Framing Reading A Category That Had to Be Invented

Modules 2 and 3 traced histories of communities that already had names. Black music in the United States, before any module read about it, was already understood by Americans as Black music; Latin music as Latin music. Module 4 covers a category that the people inside it had to invent. The phrase "Asian American" was coined in May 1968 by two graduate students at UC Berkeley, just over the hill from where you are reading this, as a deliberate political alternative to the older racial term "Oriental." Before then, the communities this module covers were thought of separately, by themselves and by everyone else: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, sometimes South Asian, sometimes Pacific Islander, often "Oriental." Music was central to giving the new category its early substance, and in the half-century since, the music made under the banner has had a layered relationship to it: sometimes naming the category outright, sometimes inhabiting it without announcement, sometimes cutting against it from the inside.

The traditions this module covers are distinct. Chinese American and Japanese American jazz on the West Coast; Filipino American jazz on the Pacific and Filipino American R&B and pop in the postwar United States; the Asian American Movement's folk and protest music of the early 1970s; the Asian American Jazz movement of the 1980s; the Bay Area Filipino American mobile DJ scene that became the cradle of turntablism; Tongan American and other Pacific Islander pop; the indie rock and contemporary work that has pushed Asian American voices into the center of American popular music in the 2010s and 2020s. Their migration histories, their relationships to American empire, their experiences of exclusion laws and internment and the postwar refugee waves all differ. What they share is a long history of producing American popular music while being read by mainstream culture as either invisible or foreign, a sustained dialogue with African American music that includes direct political solidarity with Black liberation movements, and the specific experience of being grouped together under a category that, for most of US history, did not exist.

What "Asian American" means here

The phrase "Asian American" looks like a straightforward descriptive category, parallel to "African American" or "Latin American." It is not. It was coined for a specific political purpose at a specific moment, and understanding the moment is part of understanding the music.

In May 1968, Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, two graduate students at UC Berkeley, called a meeting at their apartment at 2005 Hearst Avenue. Ichioka was a Japanese American historian who had been incarcerated as a child at the Topaz internment camp in Utah; Gee was a Chinese American activist and writer. Both had been participating in anti-Vietnam War, Black Power, and civil rights demonstrations and had noticed the same thing. Asian Americans were present at these protests in real numbers, but they had no shared identity to mobilize around, no banner to march under. They tended to identify ethnically (as Chinese, Japanese, Filipino) and in those ethnic groupings their numbers were small. Ichioka's hypothesis was that a panethnic identity, combining the ethnic groups under one umbrella, would give Asian Americans political visibility they had lacked. The meeting at 2005 Hearst Avenue founded the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), and the name they chose for their group was, as far as anyone has established, the first public use of the phrase "Asian American."

The choice was deliberate. The alternative was "Oriental," a term inherited from European colonial discourse that lumped Asian peoples together as exotic, foreign, and feminine, and that white Americans had used for a century without consultation. Richard Aoki, a Japanese American AAPA founder who was also a Black Panther Party field marshal, put the rejection bluntly: "Oriental was a rug that everyone steps on, so we ain't no Orientals." Replacing "Oriental" with "Asian American" was a refusal of the old framing and a claim to the American part of the identity. It also performed a unification. Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans had been on opposite sides of the Pacific War a generation earlier; Filipinos and Koreans had distinct colonial relationships to Japan; South Asian Americans had a different immigration history from East Asian Americans. The new term insisted that, in the American context, the racial coding these communities encountered (and the political possibilities they could mobilize together) was shared.

The word for what the new term did is panethnic. A panethnic identity is one that gathers multiple ethnic groups into a shared political category, on the grounds that they face common conditions and can do common political work. "Latino" and "Hispanic" function similarly, gathering communities of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and other origins under a shared category that has political and demographic uses while flattening real distinctions. "Asian American" works the same way. The communities it gathers do not share a homeland, a language, a religion, or a single migration history. They do, in the United States, share a racial coding (read as foreign, read as a single bloc, read as the "Yellow Peril" of nineteenth-century anti-Chinese propaganda or the "Asian model minority" of twentieth-century white-supremacist sociology), and they share a long history of legal exclusion (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, Japanese American internment under Executive Order 9066, the post-1975 refugee resettlement of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao communities). The panethnic move was a way of refusing to be divided in the face of those conditions.

