Far East Movement reaching the No. 1 spot on Billboard's Hot 100 this fall with Like a G6, a musical high-five to better living through beautiful women and bottle service, probably didn't strike most pop-music listeners as pioneering. It's just the latest in a long line of hits celebrating playboy partying and living stretch-limo large.
But for Eric Nakamura, publisher/editor of Giant Robot, a magazine devoted to Asian pop culture, who also launched Giant Robot retail outlets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, it's so much more. The members of Far East Movement, who came together in Los Angeles' Koreatown neighborhood and are of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino ancestry, are the first Asian-American hip-hop act to break through to a wide audience.
Nakamura compares it to Jeremy Lin signing with the Golden State Warriors in July to become the first Asian-American in the NBA since 1947, back when it was known as the Basketball Association of America.
"I didn't know when it was going to happen, but I knew it was going to happen, and they made it happen this year," Nakamura says. "These are amazing times. There've been amazing changes."
The G6 track has also soared on the rap, pop, dance/club play, ringtones and digital-download charts and helped Far East Movement's latest album, Free Wired, get into the top 25.
The group's success has even inspired other Asian-American performers who've been around much longer.
"For a long time, I felt like I was out there on a desert island," says Japanese-American rapper/singer Lyrics Born (Tsutomu Shimura), who has been active in the music business since the early '90s and just released a new disc, As U Were. "Across the board, in pop culture and in the arts in general, I hope to see more of this.... When I'm doing a Jimmy Kimmel, I might be the only guy who looks like me all year on that stage."
One-off or encore?
But it remains to be seen if Like a G6 acts like a wedge, propping open the doors of pop success to let other Asian-American hip-hop acts through, or is a fluke, an answer in some future version of Trivial Pursuit.
"I would consider it a fluke, but, then again, I'm a rap purist," says Andrew Ryan, a visiting professor at the University of the District of Columbia who teaches a course on hip-hop and wrote the upcoming book The Responsible Use of Hip-Hop in the Classroom.
He feels that it's similar to what happened in 2003 with the British Indian Panjabi MC, whose collaboration with Jay-Z, Beware of the Boys, became a global hit.
"Some folks felt that the artist would break through. It never happened," Ryan says. "Someone who has done well is [British Sri Lankan] MIA, but she doesn't really rap, nor is she mainstream."
"I'm not sure I can say it's a movement," Nakamura says. "Are there 10 groups behind them who are ready? They could be underground and coming up. I just don't know."
Oliver Wang, an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach, and former music critic for such hip-hop publications as URB, The Source and XXL, is more forgiving. "Even if Far East Movement's current success proves to be a fluke, they'd still represent a breakthrough for Asian-Americans in pop music," he says in an e-mail. "While the Billboard charts don't mean as much today as they used to, there's never been an all Asian-American group who've enjoyed a hit single as big as Like a G6 in well over a generation."
Shunning politics
While Far East Movement may be many listeners' first experience with Asian-Americans in hip-hop, its hardly the first such act. Going back to the early '90s, acts like Mountain Brothers, Asiatic Apostles, Yellow Peril, the Seoul Brothers, Chops (formerly of Mountain Brothers) and Jin (who earned a fearsome reputation with rap battles on BET's 106 & Park show) built followings on the hip-hop underground.
Andrew Ryan notes that while there may not have been a flood of Asian-American rappers over the years, that doesn't mean Asian-American kids haven't partaken in hip-hop culture. "I think they were just into different elements of it. The breakdancing scene in D.C. and Virginia is 90 percent Asian-American. There've been lots of DJs, too."
However, unlike some of those acts that preceded it, and despite its name, Far East Movement -- whose biggest lyrical concerns revolve around which club to go to next -- stays away from topics dealing with racial consciousness or politics. "We never really made race our basis," says Far East Movement's Kev Nish (Kevin Nishimura). "We just grew up as L.A. kids.... Ninety-five percent of the kids just want to party rock and they don't care about race. They just want to wild out. That's refreshing to us."
While the band has been involved in the Asian-American community -- whether it's organizing a benefit show in L.A.'s Koreatown or staging International Secret Agents concerts featuring other up-and-coming Asian artists -- Nish says that's not what the group's members want to sing about. "We keep it separate," he says.
Mixing styles
Nish is also the first to admit that, musically, Far East Movement is anything but hardcore hip-hop, that its pop-electro sound pulls from a variety of styles. "What we do we call 'free wired,' an alternative style with dance-style beats," he says. "We'd go to hardcore electro clubs and later a rock bar, we would take all that in, hit the studio after we've had a good night, and put it all together."
This is why Wang thinks Far East Movement is the one that broke through. "Earlier Asian-American rap artists were aiming for a different audience," he says. "Those older rappers wanted to resonate with conventional hip-hop listeners.... FM took a page from the Will.I.Am playbook and instead went after a slightly younger, more pop-friendly audience."
In fact, Wang thinks that to consider Far East Movement hip-hop at all is a mistake. "It could absolutely be the case that FM's success inspires other Asian-American artists," he says. "But they won't be creating a new space in hip-hop for Asian-Americans; they'll be carving out a space in the dance/electro scene instead, and that follows a different historical path, one where acts like Jin or Lyrics Born are less the forebears and it's more like '80s freestyle singers like Jocelyn Enriquez or Buffy, both of whom were Filipino-American."
But, however the music is defined and whatever happens now, it seems that Far East Movement has made an indelible impression.
"I am so proud of those guys personally," Lyrics Born says. "We don't necessarily do the same style, but, from my perspective, I've always said I was rounding the bases for everyone else. But those guys hit it out of the park."
Cary Darling, 817-390-7571
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