"Freaky" Asian Americans, Hip-Hop, and Musical Autobiography An Introduction

This introduction uses the life, music, and autobiography of Fresh Kid Ice (from the 2 Live Crew) to frame a central objective in this themed cluster of essays, titled "Asian American Hip-Hop Musical Auto/Biographies," which extends our understanding of how hip-hop, and more specifically rap, in Asian America are forms of musical autobiography. Along with the contributions in the cluster, this introductory essay begins productive conversations between Asian American studies, hip-hop studies, and life writing studies. Asian American hip-hop musical autobiographies can offer alternative ways for imagining and unsettling a politics of Asian American identity and cultural production in the context of global capitalism, neoliberalism, and hiphop culture industries as they intersect with Blackness and anti-Blackness, gender, sexuality, multiracial space and place, refugee diasporas, and linguistic expressions.

Decades later I can still hear and feel the bass thumping against the metal door of a gym locker. Boom. Boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. While we change, the beat continues and one of the boys calls out in his best Luther Campbell¹ voice, "Somebody say hey. …" In response, most of us yell back, "We want some pus*y," with the last word tailing off. We all know the song, but some of us don't know if we should say the last word, whether it's appropriate or permissible. It was 1988, and we weren't quite sure how openly and publicly nasty we could be, even within the confines of a high school locker room, or how much we could openly tap into our teenage toxic masculinity and misogyny. It felt like there was something naughty and transgressive about doing the call and response chant of 2 Live Crew's hit song. Besides the drums and bass reverberating through my body, there was something visually and lyrically striking for me about 2 Live Crew: Fresh Kid Ice (né Christopher Wong Won) and his performance of Asian Americanness and Asian American masculinity.

Long before the Miami-born rapper MC Jin was battling on BET and baiting audiences to "Learn Chinese" (see Leung and Chen, and Chung, both in this issue), Fresh Kid Ice was moving crowds and performing his own Chineseness as one of the lead rappers of the Miami-based 2 Live Crew. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, 2 Live Crew was a popular and highly controversial rap group known for their sexually explicit lyrics, music videos, and concert performances. Their gold- and platinum-selling albums included The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are (1986), Move Somethin' (1988), As Nasty as They Wanna Be (1989), Banned in the USA (1990), and Sports Weekend: As Nasty As They Wanna Be, Part 2 (1991).² These early albums served as a foundation for southern rap and a blueprint for the Miami bass subgenre.

In addition to their influence on rap music, 2 Live Crew is historically significant for two legal reasons. First, in 1990 a US District Court ruled that 2 Live Crew's As Nasty as They Wanna Be was legally "obscene" and without "serious artistic, scientific or political value," setting off First Amendment and censorship debates and paving the way to prosecuting retailers who sold the album in various Florida counties.³ In 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Georgia overturned the earlier ruling, a victory for the music industry that helped establish the rights of artists to exercise free and protected speech while opening up lively discussions about the limits of artistic expression.⁴ As a result of the case, record companies began to voluntarily place "parental advisory" stickers on albums that contained explicit lyrics. Second, 2 Live Crew was involved in a copyright and fair use case (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.) when they sampled Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" for a song parody on As Clean as They Wanna Be (the non-explicit and radio-friendly version of As Nasty as They Wanna Be). A US District Court initially ruled in favor of 2 Live Crew, stating that there was no copyright infringement in their song parody. However, the US Supreme Court later reversed the lower court's decision on fair use, and the two parties eventually agreed to an out-of-court settlement.