It is worth pausing on one further complication, because it shapes who this module includes. The federal government's racial classification, since the 2000 census, has used the category "Asian or Pacific Islander" (AAPI), folding Pacific Islander communities (Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, Chamorro, and others) into a single bureaucratic grouping with Asian Americans. Many Pacific Islander writers and organizers have pushed back on this folding, because Pacific Islander histories are different in important ways. Pacific Islander communities are Indigenous to lands that the United States colonized (Hawaii annexed in 1898, Samoa partitioned in 1899, Guam acquired in 1898), which makes the relationship to the United States categorically different from voluntary or forced immigration. The 1990 separation of "Pacific Islander" as its own census category in some federal contexts, and the 2000 standardization of "AAPI" as a combined category, both reflect this contested grouping. This module's third track is by The Jets, a Tongan American family band, and the question of whether Pacific Islander histories belong inside an Asian American module is a real one. The course's answer is to include them while flagging the complication, which is what the federal AAPI category does and what Pacific Islander writers continue to argue about.

So when this module uses the phrase "Asian American" to name the territory it covers, the phrase is doing several things at once. It is a recent political invention. It folds together communities whose individual histories in the United States are long and substantially distinct. It includes (with reasonable disagreement) Pacific Islander communities. And it is the term the people who made the music chose, often deliberately, to do their political and creative work under, with the music and the term shaping each other across the next half-century.

The long pre-history

Asian musicians have been making American popular music since the late nineteenth century, more than seventy years before there was an "Asian American" category to name what they were doing. Three threads are worth pulling out, because each shows up in the music covered in this module's anchor tracks.

The first thread is the Filipino musician on the Pacific. The United States annexed the Philippines in 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, and held the islands as a colony until 1946. Spanish colonial musical practices (the rondalla, the choral tradition, the European church music inherited from Spain's three-and-a-half-century occupation) were already deep in Philippine musical life when the Americans arrived. American occupation added ragtime, foxtrot, military band music, vaudeville, and, by the late 1910s, jazz. Filipino musicians learned the new repertoire fast and exported it back. By the 1920s, Filipino musicians were the dominant non-white labor force in jazz orchestras in hotels and ocean liners across Asia: Manila, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Yokohama, Calcutta, Singapore. Frederick Schenker, a music historian who has written about this scene, calls Filipino musicians "the unsung Pacific carriers of jazz." Some Japanese musicians of the period have said the first time they heard a musician improvise (rather than play strictly from sheet music) it was a Filipino doing it. This is a tradition older than the term "Asian American," older than most of the recorded history of jazz in the United States, and it is the substrate on which Filipino American musical practice in California built. When this module's fourth track gets to the Bay Area Filipino American DJ scene of the 1980s and 1990s, the line back to Filipino musicians on Pacific ocean liners in the 1920s is a continuous one.

The second thread is the Chinese American and Japanese American jazz scene of the prewar West Coast. By the 1930s, San Francisco's Chinatown had at least twelve Chinese cabarets running, the most famous being Charlie Low's Forbidden City, which opened in 1938 and which writers and historians have compared to an Asian American counterpart of Harlem's famous Black-staffed-and-white-patron-only Cotton Club. Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean dancers and musicians worked at the Forbidden City, including the Chinese American singer Larry Ching, sometimes billed as "the Chinese Frank Sinatra," and the Filipina jazz singer Katy de la Cruz, billed as the "Queen of Filipino Jazz," who held a Forbidden City residency in the late 1940s and early 1950s during her US tours. Across town and across the bay, second-generation Japanese Americans (the Nisei, US-born children of Issei immigrants from Japan) formed jazz orchestras with names like the Cathayans, the Japanese Sandmen, and the Sho Tokyans. In Los Angeles, an Issei brass band called the Mikado Band, founded by Seiichi Nako around 1910, performed brass-band arrangements of opera excerpts well into the 1930s. None of this material was recorded under the banner of "Asian American" because no such banner existed; it was recorded as jazz, period, performed by people whose racial coding was visible at the venue and audible in the press but not central to the music's category.

