Music to Fight For

People who know me know that I love to listen to hiphop/rap music. I'm one of the rare people that know the history of the music and the underlying themes. I can hear the pulse of the beat and feel the words from the underground. My experience evolved from the days of after school specials...but on the radio. The DJ cutting and mixing the track for the people stuck in a traffic jam. I lived that and after two years of indulging myself in the "sins" of popular radio hits that demoralized women, glorified senseless violence, I found a new niche. They like to call it "conscious" hip hop. The picture to your right is one of the legendary Soulquarians, its members including Talib Kweli, Mos Def, ?uestlove of the Roots, and Common. The woman in the center with the hair decoration is Erykah Badu. She is Neo-soul. Afrocentric. Another fighter for love, peace, and unity. This is the kind of music I listen and read about on a consistent basis. One that highlights the black struggle in America and educates about the roots of Africa. Hip hop has wronged my culture many times. Notoriously, the west coast rappers that called out the Asian minority in California whose apparent success in the small business industry was enough to frustrate the struggling black community. They called for violence against the shopkeepers. All it took was some police brutality, and then when the Riots sparked, Asian Americans found themselves on the rooftops of their stores shooting at looters to protect the product of their hard work. But I feel for the black struggle as much as I feel for the struggle of my own background. Common's father once mentioned "the ingredients of acknowledgment, apology, amendment, and atonement" in a track off Common's "Finding Forever." At the very least America tries to accomplish these things for the people that they've wronged. Slavery, segregation are gone. Mr. Obama could be our next president. But where is the atonement for the Exclusion Acts, the brutality of building transportation we never got to use, and the internment camps bred by fear and ignorance? Where is our spokesperson? As these China-US tensions tighten, I can feel the strange sentiment in the air that inevitably will affect me only because I am misunderstood. Whenever someone does not recognize their identity as an Asian American, a Taiwanese American...whenever someone does not fight back with protest when others hurt their friends and family, I feel ashamed. Because that's the Perfect Immigrant. That's why I'm hoping for another form of the Soulquarians to arrive. Hope that they'll speak to me, educate me, recognize the struggle. Keep on. Justin is a firm believer in hip hop's ability to teach. He hopes that one day he'll see Taiwanese hip hoppers address the issues, and steer away from the money making schemes that have plagued the music.