A New York Times article published a decade and a half ago, “Trying to Crack the Hot 100,” raised an issue I had long been pondering. Why is it that in the United States, the center of the popular music universe, there are no Asian-American pop stars? Even the article itself seemed to come out of the blue. One wonders how the author, Mireya Navarro, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, latched onto the topic. You could ask me the same thing, not being Asian myself, though I do have an abiding interest in Asian culture, having lived in China for three decades (plus a few years in Japan) and in music as well. On the surface, we seem to be dealing with a contradiction in terms. Asian-American pop music? It doesn’t even qualify as a pigeonhole. There is only 1) black music, which encompasses pop music (“Pop music is black music; that’s just what it is,” as a Rolling Stone article aptly puts it), 2) Nashville, 3) ethnic, that is, Latin American music, and 4) the confused catchall category of New Age/world music.

Though music by Asians abroad attracts occasional attention with exotic imports such as K-pop, music by Asian Americans, on first impression anyway, is simply not on the map. The 2023 STAATUS Index (Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the U.S.) reports that a quarter of Americans were unable to name a famous Asian — in the U.S. or anywhere. Those who were able to, mentioned Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Kamala Harris, and Lucy Liu, in that order. One question in the survey asked respondents, “In TV or the movies, Asian American women and men are often portrayed in the following types of character roles?” The leading answers regarding men were Kung Fu (28%) and gangs (25%); and regarding women, “Don’t know” (18%) and sex worker (15%). Needless to say, no question was included on Asian pop stars, as the authors of the survey, who are themselves Asian Americans, knew it would draw a blank, if the question had occurred to them in the first place.

Now, surely it can’t be the case that Asian Americans are only good at math, as they are unfortunately often stereotyped to be, and constitutionally incapable of music. “Where is the Asian-American Justin Timberlake, Prince or Christina Aguilera?” Navarro asked. Her research turned up a “parallel universe” of musicians struggling to break out into wider recognition. Pointing to such up-and-coming singers (at the time) as Harlem Lee, Paul Kim, and Natalise, she predicted that “so much is percolating in the underground that more Asian-American talent is bound to start bubbling up soon,” or as Natalise herself declared, “I feel that we’re on the brink of something huge and it’s just a matter of time and effort.” In Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race Through Musical Performance (Duke UP, 2015), Grace Wang spotlighted a few more pioneers, David Choi and Jennifer Chung, both of whom gained traction on YouTube in the early 2010s, along with American-born Leehom Wang, who learned to sing in Mandarin and found success in Taiwan and Mainland China.

The predictions were mostly on the mark and today the crop of Asian-American musical talent is becoming a force to contend with. But they are not the same crop, and it’s time for a reassessment. Navarro, writing in 2007, already overlooked three singer-songwriters who had come out with their first albums several years prior to that — Vienna Teng, Rachael Yamagata, and Susie Suh. Connie Lim (now known as Milck), Mitski, and Hayley Kiyoko followed a decade later. All are California natives, where Asian Americans are most concentrated, except Yamagata who is from Virginia and Mitski who is originally from Japan. In addition to these six and as an instructive foil to them, we will look at two more notables, the British Asian singer Phildel and the Mainland Chinese singer Chen Li. All eight are female musical artists of high caliber (I can’t find any male counterparts to match them). They write all of their own songs, and they all have ravishing voices. Whereas Kiyoko fits squarely in dance-driven pop and Mitski tends toward alt-rock, the others are grounded in guitar or piano-based folk music, yet they are all stylistically distinct. Listeners will have their favorites, but I can affirm they all captivate me equally; my favorite is whoever I happen to be listening to at the moment. To present these artists as impartially as possible, I eschew any form of ranking but introduce them in chronological order by year of their debut album.

VIENNA TENG

Waking Hour (2002)
Warm Strangers (2004)
Dreaming Through the Noise (2006)
Inland Territory (2009)
The Moment Always Vanishing (Live) (2009)
Aims (2013)
The Fourth Messenger (2015)

It’s always fruitful to start with names. The way in which an Asian-American artist reveals her ethnicity (or not) in her name tells us something about her and the image she wishes to present. Born to Taiwanese parents in Saratoga, California in 1978, Cynthia Yih Shih studied classical piano from a young age. When she turned to songwriting while a computer science major at Stanford University, she adopted the stage name Vienna Teng, combining the name of the city synonymous with classical music and the namesake of Taiwanese pop songstress Teresa Teng, who dominated the Sinosphere in the 1970-80s. Shih did not, it seems, learn much Chinese while growing up; the traditional folksong “Green Island Serenade” (from her second album), sung in Mandarin, is her sole nod to her ethnic heritage. More significant than the associations of her stage name, on the other hand, is the dual or split personality Teng maintains between her musical and her professional personas. She has described her social and environmental activism as of overriding importance and music as no more than a part-time endeavor. Despite that, it is only through her music she has been able to garner the attention and influence needed to effectively promote her politics.

A glamorous woman with sparkling narrow-set eyes on a handsome face, Teng is unapologetically woke and politically correct with a vengeance (what pop star today can afford not to be who doesn’t want to be eviscerated on social media?). But not in a petty way. This is a woman who chose to live in Detroit after years in the Bay Area and New York City because she would rather start up a local recycling plant or (let us guess) an eco-friendly craft brewery that collects its own rainwater than hang out with the same old hip in the music world: the cover of her album Aims shows a map of metropolitan Detroit with the neighborhoods undergoing redevelopment colored in. Whatever her stance on her identity as an Asian American, I suspect she would regard it as irrelevant next to the existential emergency of global warming.

