Playlists: Spotify and Beyond
Every three months, MAARC will release a Spotify playlist. Some lists are based on particular moods, some commemorate certain people, and some are based on socio-historical topics. To play the lists, please go to our Spotify page: https://open.spotify.com/user/kjcj6bysrxbf65gnm3545xxrv?_mrMailingList=418&_mrSubscriber=2076. This page will provide information about the music and musicians on the playlists. There will also be links to music that is not available on Spotify.
Summer 2019 Playlist: A Celebration of LGBTQIA+ Asian American Musicians
Spotify Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/46RdRpguvDV2QUZebLhjL0
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, the Music of Asian America Research Center has created a Spotify playlist of songs created or performed by queer Asian American musicians. Throughout July, we will add—on this webpage—additional songs and performances by queer Asian American artists who are not on Spotify. If you have suggestions for additions for this playlist, please email us at info@asianamericanmusic.org.
Fanny (June Millington): Charity Ball
Fanny was an all-women hard rock band founded in 1969 by two Filipino American sisters: guitarist June Millington and bassist Jean Millington. Rejecting typical 1960s “girl group” styles, Fanny created two singles that made the Billboard Hot 100 top 40, and inspired many later all-women bands, such as The Runaways and The Bangles. June Millington said that she came to know that she was a lesbian around the age of 20. With regards to Fanny, she said in a 2011 interview with The Edge, “Everybody knew I was gay, who was around us. It wasn’t anything I tried to hide but I really appreciated that that wasn’t featured at the time, or needed to have a huge amount of attention on it.” To find out more about June’s illustrious career after Fanny, visit this NPR feature. “Charity Ball” is the title track of Fanny’s second album, and it went up to #40 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Madame Gandhi: The Future is Female
Los Angeles-based Indian American producer, activist and drummer Madame Gandhi first achieved fame as the drummer for M.I.A. and Kehlani. More recently, she was the opening act for Ani DiFranco’s tour. “The Future is Female” is a track from her debut solo EP, Voices (2016). In an interview with VICE, Gandhi said, “It’s about women being treated the way we deserve to be treated but more than that, it’s this idea that male energy tends to rank things like, for me to win you must lose and it’s a game, it’s about ego and competitiveness. Obviously, we all need a little of that because that’s motivation, but we’re too far in the extreme of that to where we’re just killing people and raping the earth.” She continued, “’The Future is Female’ is about living in a world where we value femininity, but we value being collaborative and being emotionally intelligent. We value feminine traits and if anything, the transgender community has been light years ahead of this message.”
With regards to her queerness, Gandhi said, in an interview with Vulture, “I had to ask people to not put my queerness at the forefront of my identity. Not overly booking me for events that felt pigeonholing or reductive, or [making sure] that I’m doing as many electronic music festivals and feminist and South Asian events as I am doing pride events, because these identities are really balanced for me. It wasn’t a source of oppression so much as it was a source of commodification. Folks in the mainstream are realizing how valuable it is to flex on diversity, whatever that means, so they’re signing artists just for being diverse, rather than for the whole picture of their art. My feminism has always been most salient to my identity, and being a musician or being a New Yorker, and my academia. But my queerness and my South Asian–ness have been more essential to my projects more recently, because I recognize the responsibility to own those parts of my identity in understanding how important it is to show nuanced descriptions of what it means to be queer and South Asian. I’ve brought that more forward in my projects in my social media. In my lyrics, I enjoy being able to talk about flirting with my now-girlfriend or talk about pleasure from a queer-femme perspective.“
Marshall Bang (MRSHLL): Circle
Originally from Orange County, Marshall Bang grew up in a devout Christian household, and his mother is an evangelical pastor at a megachurch for Korean immigrants. In an interview with KPCC, he said, “Church is supposed to be a place where you can really be yourself but because certain subjects are untouchable — being gay was one of them. I just kind of pushed everything down and suppressed it. And if anyone, you know, accused me of being gay, I would just be like ‘No, I’m not!'”
