Asian American Music and the Formation of Identity

The film Yellow Rose follows the story of a young Filipina undocumented immigrant named Rose, who in her time in the United States, falls in love with country-western music and dreams of becoming a famous country star. This fascination with country music, a genre not typically associated with those of Filipino birth, is incredibly interesting as it raises questions about how the cultural remnant of historic imperialism affects the modern psyche of those alive today, as well as how music among other tenants are used to form both individual and group identities. Scientists have found that there is a strong association between the sort of music one listens to and the cultural or national group with which they identify¹. Music is a powerful tool which can help to unite a people which, especially given the diverse nature of the Asian American political body, is incredibly important. In this exhibit, I would like to examine how a history of colonialism has permanently affected Filipino culture and how the erasure of “savage Filipino culture” by the Americans and Spanish has created a new culture in the place of the preexisting one. More importantly though, I’d like to show how Filipinos, and how Asian Americans in general have used cultural elements which were once domineering and oppressive, and appropriated them to form their own cultural identities, much like how Rose uses country-western music to build her identity in the film. Through the exhibits presented, I hope that you can understand how the history of settler colonialism, especially in the Philippines, has been used by the indigenous inhabitants, as well as members of the diaspora, to form empowering cultural anchor points of a political body in dire need of them.

  1. LOUD AND PROUD By OGTG

The first object I have for your consideration is a rap song made by Filipino artist OGTG called LOUD AND PROUD. This is a song written in Tagalog which is all about how the artist is extremely proud of his Filipino heritage and how he lives with that pride throughout all aspects of his life. In a sense, in building this song, he is building his own ethnic identity for the public to see. However, much like Rose’s use of non-traditional music to express herself and her emotional state, OGTG uses rap music, a genre typically associated with African Americans. Or This is actually not an uncommon form of rap music, scholars have documented for decades cases of Asian Americans at poetry slams and community events using rap to express their political outlook², similar to how African American artists have used the genre for decades. In this case, a Filipino artist is using a piece of distinctly American culture, though distinctly African American, and adapted it to form their own new identities. This is not the only sort of genre in which Asian Americans in general have found themselves expressing their ideas. Numerous Asian American sociologists have examined the Asian American presence in everything from ultra-modern composition³ to classical music⁴, and have shown specifically how classical music has been used as a form of political resistance, especially during WWII to oppose Japanese imperialism. Across the last several decades, music which has been considered not traditionally Asian has had a massive role to play in Asian and Asian American political resistance and identity formation, much like Rose in the film. This is as a result, largely, of a tragic history of cultural and hegemonic imperialism, over the Philippines specifically, by the United States and Spain. As a direct result of cultural imposition, which will be explored further in the next exhibit, the United States sought to impose its culture on the Filipinos. Using traditionally American genres like rap in order to express one’s unique Asian American identity is just another way in which Asian Americans can empower themselves by using imperial culture to express and identify themselves.

This is a music video for the rap artist OGTG which describes his love and pride in the fact that he is Filipino and described how he shares this love with his Filipino American brethren⁹.

This is an American propaganda image from 1899 depicting pre-colonization Filipinos as savages, warmongering, primitive peoples¹⁰.

2. Anti-Filipino American Propaganda

The second object I have is a piece of old newspaper propaganda depicting the American view of Filipinos before and after American colonization. To understand the formation of the Filipino identity both in the Philippines and in the diaspora, it is crucial that we understand modern Filipino history through the lens of settler colonialism. When America gained control over the Philippines from Spain in the wake of the Spanish American War, it was seen as a backwater place which needed to be civilized, as the propaganda demonstrates. The abolishment of this foreign culture was critical to America’s goal of settler colonialism, a goal and structure which continues to this day⁵. Certainly its effects do, the paternal nature with which the United States treats nations especially in Southeast Asia has actually made the region less safe and has only served to heighten military aggression by China and the like⁶. Overall, I share this piece of old propaganda because it is important to emphasize how much the Philippines’s colonial masters attempted to “civilize” the islanders and erase their indigenous culture. Filipino culture has for the last few centuries, been forced to exist in opposition to settler cultures and so in doing so, has been forced to adapt aspects of those cultures, including their musical and entertainment traditions in order to identify themselves, a concept which will be explored even further in the rest of the project.