It’s from this perspective that we can get a handle on her searching and restless body of music. She herself characterizes it as “chamber folk,” “indie pop,” or “theatrical chamber pop.” This indeterminacy points to a question we will be confronting more than once here, namely what is Asian-American popular music? Does it have a signature sound? Can it claim anything American of its own? Or everything? In divining her own roots in folk music, Teng has tried her hand at a variety of styles, even taking up the fiddle in “Grandmother Song.” Go back further than that and you’re in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, whose descendants populated Appalachia. Indeed, after repeated listenings to Teng’s albums, apart from her penchant for empowerment anthems, I find a number of her songs (e.g. “Between,” “Drought,” “Landsailor”) to have a vaguely Celtic flavor, whether intentional on her part or not.

Teng has a gift for melody in powerful songs like “Gravity,” “Mission Street,” and “No Gringo.” As satisfying as her first four albums are, however, they have a meandering grab-bag feel. A change of pace is evident in her fifth studio album and masterpiece Aims, winner of four simultaneous awards in the 13th annual Independent Music Awards, whose songs flow and cohere with the feel of a concept album; “In the 99,” “Copenhagen (Let Me Go),” and “Flyweight Love” fuse effortless, intricate counterpoint with bouncy calypso-like rhythms. That album was followed by another turn in The Fourth Messenger, a musical about a modern-day female Buddha, written in collaboration with the dramatist Tanya Shaffer. Here Teng falters. Roger Waters, a master of rock opera, tried his hand at a classical opera, Ça Ira, which ended up sounding like a musical, and not a very good one. At least Teng’s musical sounds like a musical, though a slow-motion one, appropriate for Buddhists. Musicals too must rock; they must be fast-paced and dramatic. Teng should have aimed for a rock opera, something along the lines of a Buddha Superstar.

Thanks to YouTube, the greatest invention since the wheel, we can sample on screen practically everything that has ever been captured on the moving camera. Professional music videos are expensive and generally beyond the budget of indie musicians unless they have money thrown their way or the know-how to produce videos themselves. To film the opening track of Aims, “Level Up,” which depicts a dancer doing flips with a prosthetic limb, Teng sought $20,000 from her fans on Kickstarter and wound up with $80,000. This paid for a tour and a second polished video for her song “Gravity,” featuring her on the piano on a windswept landscape with an old windmill and a wandering male lover dressed in colonial-era attire. Other videos are of live performances and her rapport with audiences serves her well, e.g. “Flyweight Love,” the a cappella “The Hymn of Acxiom,” the concert Live in Berkeley, CA (2019), and her absolute gem of a song, “The Atheist Christmas Carol” (from Warm Strangers) which we have gotten in the habit of sharing on social media on Christmas day.

RACHAEL YAMAGATA

EP (EP) (2003)
Happenstance (2004)
Elephants…Teeth Sinking into Heart (2008)
Chesapeake (2011)
Heavyweight (EP) (2012)
Tightrope Walker (2016)
Happenstance (Acoustic) (2016)
Porch Songs (EP) (2018)

Born to a Japanese-American father and a mixed Italian-German mother, Rachael Yamagata has kept her father’s name without fanfare. Everything about her known personality and music is consistent with this evident and perhaps serene indifference to her Asian-American heritage. She feels under no obligation to alter her name or adopt a stage name. The only visible evidence of her ethnic identity is the epicanthic folds on her seductive Charlotte Rampling eyes. You’ll notice I don’t include headshots of my subjects. This is partly due to the hassle of copyright permissions but also to the arbitrariness of photographs, their meanness even with the best intentions, their “semblance to rape” as Susan Sontag puts it in On Photography: if to “photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves,” then to appropriate someone’s photograph is to rape the raped. Few of us are satisfied with any of our own photos in public circulation, and I don’t want to be responsible for selecting on behalf of another. It’s enough to describe these musicians’ appearance verbally.

In 2001 Yamagata left the Chicago rock band Bumpus to pursue a fiercely independent solo career, operating out of a home studio in rural New York. Only an indie could have come up with an album title like Elephants…Teeth Sinking into Heart. Of all the epithets employed to classify Yamagata — “adult alternative,” “melodic adult alternative pop,” “transparent ballads and punchy alternative pop” (which could all equally apply to Vienna Teng), only “bluesy” puts a finger on it, not the blues per se but a bluesy cabaret folk, or as one critic describes her, “a torchy lounge chanteuse in the pre-rock’n’roll ’50s or a bluesy soul shouter in the late ’60s.” Another describes her as “Tom Waits meets Roberta Flack, Nick Cave hanging with Rufus Wainwright.” Yamagata is a collaborator, versatile enough to have performed with Bette Midler, Sheryl Crow (both at the White House), Steve Earle, Allen Toussaint, Toots and the Maytals, Ryan Adams, Ray LaMontagne, Conor Oberst, Jason Mraz, Ray Lamontagne, Rhett Miller, Mandy Moore, and the Chinese mainlander Guo Ding (Yamagata is the only musician I am aware of under review here, apart from Chen Li of course, to do tours in the PRC, in 2019 and 2023). She has worked with so many musical artists that the question arises as to why she isn’t better known. Her stated reluctance to sign up with any of the major labels is one reason. I wonder if racism is another, if not outright anti-Asian bigotry, then the more benign “aversive” racism, the kind you would never admit to but engage in nonetheless through befuddled avoidance, as when “Rachael Yamagata” is too much of a mouthful to figure out.