The third thread is what happened to the Japanese American jazz scene in 1942. On February 19, 1942, ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, two-thirds of them US citizens, into ten concentration camps run by the War Relocation Authority. (The official US government term was "internment," and we will use that term in this reading because that is the term you will encounter in most sources, while noting that scholars and survivors increasingly use "incarceration" because "internment" implies a wartime detention of foreign nationals, which most of the people incarcerated were not.)

Japanese American musical life did not stop in the camps. It continued, in chamber ensembles and dance bands and church choirs, on improvised stages in tar-paper barracks. After the war, the Nisei and the next generation, the Sansei, came out of the camps and back into a country that had stripped their families of homes, businesses, and savings. The musicians among them rebuilt their careers; some continued in jazz (Paul Togawa, who had been incarcerated at Poston as a child and had taken up the drums there, became a working Los Angeles jazz drummer in the 1950s and acted in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song); others moved into mainstream entertainment (Pat Suzuki, a second-generation Japanese American who had been incarcerated as a child, was discovered in a Seattle nightclub in the late 1950s by Bing Crosby and went on to a Broadway run in the 1958 production of Flower Drum Song and a string of jazz-standard albums). Two decades before the term "Asian American" existed, Suzuki was the most successful Asian American musician working in mainstream American entertainment, and her career was shaped end-to-end by the conditions internment had created.

These are pre-history in only one sense: the people doing the work did not yet have a shared name for what they were doing. They are not pre-history in any other sense. The musical practices and the musicians' children and the institutional infrastructure (Forbidden City, the Issei brass bands, the Filipino musicians' union locals on the West Coast) all carried forward into what came next. Three communities, three relationships to American empire, three different traditions inside American popular music. When the Movement generation of 1968 to 1973 started using the new term "Asian American" to talk about the music they wanted to make, they were not starting from nothing. They were renaming a long history.

1965 and what changed

The previous section traced what the term "Asian American" came to mean in 1968. This section traces what made the population the term had to describe. The single most consequential piece of legal history is the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, but the act only makes sense against the eighty-three years of explicit Asian exclusion that came before it.

For most of US history, the laws governing who could enter the country and who could become a citizen were explicitly racial. Asian people, with rare exceptions, could not. The first restriction was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most Chinese laborers from entering the country and made existing Chinese residents ineligible for naturalization. The 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement informally restricted Japanese immigration by diplomatic understanding. The 1917 Immigration Act created an "Asiatic Barred Zone" covering most of South and Southeast Asia. The 1924 Immigration Act (also called the Johnson-Reed Act, also called the Asian Exclusion Act) formalized a national-origin quota system that effectively closed off most Asian immigration outside the Philippines, which was then a US colony. The 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act closed even that loophole, granting eventual Philippine independence and reducing Filipino immigration to 50 people per year.

The Second World War shifted the architecture but did not lift it. Executive Order 9066 in 1942 forced approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into incarceration camps. The 1943 Magnuson Act repealed Chinese Exclusion, with a token quota of 105 Chinese immigrants per year. The 1946 Luce-Celler Act doubled the Filipino quota to 100 per year and finally allowed Filipinos and South Asians to naturalize. The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act removed the racial bars on naturalization but kept the national-origin quotas in place. From 1882 to 1965, in other words, US immigration law treated Asian people as a problem to be managed by exclusion. Eighty-three years of legal restriction, each piece of which singled out a specific Asian community for specific barriers, makes the Asian American population that existed in the United States in 1965 a population shaped by exclusion to a degree that is hard to overstate.

On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act (also called the Hart-Celler Act, after its sponsors Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn) at a ceremony at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The new law removed the national-origin quotas. Each country was given the same annual cap of 20,000. The law set up a preference system: 75 percent of admissions for family reunification, 20 percent for employment-based admission with a strong tilt toward "highly skilled" professionals, 5 percent for refugee status. Johnson's signing remarks called the old quotas "a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice." Most of the legislators voting for the bill, and most of the press covering its passage, expected it to be a symbolic correction with little demographic consequence; the assumption was that European immigrants would continue to dominate, just without the racial framework.