3. Assignment Asia: Cowboys in The Philippines

The third exhibit I have is a video produced by Chinese television network CGTN, which is an informational piece about one of the biggest rodeos in the Philippines. The Philippines, as the piece describes, actually has one of the largest rodeo traditions of all of the nations of the world, a practice which they borrowed largely from the United States and Spain. Specifically, rodeos began as a tradition in the Great Plains of the United States and Mexico, where it was a form of entertainment practices by vaqueros and cowboys and a place where they could demonstrate feats of skill. However, as a result of imperial domination over the islands, pieces of American culture like this have made a transition over the Pacific Ocean. However, much like the country-western music in the film and the rap music which I have previously discussed, Filipinos have taken this cultural practice and adapted it to be specifically Filipino. As I said previously, Filipinos today have one of the strongest rodeo cultures anywhere in the entire world, so much so that residents of the Great Plains in the United States or Mexico would probably find themselves right at home at one of these cultural events⁷. Event like the rodeo, pieces of American and Mexican culture which were once nonconsensually thrust upon the Filipinos, has been adapted into a time-honored tradition in the vein of many pieces of culture, including music, which have been adapted from those who once imperially dominated the nation and people.

This is a human interest piece by the Chinese news station CGTN which demonstrates the rodeo culture of The Philippines¹¹.

This is an image from the article which is the subject of this exhibit, demonstrating a Filipino man playing piano¹².

4. Are We Filipinos Because We Love Music, or Do We Love Music Because We Are Filipinos?

The fourth exhibit I have is from Paul de Guzman, a native Filipino, entitled which asked whether the Filipino people love music because they are Filipino or whether they are Filipino because they love music. He asks this question because it is a well-known fact that the tradition of music and music making are extremely important in Filipino culture. De Guzman describes how Filipino singers and musicians are often sent abroad for international competitions in which they are often showered with praise, acclaim, and prizes. He says that it often feels that being a musician or being involved in the creation of music as an art form feels inherently inseparable from being Filipino. He then goes on to describe how Filipinos have adapted Spanish and American influences in order to use their unique musical motifs to suit Filipino cultural music. This is exactly what I have described in the first and third exhibits, as a result of Spanish and American imperial domination over the nation of the Philippines, there has considerable cultural crossover between the nations which has permanently affected Filipino culture. As the author of this piece says, this sort of culture has been adopted by Filipinos to such an extent that it feels worthwhile to ask if this aspect of Filipino culture is necessary to engage with in order to be considered truly Filipino. I would argue that this is a very similar process to that which the Filipino diaspora in the United States understands and has to engage with on a daily basis. They adopt aspects of “American” culture into their daily lives and it interacts with their Filipino culture in ways entirely unique to their cultural and ethnic group. This concept is at the root of intersectionality in the United States, that diaspora groups experience race differently in the United States, partially due to their entirely unique cultural background.

This is an image of Charice, a Filipina-American pop singer, showing the intersection of American and Filipino cultures¹².