The bluesy “These Girls” from her first album, a six-track EP entitled simply EP, points to what’s to come. Her next album, Happenstance, is a satisfying enough assemblage (reworked twelve years later into an acoustic version), but it’s not until Elephants that Yamagata takes wing. The album starts off slowly with hushed tentativeness, so slowly I worried on first hearing it would never get off the ground. Yet the songs build with mounting tension and jagged outbursts of release. The nine-minute-long “Sunday Afternoon” demonstrates her skill at drawing out a song like taffy with marvelous twists and unexpected modulations without ever slackening. I didn’t want to listen to anything else for a week, though there is a kitchen-sink quality to the lengthy album at 72 minutes, and the four rockers she tacks on near the end don’t quite jive with the preceding. Her follow-up Chesapeake is more energetic and coheres better, but it’s her latest studio album, Tightrope Walker, that vies with Elephants as her best. As the title itself suggests, she here solves the problem of balance with slow, charged ballads alternating seamlessly with harder material. The strange angular percussion on “Nobody” and “EZ Target” conjures up David Bowie, while the latter song’s guitar riffs call to mind George Harrison. The more I listen to Yamagata, the more I hear echoes of everyone in her music, filtered through an active imagination rather than slavish imitation.

Roughhewn, impressionistic videos of “Sunday Afternoon” and “Starlight” depict to charming effect a melancholy Yamagata ambling through her upstate New York woods and rocking with an amusement park backdrop respectively. More recent, polished videos accompanied the release of Tightrope Walker, including “Let Me Be Your Girl” and “Nobody,” both showcasing female ballet dancers, in the latter instance (co-directed by Yamagata) piling over each other slumber-party style, while “Over” again sees Yamagata scampering about her beloved forest. Busy camerawork can distract from music-making and sometimes we just want to see a performer close up. We have her both on acoustic guitar live in “Be Be Your Love” and on keyboard in her intimate 2016 studio session On Audiotree Live from Chicago.

SUSIE SUH

Susie Suh (2005)
The Bakman Tapes (2011)
Everywhere (EP) (2015)
Evening Prayer (EP) (2019)
Invisible Love (2021)

In a 2005 NPR interview shortly after the release of her debut album on Sony/Epic Records, Susie Suh relates the nugget that while demoing songs for Don Ienner, then president of Sony Music, she borrowed a guitar displayed in his office that Bob Dylan had given him, played it, and nabbed the recording contract. Now, Suh doesn’t sound like Dylan, any more than Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell do. Nor does Suh sound like Mitchell, one of her stated influences. The point is not to imitate an idol’s style but only their spirit, much as Dylan considered himself to be Woodie Guthrie’s “greatest disciple.” Suh herself succeeds in making a Dylan song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” entirely her own, which she recently performed live on video. It’s as good an introduction as any to her inimitable voice, unsentimentally and effortlessly at once tragic and soothing, with an emo edge but none the worse for that. It can best be described as the sensation of morphine kicking in after undergoing some awful physical or mental trauma.

Any folk singer worth her salt knows how to separate the guitar from the voice. The guitar should never merely accompany the voice but be its own motor, driving the song and pulling the singer along: you are conscious of listening to separate entities as the singer keeps pace with the rolling guitar. Suh’s guitar propels you along right from the album’s opening track, “Won’t You Come Again.” In “Seasons Change,” a service employee is lost in loneliness in a shopping mall parking lot; the words are sharp and telling, but with copyright snipers perched everywhere I’ll refrain from reproducing them. “Petrified To Be God-like” has the feel of a dirge, though an irresistible one, brutal confessional lyrics and all.

After a mysterious six-year hiatus from recording, Suh released a follow-up album under her own label, Collective Records. The Bakman Tapes begins gorgeously with “Feather In the Wind.” The touching “I Do” chalked up 51 million streams on Spotify. That morphine voice of hers in “Here With Me” on the EP Everywhere also garnered over 50 million Spotify streams. When Suh doesn’t know what to sing about she tends to do what most songwriters do and sings about love; the word clogs up a few too many of her songs on The Bakman Tapes and her latest album, Invisible Love. On the latter, her most experimental and inconsistent album, sugar highs such as the feel-good New Age pop of the title track, “Invisible Love,” alternate with more satisfying (or I should say narcotizing) efforts — the ethereal “Over You” and “Blood Moon” and the spare “Jophiel,” on which Suh is accompanied by ghostly vocals and the gentle patter of a lumen.

Born in LA to Korean parents, Suh has kept her euphonic name and identifies as Korean American. That she features herself on all three of her full-length album covers, if pensively so, suggests she is proud of both her ethnicity and her appearance. She has an attractive face. I would call it prototypically Korean, except that it has become unfashionable to identify ethnicity in the face, close as it is even with benign intentions to racial profiling and stereotyping. It would likewise be objectionable to describe her face in the most general terms as Pan-Asian. Indeed it is objectionable these days to employ not only the discredited word “race” (though not the word “racist”; we are free to accuse anyone we like of being racist) but any word, including “ethnicity,” for the purpose of categorizing people by their skin color or other physical features — except when choosing to categorize oneself. Susie Suh is Korean-American, therefore, not because that’s how she happens to look but because that’s how she identifies herself; she could have chosen to identify herself simply as American.

You might wonder why any of this matters when it’s only the music that’s important. But consider for a moment, if you had not known anything about Susie Suh before reading this post and happened to encounter one of her album covers, you might have assumed her to be a foreign pop singer. This pegging of Asian-American artists as “perpetual foreigners” renders them, according to Whitney Wei, “nearly invisible in white-dominated Western markets”; as a result, “major record labels often don’t take chances on such talent for this very reason.” And even as “a majority of music listeners discover new sounds via online streaming playlists on Spotify,…algorithmically-generated recommendations notoriously skew towards white artists” (We Need to Address Anti-Asian Racism in the Music Industry). With over 125 million Spotify streams to her credit, Susie Suh would seem to prove this wrong. At the same time, it’s fair to speculate on how much greater a presence she and other Asian-American artists might achieve if their names and faces aligned more readily with audience expectations. Put another way, not appearing to be fully “American” forms a limit beyond which greater stardom remains out of reach.