Although a forerunner among Asian Americans in hip-hop and perhaps the first and most (in)famous Asian American rapper, Fresh Kid Ice is largely unrecognized and overlooked by the Asian American community and Asian American studies. Despite his awareness of his ethnic heritage and racialization, as exemplified by his use of another stage name, "Chinaman," the titles of two solo albums, The Chinaman (1992) and Freaky Chinese (2004), and the music label he founded, Chinaman Records, he is usually only part of general discussions about 2 Live Crew.⁵ His individual musical work and life have not received wide academic attention. Even with his extensive music catalog and his pioneering role in rap music, the publication of his autobiography, My Rise 2 Fame: The Untold Stories of Fresh Kid Ice aka Chinaman, in 2015 was also largely unnoticed. His death two years later was broadly commemorated in the hip-hop community but barely registered a ripple in Asian America. Fresh Kid Ice's life story leaves open a lengthy set of questions. Why have we forgotten or disregarded Chris Wong Won in Asian America, and why isn't he embraced as a subject of academic study? What makes someone deserving of inclusion, celebration, and critique in our collective Asian American history? Whose auto/biography is worth telling, reading, and analyzing? Is rap music not the right type of storytelling? Who gets to play the selector for our Asian American politics, history, and culture playlist? Who samples, mixes, and scratches our Asian American academic mixtape? Was he too corny offensive, or "freaky" for our Asian American model minority sensibilities? Have we ignored him because of his role in perpetuating the sexual objectification, fetishization, and exoticization of Asian and Asian American women in the 2 Live Crew Song, "Me So Horny," which samples the notorious scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket, and continues to haunt Asian America?⁶ Has Wong Won gone unacknowledged because he is Afro-Chinese, and his Caribbeanness troubles our notions of Blackness, Asianness, and/or mixedness? Was Fresh Kid Ice not the right kind of Asian American? In what ways does Fresh Kid Ice reveal the challenging work of remembering, representing, and writing? What are the ethical dilemmas and problematics around Asian American self-representation? For example, how can we negotiate the misogyny, homophobia, patriarchy, and violence that Fresh Kid Ice and 2 Live Crew represent? What can Fresh Kid Ice's auto/biography reveal about historical and contemporary self-representations of Asian Americans, our encounters with them, and why they matter? In other words, what can Fresh Kid Ice and his rise to fame tell us about life writing, hip-hop, and Asian Americans?

Wong Won's My Rise 2 Fame chronicles 2 Live Crew's ascent to notoriety, their legal battles, musical group in-fighting and breakups, and industry struggles using the hip-hop ethos and usual rap autobiography narrative structure of making something out of nothing. In his autobiographical account, Wong Won also asserts his individual place in rap history while reveling in his own triumphs and conquests, sexual and otherwise (but mostly his sexcapades). Much of My Rise 2 Fame is a narrative of overcoming⁷ that follows a familiar narrative of the Asian immigrant success story: first the bottom, symbolized by migration; then, bucking the social, cultural, and economic odds through hard work and perseverance; and finally making it to the top. Wong Won was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1964. He references his family's mixed-raceness—he notes his African ancestry on his mother's side while his paternal line is of Chinese descent. He does not directly address his mixed-raceness or biraciality in his music—he sometimes refers to his Blackness but usually appeals to his "Chinaman" persona—and discussion of his mixed racial background is correspondingly a small part of his autobiography. In 1977, his family moved from Trinidad and Tobago to Brooklyn, New York, where he graduated from the Samuel J. Tilden High School in 1982. The school was then known for its significant Caribbean immigrant population and specialized honors programs, both of which included Wong Won. In the book, his friends and family characterize him as quiet, smart (his friends noted that he was academically high-achieving), and athletic (his friends nicknamed him "Tank" because of his size and affinity for weightlifting, and he played running back for the football team). In this way, he was way ahead of Jeremy Lin, but instead of going to Harvard (and eventually the NBA) to play basketball, he chose an even more patriotic path by enlisting in the US Air Force. While stationed at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California, he met fellow musicians Yuri "Amazing Vee" Vielot and David "Mr. Mixx" Hobbs in 1984, and together they formed the first iteration of 2 Live Crew. A little later they joined forces with Luther Campbell and Mark Ross, who replaced Amazing Vee, to form what became the core group, and Wong Won moved to Miami after he left the military in 1986. In 1988, as the group was set to reach new heights in popularity with Move Somethin', Wong Won was involved in a horrible car accident that nearly killed him and resulted in the limited mobility of his left arm, which negatively impacted his long-term health. Despite the near-fatal accident that almost derailed his music career, he persisted and ultimately overcame health, legal, and music industry obstacles and rose to fame.⁸

