Crib Notes

The second annual BET Hip-Hop Awards festivities haven’t even started yet, and I’m already so over it. Perhaps that sounds a bit blase coming from the music editor. But like any major award show, the weekend surrounding the BET Hip-Hop Awards (hosted in Atlanta) has little to do with music. The corporate-sponsored events; the celebrities, wanksters and wannabes in attendance; the goo-gobs of groupie action — it all adds up to more of a headache than it’s worth.

Blame it on the old man in me, but sometimes it’s a bit disheartening to see how “Hollywood” hip-hop has become. Bah humbug.

So imagine my surprise/relief upon hearing about the Asian Hip-Hop Summit, scheduled to coincide with the weekend’s celebfest. The summit had been going on for five years in L.A. before breaking out in ‘07 to San Francisco, Seattle, NY and now Atlanta. The ATL summit includes two shows — one on Saturday at Dem Saigon Cafe & Bar ($5. 8 p.m. Oct. 13. 4300 Buford Highway), and a second on Tuesday at Lenny’s ($5. 8 p.m. Oct. 16. 486 Decatur St.).

There’s a long lineup of acts from Atlanta and elsewhere on the bill, including Jackie Chain (a Southern-styled rapper with a pimplike persona), Bruce Leroy (a neo-soul band fronted by an Asian rapper), R&B songstress Joy Tolentino and the self-produced Kato (pictured in the above photo from his MySpace page).

As the names might suggest, these are Asian-American acts — which means most of them rap/sing in English without even the hint of an accent. I had a few other questions MySpace couldn’t answer so I hit up the organizer, Kublai Khan, myself via e-mail.

Mainly, I was curious about how deep the Asian-American hip-hop scene is in Atlanta. I also wanted to know if Khan had attempted to reach out to BET since both events are jumping off at the same time.

You can read his full response below the jump.

I did not know about the BET Hip-Hop Awards, that’s a coincidence. Another coincidence is that the only other big hip hop concert on Sat Oct 13 is DJ Krush at the Unicorn, who is Japanese. So there’s two big Asian hip hop concerts on the same night in Atlanta, GA–very strange indeed.

We had 5 Summits in Los Angeles, then this summer, we branched out first to San Francisco, then from there to New York, then Seattle & Vancouver, and now Atlanta. In one summer, we covered the whole West Coast, did the city where hip hop was born, and now have brought the Asiatic arts movement to the Deep South. The growth of the Asian Hip Hop Summit this year was totally organic. It grew out of a need, felt by all Asiatic people all over North America, for culture and identity and community, something to call our own. The response by the Asian community to Asian Hip Hop Summit outside of L.A. has been surprisingly positive. Asian shows for an Asian audience are a common reality in L.A. now, largely due to Asian Hip Hop Summit, but in other parts of the US, the idea of doing an Asian show is a revelation.

We decided to come to Atlanta because I had to go back to the Deep South for my mother’s birthday. So I figured why not throw a show while I’m out here. I grew up in Auburn, AL, about 2 hours away from ATL. I moved to L.A. to go to school, and have been there ever since. When I was growing up, there was a bunch of other Asians around, but we never had any role models or sense of an Asian culture in the South. Now, with the Asian population of the South larger than the Asian population of the Midwest, there are so many Asians that a Deep South Asian arts movement is a very viable possibility now, and obviously ATL would have to be the capital of this movement. So it’s like a homecoming for me to come back to the South and help build up a movement for my people.

At the same time, the Asian Hip Hop Summit is about bringing Asiatic music to all people, showing that we can make good music too, that we have something interesting to say. There are a lot of Asian artists in Atlanta, but most don’t know each other exists. After AHHS ATL drops this weekend, there will be more of a defined pan-Asian scene, perhaps the first ever to exist in the history of the Deep South. Surprisingly, there are a ton of good Asian musicians in the Deep South, not just ATL, but also surrounding Deep South states.

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Tags: Asian-Hip-Hop-Summit, BET-Hip-Hop-Awards, Bruce-Leroy, Jackie-Chain, Joy-Tolentino, Kato.