In her free-flowing gowns, Suh has recently cultivated a kind of earth-mother persona, the “divine feminine” as she calls it, in a series of increasingly elaborate music videos. “Winter” features her live on guitar, and “Best Friend” and “Over You” accompanied on keyboard. On “Here With Me (Two Worlds)” only her lips are visible, sensuously flitting across the screen. On “Blood Moon,” she poses atop a lava-encrusted caldera in Iceland, while on “Invisible Love” she performs with dancers, dons a series of goddess masks, and sings in a cave, her naked body politely adorned with blue butterflies.

CONNIE LIM/MILCK

As Connie Lim:
Shifting (EP) (2007)
The Hunted (EP) (2010)
A Better Part of Me (EP) (2013)
As Milck:
This Is Not the End (EP) (2018)
Into Gold (EP) (2020)

If Connie Lim had continued in the same vein as on her initial albums, she would have blossomed into a songwriter worthy of note. Nothing is without interest. The first track on The Hunted, “Sugar,” features a solo section of Arabic melismas on what sounds like a mizmar or zurna, reminiscent of the melismas (by Lebanese singer Fairouz) that Madonna dubbed into “Erotica.” Lim’s fondness for melodic embellishment follows on the next track, “Now,” with her lovely vocal turns. “The Hunted” protests Uganda’s 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The DJ Alexandre Remix of “Sugar” converts the song into thumping techno; and so on. A video of her 2012 song “LA City” exemplifies her early period.

Her career then seems to have stalled in the mid-2000-teens and, searching for a new direction, she delved into her traumatic childhood past, having been a victim of sexual abuse. There she found more meaningful material and her voice as well, literally so, a gravelly yet honey-rich timbre which deepened as she approached thirty and seems to have dropped an octave. From this point on, instead of her usual mix of sweet ballads, dance numbers, and the odd empowerment anthem, she began to carve out anthems almost exclusively (stylistically she terms her present style “country pop” or “soulful electronic”), beginning in 2015 with “I Can’t Keep Quiet,” i.e. in the face of misogyny and sexual abuse. At the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC, she gathered around her everyone wearing a knitted pink “pussyhat” (purportedly signifying both the color of the labia and Donald Trump’s “grab them by the pussy”) and sang “Quiet” with them a cappella, a video of which went viral and launched Milck, as she now rebranded herself, into the wider public.

Born in LA to Hong Kong immigrant parents, Connie K. Lim’s mid-career makeover reveals an instructive ambivalence in regard to her Chinese ethnicity. Her name is overtly Asian; both Cantonese and Koreans have surnames that transliterate as “Lim.” By contrast, “MILCK,” a backward anagram of C. K. LIM, hides its ethnicity. Milck’s physical appearance, meanwhile, defies the racist stereotype of the dainty, diminutive Asian female. Like her weighty anthems, she is a commanding presence, with a voluptuous figure and a sturdy, ravishing face, more Korean than Chinese, and hair dyed blond. While women’s rights is her main concern, she has been shifting her attention to the anti-Asian racism unleashed during the Covid pandemic, exemplified by the March 16, 2021, mass murder by a white gunman of six Korean massage workers and two customers at several Atlanta spas. It was perhaps the most deadly incident of violence against Asians in the US since the Chinese Exclusion Act massacres in the 1880s and has understandably traumatized the Asian-American community.

Although it would seem to be preferable not to be noticed as Asian but simply as American, one cannot disguise one’s face. Rising star Rina Sawayama, a Japan-born UK-based singer-songwriter of hard-edged pop music not reviewed here, demonstrates in songs like “STFU!” [Shut the Fuck Up!] that ethnically Asian musicians need not shy away from confronting racism in their music. Milck likewise recognizes that the only recourse is to place one’s face and ethnicity front and center, as she frequently does in her music videos (e.g. “I Don’t Belong To You“), as if to say, get used to my face, it has everything to offer rather than nothing else to offer. In her own words, “I have known this [racism] my entire life, ever since I was in elementary school when kids would make fun of my eye shape. Or when music managers told me to go ‘back’ to China to pursue music, because American audiences would not feel compelled by an Asian artist,” a tradition of derision and contempt, I would add, reaching back to the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants to the US and the music they brought with them (see Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Anti-Asian Hate: It’s Time To Stop Playing “Chinatown, My Chinatown”), while Milck continues:

The assumption that Asian women are docile and quiet is harmful, because it’s a simplification of a human being’s complexity. Oversimplification of an entire group of people based on how they look and where they are from is dehumanizing. That act made it easier for Aaron Long [the Atlanta spas gunman] to shoot the six Asian women, labeling them as temptations. They were so much more than somebody’s temptation on somebody’s bad day. They were somebody’s mother, mentor, friend, or first call. (Sandra Song, 8 Asian Musicians on Racism and Being “Othered”)

Like many musical artists today, Milck prioritizes the music video single over the full-length album. Her growing reputation has given her the financial wherewithal to churn out high-quality video productions and retrospectively gather them into EP albums. One version of “Quiet” shows Milck confined in a glass cage as it slowly fills up with water until the force of her voice breaks open the glass. “This Is Not the End” is a hallucinatory montage of ballet dancers twirling and floating through a blue and red-tinted matrix (The Matrix is a favorite movie of hers). In “If I Ruled the World” (from Into Gold), a regal Milck sits on a throne dressed in black and a kind of gold Egyptian headdress as she imagines a kinder, gentler world ruled by women. In “Gold,” Milck, dressed in chaste white, drips metallic gold paint over her body (gold being the new Asian signifier replacing the old pejorative yellow) as a multiracial troupe of ballet dancers sensuously unpeel their ballet tights to reveal their tattoos (alas nothing more). Milck is a commanding presence live on piano, as in the beautiful “Black Sheep” (also performed in a coveted NPR Tiny Desk Concert), and this past March, the powerful “Metamorphosis” from her upcoming album of the same name.

