By Matt Collette
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.
Phi, who lives in Minneapolis, Minn., has performed his poetry since 1991. He is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion, a National Poetry Slam finalist and his work has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry and in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology.
Kiwi, who lives in San Fransisco, has been a figure in the New York and California independent hip-hop scenes for the past decade. He has performed with Common, the Black Eyed Peas and a number of other prolific performers and was part of the Filipino hip-hop group Native Guns until the group broke up earlier this year.
“They’re really representing a diverse perspective on Asian Americans,” Hom said. “[We’re bringing Beats Rhymes and Rice to Northeastern] to showcase Asian American performers. These aren’t the people you see in mainstream media.”
The event is funded through the Student Activities Fee and, on his website, Li said the three performers will give some of the proceeds back to Asian American organizations in their own communities.
“I think their music is good. I think it’s coming from a perspective you don’t typically hear,” Hom said. “And it will be a lot of fun.”