5. Between the Notes: Finding Asian America in Popular Music

The final exhibit that I have for you involves an academic paper written by Oliver Wang about Asian Americans in popular music in the United States¹³. However, I am less interested in the specific analysis of popular music as I am about some of his point about Asian American group cohesion and the nature of coalition building in Asian America. He explains in the introduction to the paper that in order to form a political body and interest group to forward the interests of Asian American people in the United States, there must first be created a sense of solidarity between all of these groups, which is difficult, given the fact that most Asian Americans in general actually have very little in common aside from their common continent of origin and their common residence in the United States. Wang argues that solidarity in large coalitions like this must take a template from other coalitions like the Black community and other foreign national interest groups. First and foremost, there must be common cultural anchor points, so that the people of the coalition can better relate to one another and begin to see themselves as one large cohesive group. Wang sees one of these cultural anchor points as being music and the creation of all genres of music, in the case of his paper, he speaks about Asian American contributions to American popular music, though the concept appears and is valuable across genres. I feel that it is important to close with this paper because it shows how all of the tenants of what is today Filipino American culture and the way in which that culture has been built can be applied in large part to the Asian American community in general. Given that the United States has been the undisputed hegemon of the entire world for decades, aspects of its culture have seeped into every other one on Earth. All across the world, people of all different colors and creeds watch American movies and listen to American music. It is inherently ingrained in many parts of a world culture which is is becoming increasingly more homogenized as a result. Filipino Americans, like Asian Americans in general, have also been subject to these cultural shifts. In a sense, Asian Americans as they are today exist in two forms, not entirely “Asian” and not entirely “American”. Rather, it is their unique culture which takes aspects of the two and combines them in order to form and entirely new culture group and through that shared culture, form a political body of shared solidarity which can work for the liberation not only of Asian Americans in the diaspora, but also to fight the institution of colonialism for Asians across the entire world. The film Yellow Rose gives us a small insight into just one person, one Asian American girl who uses aspects of her Filipina culture in order to form the subject matter of her songs but also someone who uses a culture which was thrust upon her from birth without her consent in order to express herself and build her own identity as an Asian American. In performing this action, Rose also contributed to the collective consciousness of what it means to be an Asian American and where and how various Asian and American cultures intersect in order to build cohesive cultural identities for the people of Asian descent living in the United States⁸.

Notes

  1. Boer, D., Fischer, R., González Atilano, M.L., de Garay Hernández, J., Moreno García, L.I.,  Mendoza, S., Gouveia, V.V., Lam, J. and Lo, E. 2013. “Music and national identity.” J     Appl Soc Psychol 43: 2360-2376. https://doi- org.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/10.1111/jasp.12185

  2. Castro, C.-A. 2007. “Voices in the Minority: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Asian American in Popular Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 19: 221-238. https://doi-org.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2007.00124.x

  3. Rao, Nancy Yunwha. 2009. "THE COLOR OF MUSIC HERITAGE: Chinese America in American Ultra-Modern Music*." Journal of Asian American Studies 12 (1): 83-119,134. http://proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/color-music-heritage-chinese-america-american/docview/216876078/se-2.

  4. Wang, Grace. 2009. “Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture: ‘Music Moms’ and the Performance of Asian and Asian American Identities.” American Quarterly 61, no. 4 :    881–903. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27735029.

  5. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 52–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214560440.

  6. Ahn, Christine, Terry K. Park, Kathleen Richards, and The Nation. “Anti-Asian Violence in America Is Rooted in US Empire,” March 19, 2021. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/anti-asian-violence-empire/.

  7. There Are COWBOYS in the PHILIPPINES! Insanely Good Filipino-American BBQ, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KInHnMZJ8_A.

  8.  Wang, Oliver. 2001. “Between the Notes: Finding Asian America in Popular Music.” American     Music 19, no. 4 : 439–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/3052420.

  9. OGTG 4106, dir. 2022. OGTG - LOUD & PROUD Feat. Mr.Puyo X Pinoy Re-al Gang (Official Music Video) Prod. by Abel Beats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxBXlzKlmXo.

  10. “The Filipino Before and After Expansion (Old School American Propaganda).” 2017. Reddit Post. R/Asianamerican. www.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/6dvfqc/the_filipino_before_and_after_expansion_old/.

  11. CGTN, dir. 2017. Assignment Asia: Cowboys in the Philippines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMJVCGdpH18.

  12. Guzman, Paul de. n.d. “Are We Filipinos Because We Love Music, or Do We Love Music Because We Are Filipinos?” Tatler Asia. Accessed November 30, 2022. https://www.tatlerasia.com/culture/arts/historical-notes-on-why-filipinos-love-music.

  13. “YWRF23SSETE2MLVJLWJTPKRCCM.Jpg (1200×950).” Accessed December 17, 2022. https://www.nydailynews.com/resizer/Lkw3kTdeQz4K58DnM1PcYsZESmo=/1200x0/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/YWRF23SSETE2MLVJLWJTPKRCCM.jpg.

  14. “Desert-Rose.Jpg (1600×1200).” Accessed December 17, 2022. https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/desert-rose.jpg.