PHILDEL

The Cut-Throat EP (EP) (2009)
Tales From the Moonsea (EP) (2009)
Qi (Instrumental) (2010)
The Disappearance of the Girl (2013)
The Glass Ghost (EP) (2013)
Ritual Black (EP) (2016)
Wave Your Flags (2019)
Earth Alone (EP) (2020)
Winterscapes (EP) (2021)

The “disappearance” in the title of her debut vocal album, The Disappearance of the Girl, as Phildel reveals in a 2013 Guardian interview, refers to the “world of silence and control” she was plunged into upon her mother’s second marriage to an Egyptian Muslim when Phildel was nine. Music and friends were forbidden, and Zara, as her stepfather renamed her, was not even allowed to answer the telephone. She escaped from this household dungeon when she was seventeen and returned to her original father who was recovering from cancer. There is another sense in which Phildel “disappeared” — from her Asian heritage. Born in London and christened Phildel Hoi Yee Ng, she kept her portmanteau given name (a combination of her Chinese father’s name, Philip, and her Irish mother’s name, Della) and dropped the rest. The only apparent Chinese connection remaining in her music is the title of her 2010 instrumental album, Qi, from the Chinese word for “breath” or “energy.” As with Rachael Yamagata, Phildel’s looks are ambiguous: she only looks Asian once you know she is half-Asian. It’s an androgynous, exceedingly handsome and beautiful face.

Qi has a concentrated emotional energy that rises above generic New Age and has the feel of a Philip Glass film score. Phildel’s knack for building limpid orchestral arrangements around simple piano scales and arpeggios was acquired from her experience in TV advertising, with commissions from the likes of Apple, Marks & Spencer, and Expedia. But it’s as a songwriter that she excels. Inhabiting a territory where piano-based folk and synth-pop overlap, her music is difficult to place. A description on Direct Current captures it: “Both ethereal and haunting, a fusion of delicate neo-classical piano melodies and vocals that fall somewhere between angelic and ghostly.” Kate Mossman adds in the above Guardian article that Phildel’s songs “are so tightly written they can be looped, chopped and tweaked while retaining their atmosphere.” The Disappearance of the Girl is a lush, magic-carpet ride of an album, with a strong sense of flow; the songs seem woven into a tapestry and you don’t want to listen to them separately. Yet you can’t quite make out what they are about. Her second full-length album, Wave Your Flags, is darker and even more enigmatic. I have no idea what the origami animal head on the cover (and in the music videos for the album) is supposed to signify, except that this musical artist seems intent on spinning a mysterious cocoon around herself in all of her songs and lyrics, as if by continually effacing herself she can re-enact her disappearance.

This again brings us to the question of how Asian musicians are racially situated in the Anglo-American musical landscape and how they in turn respond to these institutionalized pressures by accommodating or resisting them. In her research into Asian-American musicians attempting to break out on YouTube, Grace Wang recalls that “vexed questions about the erasure of the Asian face in mainstream media emerged as a frequent theme in my interviews.” She cites David Choi: “There’s a lot of halves [mixed-race Asians] that are doing really well, but straight-up Asian, not yet. There is yet to be a single artist to be at number one, you know, a straight-up Asian-looking person.” And pop-soul singer Dawen: “America is not ready for an Asian American face.” Writing less than a decade ago, Wang’s conclusions are pessimistic:

Asianness is figured as absence — outside the authenticating links connecting race and musical ownership but illusively present in the stereotyped sounds that serve as proxies for Asia and Asian bodies… It goes without saying that the resulting perception of imitation — of “trying to copy other people” rather than drawing on original resources or traditions — plays on dominant tropes about the derivative nature of Asian Americans, allowing for the easy transfer of these traits onto their music-making practices. (Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race Through Musical Performance).

The situation today is clearly improving. The musicians under review here all have solid and growing followings. It is hard to conceive of anyone holding their Asianness against them (much less “halves” like Phildel, Yamagata, Mitski and Kiyoko), as if this somehow precludes the possibility of their “musical ownership.” Institutional barriers remain but are being inexorably hammered away, perhaps faster in the multicultural UK than in the US. And yet (I am speculating here), by calling attention to her transience, by cultivating her elusiveness, Phildel, a name which itself marks an absence in that it references only her parents, reveals her ambivalence over being ethnically Asian in Western society. As a half-Asian, this ambivalence is only heightened. If being a racial or ethnic minority constitutes one form of identity, being racially mixed constitutes quite another. Being forever conscious of the ambiguity etched on one’s face, the impulse may be to mask, efface, and thereby normalize it so as to make it recognizable and presentable, which is after all the obligation of the musician and performer, as opposed to the graphic artist or writer.

Phildel’s economically produced music videos adopt the tried-and-true formula of repeatedly looping a handful of scenes to create enchanting montages. Most of these feature herself dressed in Victorian white gowns or petticoats skipping Diana-like through meadows and forests, frolicking with a train of women sporting Japanese Noh masks, or as in “The Disappearance of the Girl,” billowing underwater like a sea creature. In videos such as “Switchblade,” “The Wolf,” and “Storm Song” (she also performs a live stripped-down version of “Storm Song” on ukelele), you can just make out her breasts and buttocks beneath the fabric of her dress. Though you might attribute this to my male gaze rather than the caress of the camera, Phildel directs her own videos and I would guess that’s exactly how she wishes to be seen. In “Fires,” she tries on the shamaness role, and we see parallels with Susie Suh and Chen Li (below). Phildel’s most remarkable video, however, is the eerie, perverse “Glide Dog” (from Wave Your Flags), which depicts the horizontal bands of the sky, the beach, and in the middle, the glistening waves of a sea that’s colored blood-red.

