Celebrating the history of Filipino Americans in hip-hop
Resurfacing my controversial Genius feature for AAPI month.
This story was originally published in Genius on May 22nd, 2024.
Filipinos have been shaping the game since the very beginning.
“We got a new thing out / Gonna make you shout / Got rhythm, got heat / Gonna move your feet,” Afro Filipino singer Joe Bataan rhymes on the soulful, gospel-infused 1979 disco tune “Rap-O Clap-O,” considered one of the first rap songs ever recorded. While the group 2 Live Crew, who formed in 1984, are often credited as giving rise to one of the first Asian Americans in hip-hop history—the late Fresh Kid Ice was of Chinese and Trinidadian descent—Bataan’s early single marks one of the first traces of the Asian community making an impact on the genre.
Bataan was perhaps an unlikely hip-hop pioneer. He grew up in a Latino neighborhood in East Harlem, and in the ’60s, he formed the band Joe Bataan and the Latin Swingers, which created a fusion of Latin boogaloo and African American doo-wop. In the early ’70s, Bataan coined the term “salsoul”—salsa plus soul—and co-founded the label Salsoul Records. Toward the end of that decade, he was working on 110th Street in Harlem when he stumbled upon a hip-hop party in the area. Bataan was so inspired by the new form of music that he approached the young rappers about making a record. When neither of the MCs turned up for the studio session, Bataan decided to record the song himself.
“I didn’t want nobody to see,” Bataan told Red Bull Music Academy in 2013. “Thought maybe I’m too old. I was a 39-year-old rapper. I was hiding in the toilet.” But Bataan powered through, and the result was “Rap-O Clap-O.” Not long after, Bataan signed the song away to RCA, and it got played in discos by the likes of Larry Levan, legendary DJ at the NYC hotspot Paradise Garage. It also sold millions of copies in Europe.
Hip-hop was born in New York City—nobody disputes this. But as Mark Villegas, author of Manifest Technique: Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture, points out, Filipino Americans were involved in the bubbling mobile DJ scene in the West Coast, and this was concurrent with the beginnings of hip-hop on the East Coast. As National Geographic reports, Filipino Americans were among the first to create mobile DJ crews in the ’60s and ’70s. By the ’80s, crews had begun to experiment with new technology. DJs were using faders to transition between dual turntables, and Filipinos embraced this technique, solidifying their place at the birth of turntablism.
“I would caution against the narrative of ‘Filipinos helped start hip-hop,’” Villegas tells Genius. “I like the word ‘innovate’ better.”
Los Angeles trailblazer DJ Icy Ice, a member of Beat Junkies, Southern California’s first turntablism band, remembers Filipinos being involved in the hip-hop scene since 1980. His older cousins were into popping, locking, and breakdancing.
“I was heavily influenced by the elders before me, and [they’re] a big reason I do what I do today,” he tells Genius.
DJ Icy Ice went on to become one of the first Filipino American DJs on mainstream radio, spinning for 92.3 The Beat and Power 106. He was also the resident and touring DJ for the hip-hop festival Rock The Bells.
“Filipino Americans have contributed heavily to the hip-hop culture for the past 40-plus years,” he says. “Filipinos excelled and pushed the art forms of DJing, dance, and art—and are just now breaking through and being respected as music recording artists.”
In 1989, DJ Q-Bert, Mix Master Mike, and DJ Apollo—who are all of Filipino descent—founded Shadow of the Prophet, a San Francisco-based turntablism group that would go on to become the influential crew Invisibl Skratch Piklz. The three won the DMC World DJ Championships in 1992 under the alias Rocksteady DJs, a year after DJ Qbert won the award solo. Competing as the Dream Team, Qbert and Mike also won as a duo the following year and were inducted into the DMC DJ Hall of Fame in 1998. Master Mike also went on to work with the Beastie Boys on four albums before joining Cypress Hill in 2018.
Despite these early contributions to the culture, it wasn’t always easy for Filipino Americans to find acceptance in the world of hip-hop.
“Even for me coming up in the scene, I used to have cats hating,” said Filipino American DJ and Beat Junkies co-creator DJ Rhettmatic in a video interview with Hard Knock TV. “‘What does this Asian guy think he’s doing?’ For my generation, you just have to show them proof. Once you show them you have proof, you show you have heart, you have skills, and you went through all the trenches, they respect you.”
Speaking with National Geographic, writer and Filipino American culture expert Elizabeth Pisares posed the question, “How do you create your own identity when other people don’t see it or refuse to recognize it?”
“We are hard-wired to express ourselves,” Pisares continued. “Filipino Americans are very good at taking cultural materials and reordering them to find their own identity. Turntablism is just one example of taking the condition of social invisibility and turning it to their advantage.”
Because of its history of American colonization, the Philippines cultivated Asia’s foremost hip-hop scene in the early ’80s. African American, Latino, and Filipino American soldiers brought the music and culture to the towns surrounding army bases, resulting in some of its earliest exposure. At the same time, breakdancing—another one of hip-hop’s pillars—also began to spread across the Philippines. Whooze Co. International, a local crew, was mostly made up of members from Clark Air Base in Angeles City.
The U.S. colonization of the Philippines plays a large role in why hip-hop resonates with Filipino Americans, Villegas hypothesizes in Manifest Technique. “Filipinos’ modern racialization is inexorably linked to an entangled, serialized history of Western colonization, wherein people in the Philippines have been racialized for four centuries as childlike, uncivilized, and inferior,” he says.
“During the same centuries that the Philippines was colonized by the Spanish and Americans, Black people were tormented under white supremacist colonialism, slavery, and apartheid,” Villegas adds.
Because of this, both groups of people have experienced some form of otherness and found home in this counterculture of expression. However, it’s important to note the change in Filipino American position. They’ve long been considered a “model minority” in the U.S. and have achieved an above-average socioeconomic status relative to both native-born populations and other immigrant groups, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
But that doesn’t change the impact of Filipino Americans on hip-hop culture, Villegas insists. “Filipino American contributors formed an important expansive, organic, and bottom-up cultural infrastructure that helped produce the world’s most renowned Filipino American talent,” he writes in his book.
In 2019, Filipino American dancer Bailey Munoz became the first-ever b-boy to win the popular dance competition So You Think You Can Dance. “I’m just so grateful that I get to represent hip hop, b-boying, Filipinos, Bay Area, Vegas, my family—just all of it,” Munoz told AsAmNews at the time of his victory.
Today, the Filipino American imprint can be found all over hip-hop. Rappers like apl.de.ap of the Black Eyed Peas paved the way for newcomers such as Shady Records signee Ez Mil and Oakland rhymer Guapdad 4000. Some of the most innovative producers in hip-hop are also Filipino—The Neptunes co-founder Chad Hugo, Lunice (Rockie Fresh, Azealia Banks), !llmind (J. Cole, Logic, Eminem), and Mndsgn (Doja Cat, Kali Uchis) are known for idiosyncratic styles of beatmaking that push the boundaries of what hip-hop can sound like.
“Hip-hop culture operates as a local and popular site for Filipino Americans to investigate their racial position in history and the world,” Villegas writes in his book, “expanding the opportunities for practitioners to author their own representation.”
Thanks for this. Had no idea about Illmind’s heritage!