![]() In the video for Dat $tick – 88rising’s biggest hit to date – Indonesian rapper Rich Brian performed in a buttoned-up polo and fanny pack, all the while referring to himself as a “Chigga”. Unfortunately, since launching in 2015, 88rising (whose roster goes on tour in north America later this month) has done little to confront hip-hop’s habit of demeaning and exoticising east Asian people. ![]() Once upon a time, Donald Trump was hip-hop’s byword for money and success, but since his election, references to the president of the United States have been anything but reverential. But new contexts can reshape the hip-hop lexicon. Granted, individual rap songs could rarely be considered personal attacks on east Asians – these stereotypes are amongmany lyrical tropes that American rappers like to recite. When 88rising’s Asian rappers first started blowing up online, I was eager to see if their success would upend these tactless traditions. Unsurprisingly, east Asian women get a particularly bad rap lines about “yellow bitches” abound, while fetishised “Geisha girls” and “China dolls” have become stock characters in braggadocious music videos. But Eminem, Kanye West, Tyler the Creator and many more besides have received relatively little – if any – backlash for their own variations on the same “slanty eyes” gag. This year, there was a brief murmur of disapproval after Wiz Khalifa dropped an album featuring the line “smoke got my eyes looking Korean”. Stereotypes about east Asian people are prevalent and deep-seated within rap music. Likewise, it has been suggested that the recent success of 88rising,the American media company that signed Rich Brian, joji, and other popular Asian rappers, could overturn a long history of stereotyping and underrepresentation. It’s not surprising that every time we are recognised by the mainstream media, there comes a flurry of tweets and thinkpieces proclaiming a new era of social acceptance.īefore it was released, Crazy Rich Asians – a romantic comedy centred on a very privileged community in Singapore – was being declared our “ Black Panther moment”. albums, of course).S ympathetic portrayals of east Asians in western popular culture are few and far between. Sampled on the record are Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai (on “No Fly List”), slain women’s rights activist Qandeel Baloch (on “Aaja”), Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi (on “Shoes off”), and one of Pakistan's most famous Qawwali singers, Aziz Mian (on “Zayn Malik”), all helping to make Cashmere a more accurate representation of the current South Asian climate than American listeners almost ever hear (outside of M.I.A. ![]() If songs about being hassled by airport security don’t make Cashmere’s point of view clear enough, the album’s instrumentation and samples throw pieces of Pakistani and Indian history in your face-and right at a crucial time, as border tension between India and Pakistan have run particularly high. They’re the rap group of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage’s nightmares: Their songs are peppered with South Asian (Hindi and Urdu) slang, rapped by an American with roots in the Punjab region of India (Heems, formerly of Das Racist) and a Brit whose family emigrated from modern-day Pakistan (Riz MC, aka actor/rapper Riz Ahmed). Earlier this year, Heems, Riz MC, and Redinho released a quintessential telling of the brown immigrant story in the form of Cashmere, their debut record as Swet Shop Boys.
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