MITSKI

Lush (2012)
Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013)
Bury Me at Makeout Creek (2014)
Puberty 2 (2016)
Be the Cowboy (2018)
Laurel Hell (2022)
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (2023)

At Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park many years ago I once saw an orator repeatedly shouting, “Go away! Go home! I have nothing to say to you!” When nobody moved, he switched tack and tried boring us by wiggling his eyebrows up and down. He even got off his soap box and walked away. Yet the crowd stood there waiting for him to return. We were highly entertained by his antics and he was easily the most popular speaker there that day. I mention this not to suggest that Minski, “the most alluring and enigmatic musician in indie rock” (Rolling Stone), would ever intentionally treat her loving fans, some so fanatical they tattoo her lyrics on their bodies, with the same offhand irreverence or disrespect. But she did after all announce to her distraught audience at the conclusion of her Be the Cowboy Tour in New York’s Central Park in 2019, without giving a reason, that she was quitting music. She later relented and returned to music, offering the media a host of causes for her sudden act of despair, largely centering around the difficulties for an introverted personality in dealing with fame. In a Guardian article entitled “US’s best young songwriter,” she described herself as “a black hole where people can dump all their shit.” It didn’t help that fans would try to maul her and at one concert almost ripped off her shirt when she made her way to the dressing room, as if they wanted to literally consume her.

Her unheralded fan-flamed fame is nothing short of astonishing. Consider the aforementioned Rina Sawayama, the world’s reigning ethnically Asian star of the moment whose career, now mainstreamed, is being turbocharged by the massive apparatus of the pop music industry (not to mention Elton John’s enthusiastic imprimatur). Sawayama’s eponymous debut album has accumulated 936 customer ratings on Amazon since its release in 2020, a number approaching superstar status. If she’s lucky, she may surpass the 1,318 ratings of Mitski’s Be the Cowboy, released in 2018 on a mere indie label. To put this in more perspective, the renowned and inimitable Björk, Mitski’s acknowledged idol (Mitski coincidentally uncannily resembles Björk, an Asian version of the Icelandic star), has amassed only 880 ratings for her Vespertine, released over two decades ago in 2001, the most for any of her albums. Of the other musicians I’m covering here, Hayley Kiyoko (reviewed below) runs a distant second after Mitski, with a mere yet nonetheless respectable 244 ratings for her 2018 album Expectations. Mitski has opened for the Pixies, Lorde, and more recently, Harry Styles; I suspect others will soon be opening for her. The thirty-six concerts of her upcoming eleven-city solo US tour (including stops in Toronto and Mexico City), running from January through April 2024, are already sold out—though you can get on a waiting list.

She was born Mitsuki Laycock in Japan to a Japanese mother and an American father. She now goes by Mitski Miyawaki, an unapologetically Japanese name, though her squashing of “Mitsuki” into “Mitski” suggests she isn’t wholly comfortable with her given name. In a 2015 interview, around the time her career began to take off, she was evasive when asked about her origin and declined to mention her native country, only that her father’s diplomat job took the family around the world until she finally settled in the US (at the moment, Nashville). Even now she is ambivalent about her ethnicity, alternately identifying herself as “Asian,” “Asian-American,” and “American.”

Her music is full of contradictions, jumbling together everything from sentimental love ditties to thunderous rock without much sense of flow from one song to the next. Her albums tend to run to no more than half an hour and her songs to under three minutes; her songs often seem to stop in mid-air, without returns, giving them a through-composed and at times unfinished feel. Yet she has been able to turn these apparent shortcomings to her advantage. Conjuring up Suzanne Vega and Liz Phair in her penchant for tight, concise compositions while delivering searing lyrics on the nastiness of relationships and the everyday, and with a nimble, chameleon voice that shifts from biting deadpan (“Dan the Dancer,” “Washing Machine Heart,” “Working for the Knife”) to stark and tender sincerity (“Thursday Girl,” “A Burning Hill,” “I Don’t Like My Mind”), Mitski has mined a formula that has somehow struck a deep chord among her audiences. I’m not sure precisely why (I’m of a different generation), but that she is capable of prolifically cutting sublime sonic gems that grow on you is clear enough.

Her music videos are less consistent and often confusingly whimsical. When unnecessary distractions are eliminated and the focus is on Mitski herself in all her eccentricity, they click. “Working for the Knife” has her throwing herself around an empty auditorium in jerky Butoh poses and sensuously licking a railing. In the equally beguiling “Washing Machine Heart,” she poses among elegant props like a Hollywood actress in a noir film; the visual narrative is utterly at odds with the song’s lyrics yet wittier and more telling than an image of dirty shoes tumbling around a washing machine would have been. The gorgeous “My Love Mine All Mine” has her climbing a precariously balanced tower of chairs. The montage videos “I Don’t Like My Mind“ and “Heaven“ reveal her at her most enigmatically erotic, reclining in various poses, robe opening and legs spreading (with underwear on). Her Tiny Desk Concert and Audiotree Live shows from 2015 present Mitski in her then raw, angry phrase, largely unsmiling and eschewing makeup while suffering acne outbreaks; she’s more photogenic in the live performance of “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars.”

