Like Iggy Azalea in 2014, Rich Chigga (Chinese-Indonesian teenager Brian Imanuel) has earned himself a Forbes profile that charts his trajectory as hip hop’s promising and unlikely new star. Both share far-flung origins vis-à-vis American hip hop epicenters (Azalea was raised in Mullumbimby, Australia, while Imanuel was home-schooled in Jakarta, Indonesia) and non-African American ethnicities, but the optics of their performances differ in crucial ways.
Rich Chigga’s latest single “Glow Like Dat” demonstrates his understanding of rap and hip hop as a vehicle for expressing his personal feelings and worldview, tacitly avoiding any insensitive forays into the fraught history of African-American slavery and oppression. Instead of race-baiting lyrics like ‘I’m a runaway slave master’, which draws uncomfortable parallels between a painful history of economic exploitation and Azalea’s questionable profiteering from emulating a performative tradition borne out of that lineage of subjugation, Rich Chigga has drawn the line between his mastery of an aesthetic tradition and its extramusical context: "Memphis flow/But I'm from Jakarta, ho”. He has not made any claims of aesthetic domination (e.g. naming your album ‘The New Classic’), opting instead for an “ironically idiotic” self-presentation built on juxtaposing a menacing and thuggish vocal delivery with comical, ironic and self-effacing posturing.
On his latest song, his proficient rap flow serves up a catchy and laid-back ode to a distant lover: ‘I done seen you glow like that, I must say that I'm proud/ Thinkin' 'bout the times when you would go into my house (ayy)/ Had to let you go like that, I'd say it fucked me up (ayy)/ You live in my head without a doubt (ayy)’. The accompanying music video features him emulating the hypermasculine swagger one typically associates with rappers (hoodies, a gold necklace, cigars), but in an uncharacteristically whimsical setting (a field of sunflowers, a bed of vibrant flowers). There are unapologetic references to the sexual (‘Doin' things like your legs/ Just gon' stay open now they closed’) and a hint of the genre’s tendency towards misogynistic expressions (‘Had too much of these hoes’), but the song, as a whole, will likely register with most as being unproblematic.
Some African-American pop culture enthusiasts are understandably suspicious of the affinity that many Asian performers (Asian American and otherwise) have for black music – a concern that can be traced back to the 1990s, when a minority of Japanese subcultures began to embrace black music and style. The fear is that Asians, like many white performers before them, will appropriate black cool and black cultural capital to earn fame and fortune while disrespecting and ignoring the marginalized communities who depend so dearly on their music and style for a sense of identity, ownership, pride and a means of making a living. (One should note that this cross-cultural appreciation runs both ways; Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Kung Fu Kenny’ persona extends hip hop’s longstanding fascination with East-Asian martial arts films).
For now, Rich Chigga’s underdog status (he’s only 17, a foreigner from a country with little history and representation in American pop culture, without any white privilege to lean on) has attracted more supporters than haters. If he does gain enough clout, money, and power to shake-up the status quo, however, this will almost certainly change.
