURDEN OF THE MINORITY MAN.” To which Kool A.D. responded in turn: “WHY ARE YOU VALIDATING THE FALSE DICHOTOMY OF JOKES VS. SERIOUS SHIT?”
Rap has a long history of incorporating humor as an illustrative device. But no matter how many blow job puns litter Lil Wayne mixtapes, he is never going to be discredited under the reductive label of “joke rap.” And in a world where The Lonely Island’s “I’m On A Boat” earned the group a Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, the same year CPHTB primed Das Racist for a shelf life confined as meme, there was an implicit addendum to Kool’s question: “Why are you validating the false dichotomy of jokes vs. serious shit only for minority artists?”
The latest example of a musician who played along until accruing the means to push back is Rich Brian’s 88Rising rostermate George Miller, who first gained fame for his popular brand of YouTube comedy under the aliases of Filthy Frank and Pink Guy. However, after cutting together a following on a style of bluntly profane humor he initially saw as his only option, Miller now finally feels comfortable “to do stuff I want to hear,” releasing last month his debut album of textural, James Blake-indebted R&B as “Joji.”
The delicate, pathos-heavy sound of BALLADS 1 could not be further removed from the obscene post-EDM gargle Miller once cultivated his image around. Furthermore, the presentation allows Joji the chance to be taken as a legitimate symbol of conventional star power, rather than proactively justifying his on-screen presence by simultaneously provisioning absurdist visuals as the primary attraction. Hanging up the pink bodysuit and over the top antics for a muted, often-shirtless deadpan, Miller’s present popularity (BALLADS 1 made Joji the first Asian artist to top the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums Chart) marks a significant achievement in the battle Asian American art has always had to fight for recognition outside of the rigid expectations on their authors.
Whereby their contemporaries could earn attention and respect concurrently, Heems, Immanuel, and Miller each adhered to the principal that the former could only be obtained through means unrelated to the latter. For all three there was genuine surprise, and more tellingly resentment, elicited in response to their having something significant to say. As with acting, the roles for minorities are limited and function as rigid, two-dimensional means to a typically comedic end. We are never laughing with these characters; their agency is rarely afforded consideration. Their stories are not the ones we are meant to take seriously.
“I think for cultures that aren’t familiar to most Americans, humor serves as a great equalizer or humanizer. If I laugh at the same things these people do, maybe I have more in common with them than I thought,” Heems offers, before noting: “It’s unfortunate, but the entry point to a lot of Asian cultures is often laughing at Asian people before laughing with them — i.e. Gangnam Style, Benny Lava, Indian Superman, etc.”
The result is that there can be no middle ground for minority artists. Even those who press forward without conforming to casting calls wind up pushed to the sidelines. M.I.A., perhaps the most famous South Asian woman in Western culture, has had to be excessively and increasingly blunt in her political message to have it taken at face value. A defiant immigrant attitude with an eye for the specific humanitarian contours of the Sri Lankan civil war, M.I.A. has been political from the jump. However, after seizing the zeitgeist with “Paper Planes,” she was straddled with an implicit pressure to play her part as a proper pop star, despite the song itself lampooning the reductive application of stereotypes. Her reputation for controversy grew out of the shock listeners who stopped short at gunshots and cash registers felt at the nature of her subsequent material, unaware that those themes are where she’d always lived — a relationship depicted with a groan worthy poignancy by her recent documentary Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.
What that film expresses most evidently is the extent to which M.I.A.’s story is one not of inconsistency with herself, as is popularly depicted, but the standards the public was eager to see her fit. Given the two choices allowed to every Asian American entertainer, she chose to cross the line rather than fall into it. Authenticity is not a currency for minority artists, but rather a negotiation process. Das Racist, Rich Brian, Joji, and many others have all had to navigate throughout their careers the same question: How long must they play the part before they can begin writing their own?