HAYLEY KIYOKO

A Belle To Remember (EP) (2013)
This Side of Paradise (EP) (2015)
Citrine (EP) (2016)
Expectations (2018)
I’m Too Sensitive for This Shit (EP) (2020)
Panorama (2022)

Hayley Kiyoko Alcroft was born in LA to a Caucasian-American father, the comedian Jamie Alcroft, and a Japanese-Canadian mother, the figure skater and choreographer, Sarah Kawahara. Many Japanese female names have the diminutive “-ko” suffix, meaning “cute” or “little,” like the German “-chen” and “-lein.” Although Japanese feminists probably don’t name their daughters with the ko suffix, it’s still common enough to carry no overt significance, and Hayley was given little “Kiyoko” as her middle name. To create her stage name, she dropped her legal surname, and the result, Hayley Kiyoko, fittingly resembles a Japanese name, with the given name coming last. Born into the showbiz world, Kiyoko got her start as a film actress (Insidious: Chapter 3; Jem and the Holograms; CSI: Cyber; Hello, My Name Is Frank) before switching to her true métier, pop music. Her music has been called everything from dream pop or electropop to alternative rock yet transcends these labels, as she is a force all her own. She identifies first and foremost as gay, but she doesn’t play down her Asian ethnicity; in her video for “She,” for instance, she wears a T-shirt that reads, “Everyone Loves an Asian Girl.”

As an outspoken lesbian who acts as if nothing could be more natural than to be gay (though it took some courage to come out in her homophobic high school), combined with being charismatic and beautiful, she has been dubbed the “lesbian Jesus.” When Taylor Swift pulled Kiyoko on stage during a 2018 New York show, Kiyoko’s ecstatic fans in the audience can be heard sobbing hysterically. Her iconography is alluring. The cover of Expectations, her first full-length album, shows her sitting in the middle of a room looking expectantly at a nude female in the foreground in an odalisque pose. Kiyoko’s jacket is slipping off her shoulders and at first glance, she almost looks naked in her tight-fitting top, with the shadows of her areolae just showing through the fabric. The album showcases Kiyoko’s gift for writing songs that leap out of themselves in cascading melodic invention. Two of the songs, “Mercy/Gatekeeper” and “Under the Blue/Take Me In,” have double titles, suggesting they were originally conceived as separate songs and she found a way to merge them so effectively they sound inevitable. In any case, she knows how to develop a song. The last track on the album, “Let It Be,” about breaking up, pays no homage to the Beatles’ vague paean to hope. And why should it? It’s been half a century, and it’s a memorable song in its own right, with its punchy urgency and singable chorus. This densely layered album which seamlessly weaves in hip-hop beats and soulful wails as rhythmic material can hold its own with an equally exploratory album that came out a year later — Madonna’s Madame X.

I don’t know if there is a conscious lineage here, but Madonna’s stark face on the cover of Madame X calls to mind that of Debbie Harry on the covers of her solo (notably KooKoo) and Blondie albums. Hayley Kiyoko adopted this same stark visage on the cover of her latest album, Panorama. It’s an altered image based on her face, a gaunt face of indeterminate race with accentuated cheekbones, a fierce, timeless mien that conjures up an Ancient Egyptian, unlike the video of the single, “Panorama,” which shows Kiyoko’s own softer likeness in the same pose. The songs on Panorama are snappy and generally deliver and two of them, “Suppose To Be” and “Chance” stand out (a live performance of the latter shows her at her most magnetic). Kiyoko is keenly attuned to her loving fans, but this can work to one’s disadvantage if satisfying perceived audience expectations compromises one’s vision, and the more streamlined, poppier sound of Panorama lacks the giddy adventurous of Expectations. I hope on future albums Kiyoko will return to her destined role as a musical pathbreaker.

Bringing to bear her experience in the film world, Kiyoko has produced a captivating series of music videos, mostly directed by herself, tightly wrought visual narratives, some with added dialogue, that dramatize the heady sexual negotiations of today’s younger generation. Many of these videos, namely “What I Need,” “Chance,” “Curious,” “For the Girls,” and “Sleepover” show women, Kiyoko included, in passionate, deep-kissing embrace. So sensuous is the “Sleepover” video, for example, with the clothes slipping off and its bathtub scene (nudity carefully disguised), I can’t help thinking that Kiyoko could be a top-notch porn director, and I don’t mean this in any negative sense as I happen to enjoy high-quality porn myself. “Girls Like Girls,” which shows one girl fighting back and beating up her boyfriend when he catches her making out with her female lover, is so over-the-top in its earnestness that it comes off as funny. “Gravel To Tempo” depicts Kiyoko in a high school hallway wowing rival students with her dancing skills. Again, sometimes we just want to see a singer in a stripped-down performance, and I find Kiyoko’s most spellbinding video to be her Honda Stage mountain-top performance of “What I Need” (from Expectations), accompanied by a grand piano, an electric and an acoustic guitar. Massaging the song at a more leisurely pace, her inspired ensemble outdoes the frenetic album version.

CHEN LI

Ru Ye (如也) (2015)
Xiao Meng Da Ban (小梦大半) (2016)
Zai Peng Lai (在蓬莱) (Live) (2017)
Wan (玩) (2018)
Hui You (洄游) (2019)
Youchang Jiaqi (悠長假期) (2021)

Born in 1990 in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province in southwest China, Chen Li (陈粒) must have taken a creative cue from the karst hills jutting up around the scenic city. In college, she started up a band and one day posted a song online, whimsically entitled “Song To My Marvelous Abilities” (奇妙能力歌). It went viral and her career was launched. What enabled her fame to last more than fifteen minutes was her amazing ability to write songs. Another effort, “Zhu Xing” (祝星), named after a girlfriend she was breaking up with, was Chen Li’s coming-out song — as a bisexual rather than a lesbian, she claimed. She gathered these and thirteen more songs into her first album, Ru Ye (lit. As Well). It was a stunning debut for an indie musician. The opening track, “Indestructible” (不滅), is so assured only a master could have written it. The beautiful “Light” (光), to which her ardent fans spontaneously sing along in her concerts, became a hit, as did the tense “Flammable and Explosive” (易燃易爆炸). “Run Away” (脫韁) starts off unassumingly but halfway through, instead of the usual verse-chorus structure, an English chorus is laid directly over the Chinese verse in a skillful display of counterpoint. Almost every song on the compulsively listenable album has a magical touch.