In 2012, he moved to Seoul to become a part of the K-Pop scene. Five years later, he became the first openly gay singer in the Korean entertainment industry. In an interview with Billboard, Bang said, “There’s also a healthy amount of fear of just being labeled as the ‘gay one,’ because I’m more than that label. But if people want to put me under that category, then so be it, because I’m proud to be, and I would never say no to that responsibility, but if I can help people in a positive way then that’s amazing. At the end of the day, I’m just a musician. I just want to do music, and be accepted as a legitimate musician first and foremost. Everything else is secondary for me right now.”
“Circle” voices the insecurities of someone who is “tired of walkin’ in circles” and “ain’t gonna walk in circles” anymore. The climactic guitar solo at the end suggests that he found the courage to walk forward.
Brian Asawa: Villa-Lobos—Bachianas Brasileras #5: Aria
Born in Orange County and raised in Los Angeles, the late Japanese American countertenor Brian Asawa (1966-106) discovered that he had a strong falsetto voice in college, around the same time that he came out. In an Associated Press interview, he said, “On the way back to the dorms in the middle of the redwood forest, I would sing the soprano line of the choral music for fun in my falsetto voice. I discovered I had a strong voice in that range.” A few years later, in 1991, he became the first countertenor to win the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. He said, in a New York Times interview, “When I got the application, there wasn’t even a category for countertenor. When I won, I was really pleased, because it meant that the Met acknowledged the countertenor as a viable voice type.”
Asawa performed all over Europe (Paris Opera, Covent Garden, Bavarian State Opera), North America (Met, Houston Opera, Seattle Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Canadian Opera Company), and Australia, but he was most closely associated with the San Francisco Opera, with which he made his professional debut in 1991. He said that his queerness probably helped him develop as a countertenor. In an interview with The Advocate in 1998, he said, “Heterosexual men don’t feel comfortable singing in a treble register because it’s not butch. Gay men feel quite comfortable singing in their falsetto registers.”
Tranie Tronic: Plastic Fantastic
Tranie Tronic is the “space age dominatrix” persona of Karachi-born and Montreal-based transgender filmmaker and performer Atif Siddiqi. Siddiqi created Tranie Tronic “with a mission to transform societal views on sexuality making love relationships more acceptable with the transgender community.” In an interview with CBC, Siddiqi said that Tranie Tronic “had that kind of b-movie vibe to it. I think it comes from my personal life as well, and never feeling quite at home on earth and the way things are here.” They said that they have always felt to be outside of drag culture “because I do it in my personal life too; there’s not so much of a difference. It’s not like I’m a man and then I transform into a drag queen. It’s much more subtle.” In fact, they said, “The earliest photographs of me dressed up are when I was three years old and that kind of continued through my life.”
Siddiqi says that the influences for Tranie Tronic include sci-fi films, 80s electronic music, a relationship that they were in, and the South Asian Khawaja Sira (third gender) culture. For more on Tranie Tronic, watch this short CBC documentary. “Plastic Fantastic” is a track on Tranie Tronic’s 2009 album, Transmission.
Ryka Aoki: I Tell Myself It’s Me
Ryka Aoki’s “I Tell Myself It’s Me” is a track from the soundtrack of Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance, a groundbreaking 2010 documentary directed by Madsen Minax. Aoki is a writer, musician and martial artist who was honored by the California State Senate for her “extraordinary commitment to free speech and artistic expression, as well as the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” A former national Judo champion and the founder of the International Transgender Martial Arts Alliance, Aoki teaches self-defense and martial arts to at-risk youths at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. She says that the favorite award she has ever received was “Outstanding Volunteer by the LGBT Center’s Children, Youth and Family Services.” Aoki is also a Professor of English at Santa Monica College.
