Asian Avenue magazine

From West Coast-based multiethnic breakdancing crew JabbawockeeZ winning MTV’s reality series “America’s Best Dance Crew” earlier this year to hip hop groups from Asia firing up the international underground hip-hop scene, the surge of Asian artists hitting the stage is a force to be reckoned with. Asian Avenue magazine looks into the lives of Colorado’s Asian American hip-hop personalities as they stir up the local scene, their multidimensional and multifaceted stories telling much more than just about hip hop, but also about how it shapes their ideals and everyday lives.

It’s 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, or “hump day” in college lingo, and restaurant bars on Boulder’s Hill are brimming with students enjoying $5 mojitos and discussing upcoming term papers. For them, this “hump day” ritual is their release from the rigors of school.

On the first-floor gym of the University of Colorado rec center is another crowd that also gets together for some release from school on a given Wednesday night – it’s the Front Range Rockers, a crew of B-Boys and B-Girls practicing power moves and battling each other to breakbeats booming from silver speakers covered in graffiti.

“I fell in love with the culture”
CU sophomore Ellis Min has been B-Boying for three years, ever since he became intrigued with hip-hop culture and its four elements – graffiti, emceeing, deejaying and B-Boying, the dance facet of hip-hop culture. He said he started B-Boying because not too many people are into it, which makes it “kind of cool,” but the allure of the B-Boy culture goes beyond just that.

“It helps me to calm down, to forget about school for a while,” Min said. “It’s my happy place, I guess. Even when I have a bad day and I’m down about a bad test score on a chemical engineering test, when I hear a beat, my focus goes to the music and nothing else matters.”

This breakbeat – the syncopated and polyrhythmic beat derived from the part of a song in which the music “breaks” to let the rhythm section play unaccompanied – is the sound that not only serves as the basis of stress relief for the B-Boys and B-Girls who get together to train, but is also the common thread that brings them together as a crew.

“We’re all one big family here,” said Tom Liao, a senior electrical engineering major at CU. “It’s a different crowd than the one we would normally hang out with in school, and being with the crew is just something different because hip hop doesn’t discriminate in regards to age, sex, race or anything. No matter who you are, we push each other to get better in our skills; we teach each other and learn from each other.”

At a given practice, for example, there’s a cypher, or a circle battle going on, where B-Boys and B-Girls face off in a show of tricks and dance moves. It’s quite personal and provoking as they test each other’s skills, but that’s just a reflection of the core values of B-Boy culture – having fun while promoting peace, unity and love.

This confrontational aspect of B-Boying serves as a sort of medium that helps him to get over his innate shyness, Liao said. Having moved trans-Pacific from Taiwan to Denver in the mid ‘90s, starting to B-Boy in high school helped him out of his shell and gave him much self confidence. Not only that, but his crew embraces the notion of the “Godfather of Hip Hop” Afrika Bambaataa’s belief that hip hop creates harmony and saves lives – an antithesis to the mainstream media image of B-Boy culture that revolves around drugs, guns and sex. It’s just a cool moral and “I fell in love with the culture,” Liao said.

And even though B-Boying may not be the most popular subculture among the Asian-American population of dancers, he said that it’s actually a good fit as the body type works well with breakdancing – the lower height average provides for a lower center of balance, giving him advantages in power moves.

Work first, dance second
Liao said that at first, his parents didn’t like him B-Boying – they said that he “should be studying,” and worried that he would get hurt doing stunts. But having kept his grades up, they didn’t stop him from going to practices and events.

But that’s only because there’s a mutual understanding that B-Boying is just a hobby and not something they would pursue as a profession, said Andy Nguyen, a finance major at CU. Dance doesn’t “bring home the bread,” he said, and added that eventually he’ll join corporate America – if not for him, then for his family.

In time, he said, he wants to be able to support his parents and return the favor for all that they’ve done for him. It’s a notion of filial piety that makes school and work a priority over dancing for a living, and it’s a common pattern among the crew.

“My parents were worried that B-Boying might become a priority,” Min said. “They told me, ‘dance will get you nowhere.’ It’s fine for me to have as a hobby because at least I’m not sitting on the couch playing video games, but it’s just a fact that as a professional dancer, there’s not much profit and, on top of that, you’re always traveling, losing time with your other goals in life.”

He notes the worldwide success of Korean B-Boy crews Drifterz and Gamblerz who put themselves on the map by winning big-name competitions such as the Freestyle Session and Battle of the Year. With their battle wins and the Korean government’s support of hip hop as an art to attract overseas tourists, they’re able to somewhat make a living being professional dancers.

But after talking with such B-Boys at a West Coast event last summer, he said that they still don’t live well, that financial and emotional instability is a constant struggle for them.

They live off of performances and gigs such as judging battles and choreographing, as well as off of battle prize money – but that’s only if they win. Income is definitely not consistent for them, and with all the required traveling with the crew, a romantic relationship is pretty much doomed.

With that eye-opening reality of the vagabond lifestyle that professional B-Boys lead, Min finds himself considering the “you can do better” advice that his parents have repeatedly given him. He wants to take some time off after undergrad to travel a bit, but acknowledges that he’ll probably go to grad school and eventually get a nine-to-five.

“Even when I have ‘a real job,’ though, I want to make time – even if it’s only for an hour a day – to keep B-Boying,” he said. “It’ll be like living a double life, I guess. Having a stable job, being a B-Boy. But I can’t do just B-Boying. It’s a one-in-a-million chance to make it big, and even then, it’s hard.”