When 2 Live Crew initially formed in 1984, the John Hughes film Sixteen Candles introduced an iconic character of Asian American heterosexual manhood to mainstream America, Long Duk Dong (played by Gedde Watanabe). Even before the characters of Mr. Chow from the Hangover movies and Han Lee from 2 Broke Girls graced the big and small screens, Long Duk Dong represented the emasculated and sexually repressed heterosexual Asian American male stereotype in the film. Arriving on the rap scene the same year, Fresh Kid Ice offered us an opposing image who similarly (word)played with the phallus: 2 Live Crew's first hit single (where he was the lone rapper) was a dance track in which Fresh Kid Ice encourages listeners to "Throw the D," and in subsequent songs, he matter-of-factly and perhaps defiantly proclaims himself the "Long Dick Chinese." As a counter to Long Duk Dong, Fresh Kid Ice (and the rest of 2 Live Crew) spectacularly performs mainstream American heteronormative masculinity through ribaldry and by flaunting his male sexual power via the objectification, dehumanization, and commoditization (as currency) of women, conspicuous consumption (embodying mainstream rap's capitalist ideology), the exhibition of power via interpersonal violence, and boldness and outlawry through drug use and partying (see McFarland, The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation): Long Dick Chinese is a "bad motherfucker" who brings "hoes to their knees."⁹ His lyrical, sonic, and visual self-portraiture in songs and music videos embodies a direct challenge to the stereotype of the asexual and sexless heterosexual Asian American man while vigorously upholding other forms of domination. He passionately and potently declares he is not your mama's nerdy, meek, and emasculated model minority; he is Chinese and he is freaky.

Being freaky is an important trope throughout Fresh Kid Ice's work with 2 Live Crew, his solo albums, and My Rise 2 Fame. For Fresh Kid Ice, "freaky" has two primary meanings. First and foremost, his freakiness is about being sexually deviant and hedonistic. He shows off his shameless kinkiness, wild and excessive heterosexual desires, and promiscuity. From another perspective, a "freak" can also challenge social standards and societal morals (see Weese; Hardin). In this way, Fresh Kid Ice's brazenness can be framed as a kind of freedom that permits him to confront and give a middle finger to societal standards around sex and its concomitant racialization. Before Darrell Hamamoto argued for the power of the pornographic, Fresh Kid Ice was performing his own "remasculinized" Chineseness (see Nguyen), taking pleasure in his own uninhibited heterosexual desires, and erecting his own "Joy Fuck Club."¹⁰ Fresh Kid Ice is neither a Chinaman who is (chicken)cooped up nor one bound by straitjacket sexualities.¹¹ Second, being "freaky" also points to a type of racial and ethnic extraordinariness. Fresh Kid Ice's freakiness is both a nod to the image of his Asian Americanness and Chineseness as the "perpetual foreigner," the excluded yellow peril, and a simultaneous distancing from it and what it signifies is that he is a different kind of Chinese. In this sense, being a freak heightens difference to challenge socially accepted and dominant representations. For Asian America, Fresh Kid Ice's freakiness poses a type of "difficult" or "hard knowledge" in that it presents us with moral conflicts in our collective Asian American self-image. Here I borrow from work on "difficult knowledge" by education scholars, particularly those in art education and social justice education (see Britzman; Niyozov and Anwaruddin; and Zembylas). For most of us, Fresh Kid Ice's freakiness is a hard knowledge to swallow, pointing to representational and ethical tensions that disrupt our own respectability politics around gender and sexuality and our broader model-minority ethics and aesthetics. Did Fresh Kid Ice's freakiness, understood as sexual impropriety, hyper-heteronormativity, and racial/ethnic nonconformity, render him too inappropriate for Asian America? Was he invisible to Asian America because his model of manhood was too antagonistic, one that is based on competition, domination, and conquest? Was he disregarded because we attributed his hyper-masculine virility and aggression to his mixedness and/or his Blackness? Though dependent on a patriarchal dominance paradigm that connects masculinity, power, and violence through the domination of women and control of male opposition (McFarland, Chicano Rap), his remasculinized Asian American immigrant success story teases us in its lasciviousness, invites our gaze, and tempts our analysis.¹²

