Hip-hop performance to examine culture
Matt Collette
Issue date: 11/5/07 Section: The Inside
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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.
Li is from Boston and has performed both locally and nationwide. In 2002, he founded the Boston Progress Arts Collective and is the Arts Coordinator at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. Li released his first spoken word CD in 2002 and his poetry has been published in an anthology of political poetry, The Quotable Rebel.
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.
Li is from Boston and has performed both locally and nationwide. In 2002, he founded the Boston Progress Arts Collective and is the Arts Coordinator at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. Li released his first spoken word CD in 2002 and his poetry has been published in an anthology of political poetry, The Quotable Rebel.
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