And hard it is – Sean Choi, former general manager for CU’s KVCU Radio 1190 who deejayed at the Front Range Rockers’ annual Rockers Rumble battle in September, said that though he had “an awesome time” deejaying around the state for three years after graduating in 2005, he came to the point where he realized the instable lifestyle was “probably not what I wanna lead when I’m 35 with a family.”

Plus, like his CU hip-hop comrades, he also dealt with pressure from his high-expecting parents. There was always a “so, what else are you going to do?” attitude, which he acknowledged had a point because it came from the fact that his parents care for him and don’t want to see him out of a job and broke.

He’s now a grad student going for his MBA – partly because he became jaded with mainstream music that lost its true meaning of hip hop and partly because of his parents’ disapproval.

But, he said, he’ll still hit up the clubs and spin on occasion because he believes the importance for youth – especially Asian-American youth who constitute a minority in the state – to get involved in the arts to find their voice and identity and to build a strong community base. Though cynical of overcommercialized hip hop, he believes in original hip hop and keeps in the loop, he said.

“I used to be very idealistic; creating change and making a life out of music seemed so easy,” Choi said. “Studying politics as an undergrad and deejaying for a while both made me realize it’s not so. With an MBA, though, business resource will be my way to fight the system – while working in the system. It’s a balance.”

La vie boheme
In the historic Denver neighborhood on South Grant Street is its century-old community center, a Colorado landmark surrounded by old-fashioned, white-fenced homes lined up in neat little rows and where the day falls to a quiet hush by 8 p.m.

Inside the thick walls of the community center, though, it’s not quite bedtime yet: there’s an orchestra rehearsing in the basement, and in the second-floor auditorium on a 20-by-20-foot floor is a group of five – three young women, a man and a teenage boy – sliding their heels to the eight count.

Leading them is dance instructor Ricki Harada in a Run-D.M.C. tee, baggy jeans, an off-white knitted cap worn to the side topped with orange shades. He presses “play” on his hand-held remote and funk music fills the auditorium from a white boombox sitting atop the stage.

“Okay, now gliiiiiiide, and step,” he said. “And slide your heel … no, your heel has to be on the ground. Now grapevine step, and then turn and pose.”

Harada had been dancing since 8 a.m., this adult hip-hop class being the seventh class of the day. Between performances, choreographing for after school programs and leading evening lessons, he has been dancing for 12 hours straight.

He doesn’t seem to mind it, though, as he exudes energy in every graceful move that he makes. In meticulously checking the choreography of all of his students and helping them to find their own style, he’s living proof that for some, hip hop is more than just an evening class; it’s a lifestyle.

“It’s not just a hobby”
A Japanese native from the Kumamoto prefecture, Harada started dancing when he was 21. There was a huge hip hop explosion in the ‘70s and ‘80s with Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” and “Saturday Night Fever”, and ever since, he’s immersed himself in R&B, soul and funk, as well as in ballet, mime, Japanese traditional dance, theater and improv.

He had graduated from a prestigious private university, the renowned Chuo University in Tokyo, and from the business school at that. But after being introduced to hip hop, he abandoned any idea of a salaried job, despite the fact that he was the eldest son in the family who, as an unwritten rule, would eventually have to lead the family construction company. In a big move that would ruffle major feathers among his family, he up and left the country to pursue dance.

“Of course it’s really hard to make it as a freelance dancer,” Harada said. “It’s so up and down as far as gigs and income, and nowadays, it’s associated with gangster culture and has an unclean rep.

“But hip hop is so much deeper – it’s politics, it’s artistic inspiration, it’s connection with the audience. And if you can show that you’re good and that you know hip hop, people notice you. One thing leads to another, you make networks and connections, and little by little, you make it. Well, sort of.”

The first years were a hustle of juggling his dance career with a mechanic job on the side “to put food on the table,” he said. He picked up any gig he could, including dancing “The Nutcracker” every holiday season until he “got sick of the tights.”

It’s now been four years that Harada’s been paying his bills with just dance. He’s gotten a big enough rep that he’s represented by three agencies, but still, gigs come and go and the number of students in lessons is unstable as each month brings a new class rotation.

With such instability, he understands why the guys he started dancing with all “joined the corporation,” he said with a shrug, but that for him, “it’s not just a hobby.”

Bringing it home
As the Front Range Rockers finally leave the gym a little after 11 p.m., they’re still talking about B-Boying – laughing about how Nguyen banged his head on the ground during a powermove, how dating within the crew was making things “awkward” and how hanging with the crew so much has pretty much destroyed their social life – or rather, has become the definition of their social life.

And as they say their good byes, they, like the rest of the CU population leaving restaurant bars at about the same time, head off to write research papers that will shape their post-CU careers. As for Harada, he’ll “pass out the moment I walk in the door,” getting his much-needed sleep for another day of popping and locking despite the odds and instabilities as a professional dancer.

Walking out into South Grant Street to a chilly night breeze, though, he stops to ponder: considering that the roots of hip hop are the ghettos of New York City, it’s an intriguing concept that 2,000 miles away in the shadows of the Rockies is a group of people from around the world and from different walks of life who, like the hip hoppers in the boroughs of the Big Apple, are brought together by the same concept of artistic expression through mind and body.

“You see, hip hop is not dead. Hip hop is what I do. I live it,” Harada said. “I play it by ear, day to day. I’m not trying to be tough; it’s just what I do.”

By Erika Sarmiento Usui
Asian Avenue magazine