Hip-hop performance to examine culture
Matt Collette, 11/05/2007
From the The Northeastern News
While considering hip-hop and spoken word performances, Asian American performers are rarely the first to come to mind, said organizers of tonight’s “Beats Rhymes and Rice” event.
Three Asian American hip-hop artists from across the country will perform in the West Addition of the Curry Student Center at 8 p.m. The performers seek to examine Asian American culture through a medium not usually associated with Asian culture.
“It’s a spoken word hip-hop event featuring three Asian American performers,” said Delia Cheung Hom, director of the Asian American Center.
The event, a collaboration between the Asian American Center, the Asian Student Union, the Korean-American Student Association and the Vietnamese Student Association, will showcase Asian American performers, a demographic not usually associated with hip-hop, Hom said.
Beats Rhymes and Rice is named after a line from Seattle-based hip-hop duo Blues Scholar song with the lyric: “Beats rhymes rice be the breakfast of champions.”
Both members of Blues Scholar are second-generation Americans whose parents worked hard to send them to college, according to their website.
The three performers are Giles Li, Bao Phi and Kiwi, each hailing from a different region of the country. According to promotional material for the Beats Rhymes and Rice tour, they deliver a unique combination of social commentary, self reflection and painful comedy, all to challenge established assumptions about the Asian American community.
Hom said few people are aware of Asian American hip-hop performers, but the three performers at Beats Rhymes and Rice have all made names of themselves in their local communities, as well as on a national level.
“You ask people, ‘have you ever heard of an Asian American hip-hop performer’ and they say no,” Hom said. (more…)