That was wrong. In the years immediately after 1965, the Asian American population in the United States, which had been less than one percent of the total US population, began to grow rapidly. By the 2010s it was almost six percent. The composition of that population changed in three important ways. First, the existing Asian American communities (largely Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino) doubled, then doubled again, as the family reunification preference let community members bring relatives in. Second, new communities arrived in significant numbers for the first time: Korean Americans, Indian Americans, Pakistani Americans, Bangladeshi Americans. The Korean American population in particular grew almost from scratch in the 1970s and 1980s. Third, the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, passed in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon, brought more than 300,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to the United States between 1975 and 1979, and additional waves in the 1980s. The Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong American communities that exist in the United States today are largely the result of that displacement and the wars (the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge genocide, the Secret War in Laos) that drove it. The 1965 Act and its 1975 refugee follow-on transformed the demographic that the term "Asian American" would have to describe.

The musicians on this module's anchor tracks come from this transformation. The trio who recorded the first Asian American protest album in 1973 are second- and third-generation children of pre-1965 immigrants; their work was made possible by the institutions the Movement built in the early 1970s. The Asian American Jazz movement of the 1980s grew out of the same Movement-era institutional world. The Tongan American family band of Track 3 came from Tonga in the post-1965 wave; the parents immigrated and raised their seventeen children in Salt Lake City and Minneapolis. The Filipino American DJs of the Bay Area scene of Track 4 are predominantly children and grandchildren of post-1965 Filipino immigrants whose families came to Daly City and Vallejo and Union City through the family-reunification clause and the medical and educational professions the new law favored. The Japanese American singer-songwriter on Track 5 was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and an American State Department father, grew up between several countries because of her father's work, and came to the United States for college; her musical career happens entirely in the post-1965 American context. The 1965 Act is not visible in any single track's lyrics or sound, but it is the precondition for almost every musician this module covers.

The Movement and the music it made

The five years between the founding of AAPA in May 1968 and the recording of the first Asian American protest album in 1973 are the period in which the panethnic category got its musical and cultural substance. The political invention came first, the music came shortly after, and the institutions that connected them were built in those same five years, mostly by people in their twenties who had been radicalized by the civil rights movement, Black Power, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the immigration reform their parents had lived through. This section is about that institutional infrastructure, because the infrastructure is what the music sat inside. The track-by-track work of how individual recordings sounded belongs in the listening guides.

The most consequential single event of the Movement years for Asian American studies, and indirectly for Asian American music, was the San Francisco State College student strike of 1968-1969. The strike was led by a multiethnic coalition called the Third World Liberation Front, which brought together the Black Student Union, the Mexican American Student Confederation, the Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor (PACE), the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, the Latin American Students Organization, and the Asian American Political Alliance, among others. It started on November 6, 1968, ten weeks after AAPA was founded across the bay, and it lasted 134 days; it was, and still is, the longest student strike in US history. The strike's central demand was the establishment of a College of Ethnic Studies that would house Asian American Studies, Black Studies, La Raza Studies, and American Indian Studies as departments controlled by the communities they served. On March 20, 1969, the college administration agreed. The College of Ethnic Studies at SF State opened in fall 1969, the first of its kind in the country. A parallel TWLF strike at UC Berkeley in early 1969 produced the first Ethnic Studies Department in the United States in March 1969. Asian American Studies as a field exists because Asian American students struck for it, alongside Black, Latino, and Native students, in the academic year 1968 to 1969.

The strikes mattered for the music in two ways. First, they put a name on a category that had not had institutional standing. By the early 1970s, "Asian American" was a curriculum, a department, an academic field, a body of scholarship, not just a phrase from a Berkeley apartment. Second, the strikes built the network of student activists who went on to found the institutions where Asian American art got made: the International Hotel anti-eviction movement in San Francisco's Manilatown, the Asian Community Center on Kearny Street, the United Asian Communities Center in New York, and most directly for our purposes, two organizations on opposite coasts whose names recur throughout this module's listening guides: Basement Workshop in New York (founded 1970) and Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco (founded 1972).