This cluster issue was developed in the spirit of Fresh Kid Ice's freakiness and begins productive conversations between Asian American studies, hiphop studies, and lifewriting studies. There has been a long tradition of Asian American autobiography and life writing that has raised questions about culture, nation, memory, and (self)representation (see Yamamoto; Davis, Begin Here and Relative Histories). There is also a swiftly developing body of academic work on hip-hop and Asian Americans, who have been actively involved in all the elements of the cultural art form since the 1970s (see Nair and Balaji; Sharma; Tiongson; Villegas et al.; and Wang, Legions of Boom). In this cluster issue, we pair these two seemingly disparate scholarly threads in exploring Asian American hip-hop musical auto/biographies. We follow Stein's observation that "Music and autobiography are the result of a creative evocation of identity, of a temporarily arrested self that heeds audience demands but always rescues the self from stasis by demonstrating the musicians' self-conscious investment in the poetics and politics of self-staging" ("Performance" 196). In this way, contributors are interested in ways that Asian American hip-hop and rappers produce, create, innovate, sample, imagine, and self-stage Asian American selves at the individual and collective levels. For example, Mark Villegas explores Geo's auto/biographical storytelling in the Blue Scholars' self-titled album. In his analysis of the various tracks in Blue Scholars, Villegas demonstrates how Geo's individual life story is connected to the broader spiritual energy of Filipino American artistic and activist communities of the 1990s and early 2000s. He further shows how Blue Scholars imbue soul into their Marxist and anti-imperialist politics as a way to imagine decolonial Filipino spiritual lives. Similarly, Genevieve Leung and Melissa Chen's and Brian Chung's essays investigate how MC Jin's self-staging of his life and music redraws cartographies of Asian American identities and consciousness through language use, cultural expression, and narrativization of success and failure. Using a sociolinguistic approach, Leung and Chen frame the dynamics of MC Jin's language use and knowledge of his heritage language, Cantonese, as the performance of a transnational Chinese American identity and masculinity. For Chung, MC Jin's self-narration of his perceived commercial failure, which includes themes of uncertainty and anonymity, relates not only to his own racial and ethnic identity development but his overall relationship to Asian America.

This cluster seeks to extend our understanding of how Asian American hip-hop, and more specifically rap, are forms of musical autobiography. Daniel Stein and Martin Butler suggest that "musical autobiographies cross medial and generic boundaries. They conjure up and intervene in a network of sounds, images, and verbal narratives already circulating around the figure of the popular musician" (118). Following Stein and Butler's work, this cluster hopes to facilitate discussions on the self-referential life writings of rap artists and the intermediality and relationality of Asian American life writing. If jazz autobiography embodies the improvisation and call and response of jazz performance (see Stein, "Performance" and Music), hip-hop musical auto/biography emphasizes the practices of sampling and the cipher. Here I use the term "sample" to reflect the hip-hop practice of taking bits and pieces of previously recorded material (preexisting or original recordings), which are then manipulated and re-presented into a re-constructed song form. Auto/biographical samples give us a slice of the artist's life and their representation of their lives, cutting back and forth temporally, spatially, thematically, and stylistically. The idea of hip-hop musical autobiography allows us to analyze a spectrum of "autobiographical samples," from rap autobiographies, like Wong Won's My Rise 2 Fame, to artists' music at different units of analysis.