A recorded live show in 2017 at the Blue Note in Beijing, Zai Penglai (In Penglai — an island in Chinese mythology containing the elixir of life), however, reveals this folk musician who got her start with an acoustic guitar in a nexus of contradictions. I assume the seven jazzy songs (six with English lyrics) on the experimental program, none of which appears on her studio albums, were collaboratively worked out or improvised with the band members. Though some might find the performance captivating, Chen Li isn’t wholly at ease in the jazz diva role. Jumping ahead a few years to her 2021 Great Wall Online Concert, we see a similar problem in this lavish production in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Dressed in flamboyant costumes and exotic hair jewelry, she appears on a vast stage replete with a string orchestra, a rock band, and a battery of Chinese drums and percussion. But having to perform before an absent audience lends a stilted quality to the show.

After the pandemic restrictions were lifted in early 2023, she got her live audiences back and was one of the headliners at the Midou Festival in Nanjing with 80,000 in attendance. She immediately sells out solo concerts in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities. Quite an achievement for this fiercely independent artist who has bootstrapped her way into superstardom through sheer talent and drive, writing all her own music and most of her lyrics, hiring her own studio and production teams, and eschewing recording contracts with major labels. This is in stark contrast to other successful singers in the Chinese music industry and its factory production line of pop idol clones, with the exception of Taiwanese Jay Chou, who still commands a huge following on the Mainland though his heyday was in the 2000s, and Beijinger Faye Wong, whose heyday was in the 1990s and who (as I write in Music and Totalitarianism) was a better songwriter than any of her collaborators. There are, of course, legions of independent singer-songwriters struggling to break out but none has achieved Chen Li’s success. Yet there is a schizophrenic quality to her music, visibly manifested in her somewhat wooden demeanor on stage wherever she performs, though one could also read this as characteristically Chinese modesty. This is not to suggest she is incapable of putting on a satisfying performance, only that she appears to be telegraphing the contradictions of the Chinese music industry.

The parameters of musical decorum are much narrower in China than elsewhere. To write barbed lyrics with even the hint of a political subtext, to adopt any kind of socially antagonist stance as rock music does by definition, merely to become popular outside official circles of approval is to be quickly smacked down, deprived of connections, legality, and money, and consigned to obscurity. To stride the crest of this delicate wave, Chen Li has had to become a poet, a good one actually, with lyrics containing striking imagery yet so enigmatic they are all but interpretation-proof. Run-of-the-mill Chinese pop songs tend to rely on the cloying love-ballad formula and can sound to Western ears like children’s songs, with their simple diatonic melodies and lack of vocal harmonies. Grace Wang has noted that the reason “slow ballads with relatively uncomplicated melodies and vocal ranges dominate the Mandopop landscape” comes down to marketing, in that ease of singing ensures such songs can extend their life in the karaoke bar. No Chinese songwriter can attain stardom without dishing out audience-pleasers in this traditional mold. Chen Li has turned this to her advantage with an expanding catalog of memorable lullaby-like tunes that survive on musical merit, among them “As Well,” “Marvelous Abilities,” and “Light” from Ru Ye; “Pony” is a delightful example of one in English. In “Zhu Xing,” meanwhile, we see the germ of her signature style, a more sophisticated, harmonically tense type of song that creeps up on the listener before bursting forth in a shamanic torrent, exemplified by “Ren Zhaomu” (任朝暮) and “Big Dream” (大夢), both from Xiao Meng Da Ban, and “Animism” (泛靈) from Hui You.

Her “shamanic” songs are well suited to the concept music video, over which she has had greater aesthetic control and where she is fully at home. In the concise and powerful “Flammable and Explosive” she commands the scene with an angry outpouring at a sadistic lover. In “Devil Spicy” (魔鬼辣) (from Youchang Jiaqi), she wanders ghostlike through a bar unseen by the couples at their tables as she bemoans the superficiality of small talk — and the claustrophobia of convention experienced by the artistic outsider. The narrative video “Sitcom” (情景劇) (from Wan) depicts Chen Li in a car leaning over to kiss her female friend or lover but pulling back due to the jealousy of the latter’s boyfriend at the wheel, only to see the girl drown herself in a lake (which makes for an interesting cultural contrast with the love triangle in Hayley Kiyoko’s “Girls Like Girls”). In the visually sublime “Animism,” Chen Li the shamaness conjures spirits and a neon dragon in a primal dance. Her most extraordinary video, however, is “Big Dream,” in which she and her exact double are dressed in Elizabethan lace and take turns singing. The song’s strange, curtailed phrasings and ellipses give way to her signature vocal torrent and culminate in a kaleidoscopic montage of famous paintings to the accompaniment of an Indian tabla. None of it seems to have anything to do with the obscure lyrics, but it certainly intrigues.

* * *

Related posts by Isham Cook:
Music and totalitarianism
Philip Glass and Tan Dun
On harpsichords and white pianos: The challenge of music in China
John Dowland and the lost English Consort School of chamber music
My lovely little oriental doll: On yellow fever