Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-Hop Nation by Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr. (review)

Antonio Tiongson, Jr., promises that Filipinos Represent is not a work of hagiography, and he keeps his word. This is no mere celebration of one group’s contributions to hip-hop culture, which is notable considering that this has been a trend in hip-hop scholarship––that is, to recast the music and its peripheral cultural practices as much more than “a black thing.” By supplementing the traditional hip-hop narrative with the contributions of other racial and ethnic groups, scholars and music practitioners alike have become advocates for new conceptions of hip-hop as multilingual, multicultural, and, in some cases, colorless and borderless. The problem is that these interventions often aim at deracializing hip hop in order to prove that it is something other than commercial rap (read: black music). This approach has concerned some scholars––Imani Perry, Bakari Kitwana, and this reviewer included––who insist that, no matter what one might argue about hip hop’s diverse influences, notions of blackness have always framed the production, consumption, and reception of the genre.

Tiongson negotiates this thorny terrain with great care. These ongoing debates, in fact, provide him with the backdrop for his study of Bay Area Filipino hip-hop DJs. Drawing on interviews with these practitioners, he examines how Pinoy and Pinay youth conceive of their own place within an avowedly African-American expressive culture. What he discovers is that hip hop––and DJ culture, more specifi-cally––can serve as a vehicle for reimagining the boundaries of ethnic identity and for experiencing “Pinoy pride.” By highlighting the ways in which Filipino youth have carved out their own space within hip hop and, in turn, used black music to assert their Filipino-ness, Tiongson provides readers with a way of understanding the complexities of racial formation in the post–civil rights era.

Filipinos Represent is engaging and innovative, but the scope of Tiongson’s research is rather narrow for a book that aims to study DJing as a signifier of Filipino-ness. DJ interviews, which comprise the heart of this work, are colorful and revealing. Nonetheless, the author’s eight DJ subjects are relatively young, mostly born in the 1980s, and all beginning their DJ pursuits around the turn of the century. As a result, their perspectives on the decades-old Bay Area DJ scene do not read as representative of a subculture dominated by Filipinos since the mid-1980s. The more mature, seasoned veterans among Bay Area Filipino DJs, including Shortcut, Apollo, Mix Master Mike, Yogafrog, and Q-Bert, are mentioned, but the voices of these well-known Pinoy pioneers are conspicuously absent from Tiongson’s study. Mobile DJ crews are also poorly represented here, which is a significant oversight if one considers that these organizations have historically functioned as families, with members pooling resources, providing support for one another, and often sharing a common cultural background. This study could have benefitted from an examination of the ways in which these fundamental DJ associations, within the context of hip-hop performance, have also worked to reinforce race pride.

Ultimately, Tiongson’s book succeeds because his concern is not whether hip hop should be recognized for its Filipino-ness, but how Filipino-ness is defined by those Pinoy and Pinay youth who engage with the music. It is an inside-out approach that provides cultural and theoretical insight into the complex meanings of multi-racial, multi-ethnic participation in “hip-hop culture” without attempting to detach the musical genre from its African American origins. In this way, Filipinos Represent is a unique and welcome contribution not only to the field of hip-hop studies but also to ethnic studies and race theory literature.