Basement Workshop began in a tenement basement at 54 Elizabeth Street in Manhattan's Chinatown, founded by Columbia graduate student Danny N.T. Yung and a small group of friends. By 1971 it was publishing Bridge: The Magazine of Asians in America, the first nationally distributed Asian American magazine, which ran until 1978. In 1972, Basement Workshop published Yellow Pearl, a record-album-sized boxed portfolio of poetry, song lyrics, and visual art by more than thirty Asian American artists and writers. The portfolio's title was a deliberate inversion of "Yellow Peril," the racist nineteenth-century slogan that had justified Chinese exclusion, and the project's original premise had been to illustrate and publish the music of three young New York-based musicians: Chris Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, and William "Charlie" Chin. Iijima, Miyamoto, and Chin had started performing together in 1970 at Asian American Movement events, and their songs had been circulating in the Movement community for two years before the studio recording. Their album, A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, was recorded in 1973 and released by Paredon Records, a small Brooklyn-based political-music label. It is widely recognized as the first album of Asian American music, and it is the first anchor track of this module.

Kearny Street Workshop, founded in 1972 by Jim Dong, Lora Jo Foo, and Michael Chin, was housed for its first five years on the ground floor of the International Hotel at the corner of Kearny and Jackson Streets in San Francisco's Manilatown, which was at the time the home of an aging community of unmarried Filipino American men known as the manong generation. The I-Hotel's elderly Filipino tenants were facing eviction; KSW's location there put the workshop in the middle of the longest-running anti-eviction struggle in San Francisco history, and the workshop's silkscreened protest posters from those years are now in major museum collections. KSW was evicted from the I-Hotel along with the tenants in August 1977. It survived the eviction and is still active in 2026, the oldest Asian Pacific American multidisciplinary arts organization in the country. In 1981, KSW founded the Asian American Jazz Festival, which ran for seventeen years and provided the institutional home for the Asian American Jazz movement of the 1980s and 1990s. The second track of this module is anchored in that movement.

Two more organizations are worth naming because the listening guides will return to them. Asian Improv aRts, founded in San Francisco in 1987 by Jon Jang and Francis Wong, ran a record label (Asian Improv Records) and a presenting organization that recorded and toured the Asian American Jazz movement's musicians. The Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), founded in 1982 in Seattle by Dorothy and Fred Cordova, has documented Filipino American history including the long Filipino American musical tradition that runs from the 1920s Pacific musicians through to the 1990s Bay Area DJ scene; its archival collections are one of the main sources for what this module covers about Filipino American music. These institutions did not have the commercial reach of Motown or Stax, the labels in Module 2's framing reading; their reach was political and cultural and academic. They are the world the music of this module came out of.

The dialogue with African American music

Almost every track in this module is in conversation with Black American music. Three threads make the dialogue legible.

The first thread is musical. The Asian musicians on the prewar West Coast did not invent jazz; they entered it. The Filipino musicians on the Pacific ocean liners did not invent ragtime, foxtrot, or jazz either; they learned the new American musics and carried them. The Asian American Movement musicians of the early 1970s did not invent folk, blues, or soul; they wrote protest songs in the American folk tradition that their generation had absorbed from the civil rights movement, with arrangements that reflected the soul, gospel, and Latin music their political organizing world ran on. The Asian American Jazz movement of the 1980s collaborated directly with Black avant-garde jazz: Jon Jang recorded with Max Roach, James Newton, and David Murray; Fred Ho's Afro Asian Music Ensemble performed at Black-organized political events through the 1980s and 1990s; the broader Asian Improv aRts world saw itself as adjacent to and in dialogue with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the Black Artists Group of St. Louis.