The contributors to this cluster analyze autobiographical samples of varying units: Leung and Chen and Chung look at a range of MC Jin's musical work, Villegas and Campos examine a rap group's album in its entirety (Blue Scholars and the Night Marchers, respectively), Chan conducts a lyrical and visual analysis of a single song, while Goldberg focuses on the sonic components of three different rappers to argue for different types of listening and analytical practice. Kenneth Chan's methodology and autobiographical sample is perhaps the most familiar: he offers a close analysis of Honey Cocaine's song and video for "Bad Gal" that puts into conversation hip-hop, Cambodian diasporic life writing, and refugee narratives. But his interrogation of "Bad Gal" also advocates for a different kind of reading practice that examines what representations of Asian American lives (via rap) tell us about cultural and artistic expression, authenticity, and appropriation. Further, Chan asks how the musical auto/biography framework can expand understanding of diasporic and refugee subjectivity as well as Asian American interracial engagements in rap and hip-hop, particularly around Blackness and anti-Blackness.

In his "Beat, Rhymes, and Life in the Ocean of Sound," David Goldberg's autobiographical sample invites us into a journey of sound, where one's self-staging is not limited to lyrical analysis. Goldberg asks us to move away from the text to a more molecular level, where one's life can be understood through sound complexes, in the loops, samples, syllables, snares, hi-hats, bass lines, and overall tempo and rhythmic structure. He uses a phenomenology-based and object-oriented approach in his analysis of the varied but connected sound complexes by Kixxie Siete, Dumbfoundead, and Bambu. His "reduced listening" requires that we open our ears to the word-sound molecules that construct an atomic auto/biographical musical whole. In the end, an object-oriented methodology can help us to negotiate how to read a rapper's life and their representation of that life amid the sheets of sound with and within which they are narrated.

The cipher, usually involving a circle of dancers and rappers (and onlookers), is another important characteristic of hip-hop musical autobiography. The cipher is both community-building and competition among active participants engaged in cyclical and circular movement and flow. Those in the cipher feed and build off one another through improvisational rapping and dancing, jamming together and co-constructing individual and collective selves through an exchange of sounds, moves, and words. Ruben Campos in this volume uses the idea of a cipher to capture the collective autobiographical utterances of the Night Marchers' individual members.¹³ The back-and-forth conversations of rappers throughout their album, Three Dots, embodied by the posse cut, is as much a project in self-making as it is place-making. Campos uses turntablism as a metaphor for examining auto/biography and place, where one turntable represents a view of Hawai'i as a US-occupied territory with an active movement for Native self-determination, and the other symbolizes the contemporary multicultural form of settler colonialism. Campos encourages us to focus on the crossfade of lyrical life writing and place-making among Natives and settlers to understand the autobiographical cipher in which the individual members of the Night Marchers participate.

To a large extent, I have used Fresh Kid Ice in this introduction as a heuristic for observing dynamics around Asian Americans, hip-hop, and life writing. Fresh Kid Ice is a stand-in for Asian Americans in hip-hop and Asian Americans more broadly, who are often unacknowledged or ignored. By approaching Asian American hip-hop through the lens of life writing, the articles in this cluster consider how hip-hop artists offer creative tools for imagining and unsettling a politics of Asian American identity and cultural production in the context of global capitalism, neoliberalism, and hip-hop culture industries as they intersect with Blackness and anti-Blackness, gender, sexuality, multiracial space and place, refugee diasporas, and linguistic expressions. Way back in 1986, Fresh Kid Ice urged us to take notice of his words, visuals, network of sounds, narratives, and self-narration: "Listen up y'all. …"¹⁴ This cluster forces us to give him and other Asian Americans in hip-hop a long overdue listen and critical read.