Hip-Hop Memoirs: An Interview with Khmer American Rapper praCh

Abstract

beyond killing field, a quarter of a century after genocide. after 2 million people murdered, other 5 million survive. fabric of culture, beauty drips texture. i find myself in Long Beach, next Cambodian mecca. beside srox Khmer, whale shrie Angkor Wat, some people still struggling, on aftermath of Pol Pot. for some futures so bright, looks like high beams, for others are lost in American Dream. for me it seems i'm on road to no-where fast. hitting speed bumps, drive'n in circles, vehicle running out of gas. they're a gap in our generation, between adults and kids. but since i'm bilingual i'ma use communication as a bridge. (1) --praCh, Art of faCt In 2006, rapper Nas (Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones) declared--by way of album name and title track--that Hip Hop is Dead. Critical of commodification and corporatization, Nas's dire pronouncement reflects a dismal state of hip-hop affairs. Born out of late 1960s civil rights struggle, focused on communal activism, and invested in self-determinism, hip hop (which includes break dancing, deejaying, emceeing, and graffiti) was from outset a multidisciplinary vehicle for youth-driven, political resistance. In twenty-first century, however, progressive politics are hard to find in contemporary radio, television, and film. More focused on bling than social change, concentrated on platinum sales and apolitically marketed, mainstream hip hop is--with a few exceptions--mostly talk and no action. As Tricia Rose warns, Hip hop is in terrible crisis. Although its fortunes have risen sharply, most commercially promoted and financially successful hip hop--what has dominated mass media outlets such as television, film, radio, and recording industries for a dozen years or so--has increasingly become a playground for caricatures of black gangstas, pimps, and hoes (1). Through impending catastrophe and frames of crisis, Rose, like Nas, lays bare hip hop's present-day plight. Indeed, as its overall fortunes have risen, hip hop's function as an artistic outlet for oppressed has fallen by corporate wayside, eschewed in favor of profitable stereotype, sensational violence, and celebrated delinquency. In face of such crises, inclusive of problematical marketability and watered-down politics, hip hop still holds potential to engage and power to convey what Grandmaster Melle Mel of Furious Five famously declared was the message: concomitant revelation of and protests against social injustice. In fact, one only needs to turn radio off and tune into YouTube. There can be found certain Southeast Asian American rappers who are taking hip-hop underground by storm with lyrics, rhymes, and samples that challenge human rights abuses, large-scale disenfranchisement, and state-authorized violence. From Hmong American Tou Saiko Lee's songs about CIA dirty wars to emcee Nam's raps about Vietnamese American refugees, from rapper Geologic's lyrical treatment of US occupation in Philippines to Cambodian American group Seasia's cadenced negotiation of Southeast Asian poverty, hip hop remains a site of resistance and a space for socioeconomic and sociopolitical critique. (2) Equally important, such Southeast Asian American rappers--shaped by war and linked by region--are transnational cultural producers who fuse country of origin arts to country of settlement aesthetics, yoking over here concerns to over there problems. Correspondingly, Lee, Nam, Geologic, and Seasia reframe and revise domestic and global terrains of hip hop. Such Southeast Asian American rappers engender what rapper/cultural critic Mos Def repeatedly argues is ultimate point of hip hop: to politically engage, actively question, and produce knowledge. In so doing, Southeast Asian American rappers are droppin' transnational science, educating listeners and fellow emcees about war, US foreign policy, displacement, immigration, and discrimination. …