The same musical pattern continues into the more recent work. The Filipino American Bay Area DJs of the late 1980s and 1990s were practicing a Black-American musical form, hip hop, inside an apprentice-and-cipher culture that came directly from Black-American hip hop institutions. The indie rock that closes this module sits inside an indie-rock idiom that came out of 1980s and 1990s alternative rock, which itself came out of punk, which came out of garage rock, which came out of rhythm and blues, which is to say: even the indie rock track in this module is downstream from a Black-American musical river. There is, in this module's lineup, almost no Asian American popular music that is not in some sense made out of Black American materials.

The second thread is political. The Asian American Movement was not just adjacent to the Black Power movement; it was self-consciously inspired by it, and in some cases directly intertwined with it. Richard Aoki, an AAPA founder mentioned earlier, was a Black Panther Party field marshal who provided the Panthers with some of their first firearms. Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American activist who had been incarcerated as a young woman at the Jerome camp in Arkansas, was a friend and collaborator of Malcolm X and was at his side when he was assassinated in 1965; she later worked with the Asian American Movement and the Puerto Rican independence movement as a single integrated political project. The Black Panthers' "Serve the People" motto was adopted directly by Basement Workshop and the broader Asian American Movement. The phrase "Yellow Power," which circulated alongside "Asian American" in the late 1960s, was an explicit translation of "Black Power." The musicians of the AAM understood themselves to be doing what Black activists were doing, in their own communities. A Grain of Sand was released by Paredon Records, the New York political-music label founded by Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber, whose first four 1970 releases included a Latin American protest-song compilation, an Angolan independence-movement record, an album of Vietnam-era anti-war GI songs, and a recorded speech by Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton. The album sits inside an explicitly Third Worldist political-music infrastructure that crossed racial lines.

The third thread is bidirectional. The dialogue is not just Asian American musicians entering Black-American forms; the forms themselves change when Asian American musicians work inside them. Module 3's anchor track on Joe Bataan, the Filipino-and-African-American boogaloo and Latin soul bandleader, is one example: a Filipino American working at the intersection of Black and Puerto Rican music in 1960s New York, with audible Filipino American musical sensibilities reshaping the result. The Asian American Jazz movement musicians inserted Chinese and Japanese instruments and modes into the Black avant-garde jazz tradition, with the result that the jazz tradition itself absorbed some of those elements. The Filipino American Bay Area DJ crews of the late 1980s and 1990s, working inside hip hop, developed the technique of scratching as a virtuosic instrumental practice to a point that the technique itself, and turntablism as a concept, were partly invented by them. The pattern is rarely one of separation; it is almost always one of insertion, with Asian American musicians moving into Black American forms with enough force that the form ends up bearing their fingerprints.

The dialogue runs in both directions, though unevenly. Black American music has been the dominant influence on Asian American music; Asian American music has been a quieter influence on Black American music, partly because the audience and the industry have been smaller. But the dialogue is real, and it is the central musical relationship in this module. Module 2 traced the foundational Black American tradition; this module traces a tradition in continuous conversation with it.

Music as political work

The music in this module does political work, and the political work takes recognizable forms. Module 2's framing reading distinguished three modes by which a song can do political work: direct address (a song that says, in lyrics, what it thinks about a political situation), formal innovation (a song that reorganizes musical material in a way that disrupts existing hierarchies), and presence (a song whose political work is partly that the artist is in the room, claiming space). All three modes operate in this module, and in some cases the same song operates in more than one.

Direct address is the mode of the Movement musicians of the early 1970s. The first Asian American protest album was an album of explicit political songs about Asian American identity, anti-war organizing, solidarity with the Black liberation and Puerto Rican independence movements, and the legacy of internment. The lyrics named the politics, the arrangements stayed simple to keep the words in the foreground, and the songs were written to be sung at rallies and community events as well as on a recording. Direct address is the oldest mode in the political-music tradition the AAM inherited from Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the civil rights freedom songs, and the Mexican nueva canción and Cuban nueva trova movements. The Movement musicians used it because it worked.