With regards to “I Tell Myself It’s Me,” Aoki states in an interview, “I pretty much play everything on those tracks. If it makes a noise, I can find a way to use it. I use guitars and basses and keyboards, and lap steels and glockenspiels and autoharps, and have a great deal of fun with harmonica and Japanese flute.” On top of these musical sounds, Aoki gives a spoken word performance of a poem about the pains, the anxieties, the brokenness, the joys, the victories and the loves of being a “femme Asian tranny dyke.” This poem is also published as “Deal with the Devil” in Aoki’s 2012 collection Seasonal Velocities, which was a 2013 Lambda Award Finalist for Transgender Nonfiction.
Byron Au Yong: Daughter
Currently a composition professor at the University of San Francisco‘s Department of Performing Arts and Social Justice, Au Yong creates musical events that help people open difficult conversations and connect to places they call home. His creative obsession with “dislocation” is derived from his family history. His father’s family fled the Japanese invasion of China in 1938 and settled in Mindanao (southern Philippines), where his father was born in 1941 and where, ironically, his musician grandfather was captured by Japanese soldiers. Au Yong wrote, “He pretended to be a farmer and joked with the soldiers until he was able to escape. They would have killed him if they knew he started the first Chinese school in the Mindanao Mountains of the Philippines.” His father eventually migrated to the United States in the 1960s, and Au Yong was born in Pittsburgh.
Yiju 移居, which means “to migrate,” presents imagined sonic remembrances of the Au Yong family’s many experiences and (not so permanent) homes. They are often paired obscuring sounds that demonstrate the impossibility of recovering memories, even invented ones. With regards to the opening track, “Daughter 女儿,” Au Yong writes, “My grandparents fled China in 1938, leaving my first aunt. I wonder what lullaby my grandmother would have sung to the daughter they left behind.” You can read more about Au Yong’s memory of his grandfather here.
Kohinoorgasm: Chalo
Awkwafina: Yellow Ranger
Haley Kiyoko: Girls Like Girls
Klark: Neptune
Nicholas Phan: Britten—The Last Rose of Summer
Rostam (Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend): In a River
Spring 2019 Playlist: Songs about Asian American Labor. #MAARCLabor
Spotify Link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/62cVUg7VZNBdP0C7rQ5ka0
The “Songs of Asian American Labor” playlist is at once a tribute to the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 2019, and a lesson in the history of immigration legislation in the United States. In many ways, the history of Asian American and Latinx labor IS the history of U.S. immigration legislation. As Beth Lew-Williams showed in her book The Chinese Must Go (2018), it was the reaction against Chinese labor in the mid-to-late nineteenth century that gave birth to “exclusion logic.” This logic gave birth to the U.S.’s earliest immigration restrictions. It continues to dominate U.S. immigration policy today, and to cause much humanitarian suffering. This playlist also highlights contributions by people of Asian descent in U.S. history, and explores the evolution of the country’s conflicting discourses about Asians. Asians have not always been branded “model minorities.”
Homages to Asian American laborers and mothers
Bhi Bhiman: “Bread and Butter”
Blue Scholars: “No Rest for the Weary”
Chris Iijima, Charlie Chin and Nobuko Miyamoto: “We Are the Children”
Oblique Brown: “What Remains”
Songs about Miners
Charlie Chin: “Dig for the Gold”
Songs about Plantations
Yumi Ishikawa and Pono Lani: “Hole Hole Bushi”
Jen Shyu: “The Chinese-Cuban Question” (3 tracks)
Additional resources: The Canefields Songs Project: http://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/Hole_Hole_Bushi/index.html
Songs about Railroad Building
Dawen: “Ku Li”
Jon Jang: “Burial Mound”
Additional resources: Chan Ka Nin’s Iron Road: https://www.musiccentre.ca/node/61171
Songs about the Delano Grape Strike
El Teatro Campesino: “El Picket Sign”
Los Lobos: “Huelga en General”
Songs about Vincent Chin
Say Bok Gwai: “Revenge of Vincent Chin”
Additional Resources: Charlie Chin, “The Ballad of Vincent Chin”; Jon Jang, “Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?”; Fort Minor, remix by Model Minority, “Vincent Chin”
Songs about Chasing the American Dream
St. Lenox, “Fuel America”
Additional Resources: Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis, Stuck Elevator