It was time for all of that to come together and bloom into something bigger. Rap was gaining steam in China kids like Rich Brian (fka Rich Chigga) were popping off with rough, catchy cuts on YouTube American fans of K-Pop and J-Pop were curious about what lay outside those clean-cut genres. In 2015, when the California-raised Japanese-Korean Miyashiro left his job running an electronic music channel at Vice to start a media enterprise that he pitched to investors as “Vice for Asian culture,” his goal was to tease out the cool in Asian culture and amplify it, on a global scale, to its highest possible volume. We had no idea.”Įverything about 88rising (stylized “88⬆”) is cool in the way Asians have rarely been allowed to be cool in American culture, save for small blips - Mean Girls‘ offhand mention of a “cool Asians table” in Lindsay Lohan’s high school cafeteria may be the most mainstream example of such an allowance - so it’s hard to fault Pier 17’s security guards, or anyone, for being a little bit dazed. “We didn’t know we were going to get this big. “I think we’ve just scratched the surface,” Sean Miyashiro, 88rising’s founder, tells Rolling Stone. There is the recognizable air of something vibrating with potential, about to explode. Last week, the company dropped a capsule with fashion giant GUESS and on Tuesday, it announced a music festival in Asia in 2019. Japanese YouTube-star-turned-elegiac-pop-singer Joji, another 88 act, saw his album Ballads 1 debut at a similarly unprecedented Number One on Billboard‘s R&B/hip-hop chart this month. In February, Indonesian rapper and 88rising act Rich Brian became the first Asian to top the iTunes hip-hop chart with his debut album Amen. But it’s also a kind of feverish, unified recognition of the moment - its unlikeliness, its import - and just how far it could knock popular music in America off its axis. It’s all in celebration of the tour and the obvious talent of record label-cum-marketing company 88rising’s acts. By the time the show turns over half a dozen other artists, accompanied by unsubtle visuals like shimmering Chinese characters and massive gold dragons, the crowd’s roar is veering toward the danger end of the decibel scale. When a bedazzled rap quartet of Asian boys pops onstage and launches unannounced into a bilingual litany (“Hello,” they shout in unison midway through the set, “we are the Higher Brothers, and we ARE FROM CHINA”), the entire waterfront seems to reverberate with thousands of iPhone flashes and bright sneakers stomping. The audience suffers no such bewilderment. A few of them watch the whole concert from the edges, looking lost one, when I ask for directions to the elevator, asks me in return to fill him in about what’s going on. Nobody in the crowd at 88rising’s early October show in New York City, an unapologetic riot on the brand-new open-air rooftop at Pier 17, is confused about where they are and what they’re doing there - except the security staff, who wander around most of the night in abject confusion.
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