Formal innovation is the mode of the Asian American Jazz movement of the 1980s and the Filipino American DJ scene of the late 1980s and 1990s. The AAJM's combination of Black avant-garde jazz with Chinese instruments, modes, and arrangements (Jon Jang's septet works, Fred Ho's Afro Asian Music Ensemble, the work that came out of Asian Improv aRts) was a formally innovative project in which the politics was partly in the sound itself: a Chinese instrument inside a Black-American avant-garde frame is, before any lyric is sung, a statement about whose music gets to be in dialogue with whose. Jang's 1984 recording "Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? / East Wind", the second anchor track of this module, came out of the Vincent Chin justice organizing of 1982 to 1983 and is a canonical document of the movement. The Filipino American DJ scene's reorganization of the turntable from a record player into a virtuoso instrument, and the related invention of scratching as an articulate musical technique, was an even more thoroughgoing formal innovation. Hip hop had been built out of the recordings of older Black music; the Bay Area Filipino American crews built a new instrumental practice out of hip hop's tools. The Invisibl Skratch Piklz, the Bay Area DJ collective whose mid-1990s work is the fourth anchor track of this module, are the canonical reference for that period of the technique's development. They were not announcing their identity in the way the Movement musicians had; they were embedding it in the technique itself.

Presence is the mode of the popular-mainstream tracks in this module. The Jets' 1986 "Crush On You," the third anchor track of this module, broke into the Top 10 with a song produced inside the Minneapolis sound; the political work was partly that a Tongan American immigrant family had pop hits at all, in an industry and a chart and a national imagination that had not had room for them. Mitski's 2016 "Your Best American Girl," the fifth anchor track of this module, staged the Japanese American songwriter's relationship to white American masculinity inside an indie rock song; the political work was partly that the song existed at all and was heard by a large audience as belonging to the indie-rock canon. Presence is often the quietest mode of political work, because the work is happening at the level of who appears in the cultural picture, rather than at the level of what any particular song says.

The five anchor tracks span roughly forty-three years and are arranged chronologically: A Grain of Sand in 1973, Jang in 1984, the Jets in 1986, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz in the mid-1990s, Mitski in 2016. Each track does at least one of these kinds of political work, and most do more than one. As you move through the listening guides, watch which mode is operating in each track, and watch how the balance shifts over the half-century the module covers. You can complete the listening guides in any order.

The queer Asian American thread

The Asian American Movement of 1968 to 1973 was substantially heteronormative, and the institutional infrastructure it built (the College of Ethnic Studies, Basement Workshop, Kearny Street Workshop, the Asian American Jazz Festival in its early years) did not have a public queer wing in the way that Movement-era Black politics had via figures like Bayard Rustin or, later, Audre Lorde and June Jordan. Queer Asian Americans were present in these spaces, often centrally, but the political identity the Movement built and named was not constructed to make their queerness legible inside it. The result, for the music covered in the first half of this module, is a queer presence that the historical record carries quietly: in correspondence, in oral histories, in the careful work of contemporary scholars trying to recover what the period’s public-facing organizing was not built to acknowledge. Naming this is part of doing the history honestly, and the contemporary recovery work is itself part of the queer Asian American musical tradition the rest of this section describes.

The Bay Area in the 1980s and 1990s built the institutional infrastructure that the Movement era had not, much of it in response to the AIDS crisis as it reached the Asian American community. The Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) was founded in San Francisco in February 1988, out of the Asian Gay Men’s Support Group that had been meeting at the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley; it was one of the first organizations in the United States specifically serving LGBTQ+ Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. GAPA’s response to the AIDS epidemic in API communities produced the GAPA Community HIV Project in 1989, which merged with the Asian AIDS Project (founded 1987) in 1996 to form the Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center (now the San Francisco Community Health Center). The GAPA Men’s Chorus, founded in 1989, debuted on November 3, 1989, at the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco; it is one of the longest-running queer Asian American musical institutions and has performed in pan-Asian LGBTQ choir festivals in Taipei (2015), Tokyo (2019), and Singapore (2025). These institutions sat alongside the Asian Improv aRts world geographically and personally, and the AAJM musicians and queer API organizers in 1980s San Francisco moved through overlapping social networks even though the public-facing programming of each kept its own focus. The AIDS toll inside Asian American queer communities through the 1980s and 1990s was substantial and is still being documented; the silence inside Asian American institutions of the same period about their queer dead is part of what the contemporary recovery work is trying to address.

The contemporary scene includes both publicly out figures and figures whose queerness has been claimed by queer Asian American fans without the artists themselves taking on a public label. The Japanese American pop singer Hayley Kiyoko (born 1991 in Los Angeles, the daughter of the Japanese Canadian figure skater and choreographer Sarah Kawahara) is the clearest case of the first: her 2015 single “Girls Like Girls” and her 2018 debut album Expectations built her career on openly queer Asian American pop, and her fans’ “Lesbian Jesus” moniker for her was both a joke and a recognition that there had not previously been a publicly out Asian American pop star at her commercial scale. The Korean American DJ and producer Yaeji (born Kathy Yaeji Lee, 1993, in Queens) has built her work around the Brooklyn queer Asian dance scene, hosting queer-Asian-centered parties from her late-2010s breakthrough forward and speaking publicly about the need for queer, Black, brown, trans, and Asian artists to support one another in industry spaces that have not made room for them. The fifth track of this module, Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl,” sits inside the second case. Mitski has consistently declined to label her sexuality publicly, and her work has been claimed by queer fans in ways that have generated substantive critical conversation about how Asian American artists’ racial specificity gets read past or read into by white queer audiences. The conversation around Mitski is itself part of the contemporary queer Asian American musical tradition, and it points toward a broader scene (Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner; Miss Grit; Mxmtoon; Rina Sawayama; Joji and the 88rising roster’s overlapping queer artists; the queer Filipino American hip hop scene; the contemporary Bay Area queer API DJ and party scene) that ten years ago would have been substantially less visible and that is now a real strand of how the tradition this module covers is being remade.

What this module leaves out

Five anchor tracks cannot cover Asian American music. The lineup makes a particular argument (that the panethnic category was invented in 1968 and that the music made under the banner has had a layered relationship to it ever since), and the choices the lineup makes leave out a great deal. Three areas are worth naming, because each is a defensible and rich subject for the final project ahead of you.

South Asian American popular musics. The Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan American communities that grew rapidly after 1965 have produced major contributions to American popular music that this module does not cover: bhangra and the bhangra-hip hop fusions that came out of New York's Punjabi diaspora in the 1990s and 2000s, the South Asian American hip hop of Heems and the Das Racist generation, the Indian American jazz of Vijay Iyer (whose work touches the Asian American Jazz movement above but extends well past it), the South Asian American R&B of Raveena, and the contemporary work of Saweetie, Raja Kumari, and others.

Vietnamese American, Hmong American, Cambodian American, and Lao American popular musics. The Southeast Asian refugee diasporas that began arriving after the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act have produced their own substantial popular musics: the Paris by Night Vietnamese American variety-show tradition that ran continuously from 1983 forward (a six-hour, twice-yearly direct-to-video series anchored by singers like Khánh Ly and Lynda Trang Đài), the Hmong American rap and pop scene centered in Minneapolis-Saint Paul and Fresno, the Cambodian American psychedelic rock revival around Dengue Fever, and the Lao American hip hop scene. The Southeast Asian American refugee experience deserves more than a single anchor track could give it.

K-pop and the contemporary Asian American reception of Korean popular music. K-pop is Korean popular music, made in South Korea and exported globally; it is not Asian American music in any straightforward sense. The decision to leave it out of this module's anchor lineup is deliberate: the Asian American musics this module covers are made in the United States by Asian Americans, and the K-pop case (made in South Korea, consumed enthusiastically in the US, with significant Asian American fan participation) is a different kind of question. The 88rising scene, which has marketed Asian and Asian American hip hop and R&B (Rich Brian, Joji, NIKI, Higher Brothers) to American audiences since the late 2010s, is closer to the module's frame and would make a strong final project. So would the contemporary Asian American hip hop scene that runs from the Mountain Brothers in the 1990s through Far East Movement, Dumbfoundead, Awkwafina, MILCK, and others.